Anti-Communist Witch-hunt in Mulayam’s ‘Samajwadi’ Regime
Mulayam Singh Yadav never misses an opportunity to invite the Left to join forces with his party and launch a third front. Last week while he was once again busy renewing his call for a third front, the UP Police were busy carrying out a systematic witch-hunt against communist revolutionaries and their rural poor supporters in the state. Even as a key member of the Maoist squad responsible for the Naugarh landmine blast that killed 15 policemen was nabbed by the police in Bihar’s Rohtas district, the UP Police have unleashed a veritable campaign of terror and torture to intimidate the rural poor in the eastern districts of the state bordering Bihar and Jharkhand. These areas of eastern UP are worst-affected by malaria, and the tribal population here, deprived of the traditional rights to land, water and forest resources, suffers from rampant malnutrition and starvation.
On November 23, the UP Police raided and ransacked the Mughalsarai office of the CPI(ML) and seized all office files. The next day, the police whisked away Comrade Shankar Kol, President of the Mirzapur district unit of Khet Mazdoor Sabha from a dharna (sit-in) being staged against starvation deaths and growing rural unemployment in the region and he was presented before a magistrate only after three days of illegal detention in police custody. Already on 25 November 2004, Ramkrishna Kol was killed in police custody in the Naugarh police station area in Chandauli district.
This pattern of systematic repression - marked by sudden police raids of Party offices and houses of Party activists, combing operation in villages, indiscriminate arrest, illegal detention, intimidation and torture, and wholesale slapping of false cases on Party activists and supporters - can only be described as veritable wave of McMarthyism in Mulayam’s ‘Samajwadi’ regime. And these atrocities cannot be explained away as a sporadic police reaction to the Naugarh blast. Over the years, the Chandouli-Mirzapur-Sonebhadra belt has emerged as a laboratory of state repression, where successive state governments have been trying out the weapons of cold-blooded massacres, fake encounters and custodial killings.
The UP police are trying to utilize the Naugarh incident as pretext to intensify attacks on the democratic movement in every corner of the state. In the Pilibhit-Lakhimpur region, where the administration had already invoked the notorious ‘Gangsters Act” against our leaders, senior police officials are openly clamouring the ‘decisive preventive action’. The bogey of Nepali Maoists infiltrating into India is also being used to the hilt to justify an intensive campaign of state repression. Egging on the Mulayam government on this course of repression is not just the BJP but also the Congress, which is negotiating with the Maoists in Andhra Pradesh.
On their part, the self-styled Maoists are now holding a series of public meeting and rallies in different part of the country, celebrating the recent merger of the PWG and MCC. In Andhra, they are now in the thick of negotiations with the Congress-led state government. The Naugarh blast, preceded by a similar action on a smaller scale in West Bengal, is probably their way of telling the world that the talks do not signify a farewell to arms. Of course the venue of this action has been chosen in a way that may not immediately jeopardize the future of their relations with the Congress and the progress of the talks with the Andhra government. And as is their wont, in the face of state repression they always leave the people in the lurch. Naugarh has been no exception.
Mulayam Singh had described his return to power as restoration of democracy in Uttar Pradesh. But his campaign of democratic restoration has ended with the release of the notorious Raja Bhaiya who, freed from POTA charges, now decorates the Mulayam Singh cabinet as an ‘honourable minister’. As for the rural poor and other toiling sections of the people and their most consistent defenders, the communist revolutionaries, denial and murder of democracy remains the bitter reality.
The CPI(ML) has launched a protest demanding the immediate release of Shankar Kol from jail, and the dropping of the false cases against him. It has also written to the NHRC asking for investigation in the cases of custodial deaths and systematic human rights violations. The CPI(ML) has also been demanding that the Sonebhadra area be declared a famine zone, and immediate steps be taken to ensure food-for-work and proper mobile medical facilities for this region.