People's Democracy

 KLO Ultras Kill Three CPI(M) Workers

B Prasant

IN A dastardly attack, armed ultras belonging to the separatist Kamtapur Liberation Force, the armed wing of the Kamtapuri People’s Party, shot and killed three CPI(M) workers and left forty more critically injured at Mathabhanga in the north Bengal district of Coochbehar.

On the evening of September 20, eyewitnesses at Nishigunj bazaar told INN/PD, three men came roaring up the Nishigunj bazaar road in two motorcycles, hardly 200 yards from National Highway 34, and stormed into the hardware shop of Gopal Debnath.  They then pummelled Debnath into submission, bound him up, and lifted him onto one of the motorcycles.

When the miscreants were about to flee the scene, CPI(M) workers from the market area lunged at them – and faced a hail of fire from what were presumably AK-47 automatic rifles.  Of them Comrade Laxman Mondol (60) died on the spot, a severely injured Comrade Sukumar Mitra (50) died on his way to a nearby hospital, and Comrade Mehboob Ali died later in hospital. 

The ultras then started to shoot their way out to the NH 34 where they took a sharp turn towards Shildanga and Falakata and sped way eluding the chasing vehicle of the Mathabhanga sub-divisional officer who was coming back from Coochbehar town.  Police sources reveal that at least a hundred rounds were fired in the process by the ultras.

Of the injured, the condition of six, all CPI(M) workers, remains grave and critical, according to doctors working at the North Bengal medical College and Hospital in Siliguri.  The police have cast wide net to try to apprehend the ultras early.  Crucial road junctions have been sealed off.  The extensive bush and forest areas that mark the locale are being rigorously searched, as are the known hideouts of the KLO and the KPP.  The criminals have proved elusive yet.

At the call of the CPI(M), a 12-hour bandh has been successfully observed in the Coochbehar district.  State secretary of the Bengal unit of the CPI(M), Anil Biswas has condemned the killing and has called for an early apprehension of the culprits.  He has also called upon the people of the area to stand fast in solidarity to protest the heinous killings.

MASSIVE PROTEST RALLY

On September 29, a massive Left Front rally attended by more than 50,000 people of the Coochbehar district protested the heinous murder of CPI(M) workers at Nishigunj bazaar.  The speakers included state secretariat member of the CPI(M), Dipak Dasgupta, senior CPI(M) leaders Chandi Pal (who presided), Dinesh Dakua, and Jogesh Barman, as well as Kamal Guha of the Forward Bloc and Srikumar Mukherjee of the CPI.  They dwelt on the spate of killings, mayhem, arson, and kidnapping in which the KLO, assisted by the ULFA, had of late been engaged.  The targets have been inevitably CPI(M) workers.

The reason why the CPI(M) has been targeted by these elements has to do with the fact that the Party has never compromised with the forces of secessionism, said the speakers.  To try to embarrass the CPI(M) and the Left Front, the opposition Trinamul Congress has made several well-known KLO activists their candidates in the last Assembly elections.  The Trinamul Congress, indeed, has had a deep understanding with the KLO and, during the last Assembly elections, they raised the slogan that there was “Mamata in south Bengal and the Kamtapuris in the north,” to try to hem in the CPI(M).

The speakers pointed out that the economic dysfunction affecting the country at large under the anti-people BJP regime was responsible for leading a small number of young men and women of some areas of the state to become desperate enough to embrace the tenets of separatism and armed violence.  False evidence is cited to incite a small section of the youth to go in for separatist cultural norms, and to set their heart on the non-existent ‘Kamptapuri dialect.’  All this is being done in a planned way, as was the murderous attack at Nishigunj bazaar, the speakers said.

The speakers recalled that it had been the KLO and its running mates that had organised the killing of 12 CPI(M) workers at Jalpaiguri in 2000 and in 2001.

A powerful voice of protest rose from the rally and the speakers reminded the participants that separatist violence must be resisted by taking the people along, and never through inane counter-violence.  The KLO ultras were asked to join the mainstream of development under the aegis of the Left Front and the Left Front government.