THE DAKMASTER NEXUS

Two months ago, West Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee was working on an altogether different plan— aspiring to be numero uno on the non-BJP side in Indian politics, displacing the Congress. The Trinamool Congress’s foray into Goa, her confabulations with key Opposition figures, her party’s statements against the GOP, all of it presaged an ambitious expansion strategy. So a strike on her turf was only to be expected. Two gruesome murders and a carnage within the span of a month— between February 18 and March 21— have offered that opening to her rivals.

- Romita Datta

The three incidents, especially the Bagtui massacre of March 21 night, have shaken up the state. Eight people, including six women and a child, were gutted alive after miscreants set ablaze a dozen houses to avenge the murder of a local TMC leader, Bhadu Sheikh. Eyewitness accounts say the police and fire brigade did nothing, not even bothering to check if there were people trapped inside. The barbaric revenge killings and the alleged complicity of local authorities sent shock waves through the system, prompting the Calcutta High Court to trash the state Special Investigation Team’s efforts and order a CBI enquiry.

The number of dead has since gone up to nine (six women, a child and a man); Nazima Biwi, who suffered 60 per cent burns, passed away on March 28, but not before she gave her statement to the CBI. The central agency has found several discrepancies between the FIR filed by the local police and the people’s version of the events.

In all three cases, the role of the police is under the scanner: either for direct involvement as had happened in the murder of student leader Anis Khan, who was thrown off his terrace during a raid on the night of February 18, or complicity, as in the case of Tapan Kandu, Congress councillor of Jhalda municipality in Purulia, who was shot dead apparently because he refused to join the TMC and help the latter form the board in the municipality. Audio clips, allegedly of local station in-charge Sanjib Ghosh, are doing the rounds, implicating the police.