Nandigram and Orwell’s Animal Farm


Reading through reports, day after day in the past week about the violence and the atrocities against women in Nandigram brought back in me some memories of the mass rape of women in Thankamani, a village in the Idukki district in Kerala way back in 1986. I was then a student, doing my graduation. And belonged to a group and the bond among us was that we all were members of the SFI; we were, hence, closely associated with the activities of DYFI and the CPI (M).

We were enthusiastic about the need to do our bit to make the world a better place and there were many occasions when our enthusiasm was a bit too much. We were all oriented in the theory of Marxism from the study classes that we would attend thanks to our association with the party. There were important lessons to be learnt. Otherwise, we would have gone astray.

But we were free from any dogma and ended up raising uncomfortable questions on the party’s stand over the women’s question, the movement for democracy in Prague (Spring of 1968), the cultural revolution in China and ended up debating these day after day without necessarily finding a definite answer. In any case, the debates were not really meant to find the absolute answer. I recall that there was a lot of space available for discussions in the group. Intolerance has not crawled into the party structure like it is now. The culture represented by the infamous I-am-the-state attitude of Louis XIV had not yet set in then. These classes also ensured that our men comrades respected and supported the women and their struggle for rights.

We used to discuss women’s issues and would strongly react to incidents of eve teasing in public places. Sometimes we went about painting tar on vulgar posters in the city. It was at that time, one day in October 1986, that Thankamani happened. It all began with the villagers protesting against the refusal by authorities to extending the services of a transport bus to that village. The protest turned ``violent’’ when stones were thrown and the police resorted to lathi charge. However, things did not stop there. The cops returned to the village that night, raided the homes and raped many women.

We were disturbed. The news made us angry.Although we had not visited the village any time or met any of the victims, we took the hurt and distress of the women in Thankamani as ours and a small group of us demonstrated through the Trichur city; shouting slogans against the police as well as the then Congress government. Thankamani soon became a concern across the State and even contributed in a way to the the CPI(M)’s victory in the assembly elections in February 1987.

Now, I read the reports of the violence perpetrated on the women in Nandigram and also that this was done by the members of the CPM. It was not the police or the army who indulged in such atrocities on the women in West Bengal. In the bad times that we live, our senses are somewhat numbed by the frequency at which we hear stories of such atrocities that are committed by the armed forces in Kashmir and the North East. The Nndigram story, however, belongs to another genre. The long list of violence committed by CPM cadres (goons), include women, some of them pregnant (Manjura Biwi at Satangabari for instance) being beaten up and children and infants attacked brutally and raped.

It was so much excruciating to read the story of 40 years old Akhreja Biwi of Satangabari, who had been ganged raped on November 7, 2007. Her trauma does not end there. Her two daughters, in their teens were also sexually assaulted. And they are still missing. Story after story of such violence on women, men and children are pouring out of that place and people, including intellectuals and artists, who were the best show pieces of the party in cultural front, are now marching on the streets of Kolkotta protesting against this mindless violence.

Except those CPM leaders in power for many decades and the “disciplined and institutionalized cadres” every human being is pained.

I stare with disbelief. How could women leaders in the party like Brinda Karat, with whom some of us have joined to fight against the injustice against women (including on the controversial birth control pills) and who spoke against the token representation of women in the party’s Polit Bureau, now stand up and justify all the violence in Nandigram?

I realise, with lots of pain, that it is not the same old party, whose office was my second home when I was young. It is not the same party where I did a bit of my apprentice in the late Eighties organising the workers in Delhi’s Okhla industrial estate on a week-long strike demanding better living conditions. And sharing the slices of bread, gone cold and hard (packed from our hostel in JNU) for lunch with comrades on the dusty pavements in Okhla. Something is seriously remiss..

If you want to know how ghastly the comrades can be, you go to Singur and Nandigram. I am happy that I am no longer in the party and hence I am able to stand up for the victims in Nandigram and Singur.And I resolved to read George Orwell’s Animal Farm, once again. And I will, probably read it now from another angle and in the light of all that happened in Nandigram.

Article published in New Sunday Express (November 29, 2007)

Tiananmen Square and Jawaharlal Nehru University

The press brought out the reminiscences of the Tiananmen Square massacre of 4 June 1989; the incident was ‘a conspiracy of the western powers to derail socialist china’, according to the Chinese government. ‘A well planned attempt to crush a democratic protest, the western counterparts cried out. It is a fact that the Tiananmen - Gate of Heavenly Peace -Square has been the central point for several major historical protests. And in 1989, demonstrators, mainly students, had occupied the square for seven weeks, refusing to move until their demands for democratic reforms were met. The social chaos had to be arrested. However, there were many other ways to clamp down on a protest when China had such a massive ‘people’s army’, the protestors could have been physically removed or caught, arrested and penalized.

However, the incident, which happened 20 years back, stirred the hornets nest in Jawaharlal Nehru University. The SFI (in its prime days) lost the elections to the srtudents union that year: thanks to the Tiananmen Square massacre. The comrades were treated like the carnivorous and they were confronted in the mess, library and canteen and everywhere; except when they took there after dinner stroll with their girl friends. Some sensitive comrades (who still adhered with the bourgeois human rights values), unabashedly supported the action of the Chinese government in public while denouncing it in private conversation. The real vanguards endorsed the views of the central committee, located some 15 or 20 KM away from the campus. Comrade Yechury came to the campus to dish out the conspiracy theory and faced insult from the “anti Chinese” .

Though I was a comrade (not in arms) then and even now, I was moulded in a “reactionary framework” as I opposed any kind of violence. Keyvan Sultani Felokori (Our Iranian refugee comrade) described me as confused and tried to instill sense in me on the inevitability of a bloody revolution. Let Ahura Mazda save his soul!

The saddest part of this story lies elsewhere. We used to have an elderly (not very old but compared to us, she was old) Chinese lady who was admitted to the Hindi language centre. A quiet and warm lady! We used to tease her with the way she said Namaste with folded hands and with her “shudh hindi”, in her absence. I distinctly remember that after the massacre at the Tiananmen Square, this lady ran through the corridor, from the bathroom, almost naked. And nobody seemed to understand what had happened to her. As days passed by the story came out. She had a son who was studying in Beijing University at that time and she was not getting any news about him. She feared that something happened to him and hence broke down. We all felt sorry for her.

Soon she went back to China….. till today I do not know what happened to her or her son. But I felt that pain (even though I had not even thought of becoming a mother, those days) and it stained my otherwise jolly university days.

Since then any mention of Tiananmen Square incident, brings the picture of that helpless mother. To me, it became face of the bloody incident.

Of course, everyone forgot the incident and the very next year, the SFI alliance captured the students Union.