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)