Coastal area of Moipith in Kultali constituency of South 24 Parganas district in West Bengal is again soaked with blood. Comrade Sudhanshu Jana, a veteran comrade and district secretariat member who was in the forefront of the people’s protest against rampant corruption and nepotism in distribution of relief material to the Aamphan-hit abjectly poor people further distressed by Covid-19-induced lockdown, was brutally murdered in broad day light on 4 July last by armed criminals who once were in the fold of the CPI (M) but switched to Trinamool Congress(TMC) once the power switched from the former to the latter. Comrade Jana was strangulated to death and then hanged from the ceiling. From 3 July, armed TMC gangsters riding on motor-bikes and four wheelers pounced upon our Party leaders, workers, supporters, sympathisers and panchayat members, hurled bombs at them and set their houses and shops ablaze. As a result, 200 houses and 80 shops were burnt into ashes, many including women sustained grievous injuries. Forty people were so brutally battered that they needed hospitalization. The whole area is surcharged with tension and the beastly savagery of the ruling party goons has been condemned and resented by one to all except the bootlickers of the ruling dispensation and the corrupt nexus embezzling relief money and material flexing muscle.
Body of Comrade Sudhansu Jana was brought to the Party’s central office in Kolkata on 5 July and then taken to South 24 Parganas district office where floral tributes were offered by central and state leadership. Though Party wished to take the body of Comrade Jana back to Moipith for cremation, but the police did not permit. So his mortal remains were consigned to flames in nearby Bishnupur crematorium. People’s wrath had been glaringly manifested in their observance of a total bandh in Kultali on 6 July at the call of our Party.
It bears recall that a solid mass base of the Party in a vast stretch of Sunderbans including Kultali was created following protracted militant class and mass struggles right from the early 1950s. The people of this area had witnessed many memorable battles conducted under the leadership of the Party upholding the rights of the poor peasants and other sections of the toiling masses. Earlier, the jotedars (rural kulaks) and the anti-socials were in the fold of the Congress, then in power. In such struggles, many leaders, activists and supporters of our Party had to shed blood, face torture and imprisonment and became martyrs. But, despite all efforts, the Congress could not break our organization. Later, when the CPI (M) was saddled in power, all the erstwhile Congress kulaks and anti-socials shifted allegiance to the CPI (M) which, they found, had abandoned leftist line and was more inclined to stick to power riding on the backing of the vested interest. The CPI (M) too nakedly used police and notorious criminals to weaken our mass base in the entire South 24 parganas district including Kultali. They murdered 161 leading Party comrades, implicated as many as 51 leaders including Comrade Prabodh Purkait, elected nine times to state assembly from Kultali in false charges and sent them to jail. Most of them were sentenced to life imprisonment. Now with TMC in power, the same onslaught is continuing. Because mounting attack including physical assault on a revolutionary party is a class conspiracy and anyone wedded to serve the class interest of the ruling bourgeoisie has to be a part of that conspiracy.
Moreover, despite repeated brutal blood-spattered whiplashes including murderous assaults by first the Congress, then the CPI (M) and now the TMC, the Moipith Panchayat has been under the control of our Party for so many years. Even in the last Panchayat election held in 2018, our Party, overcoming all hurdles and hassles including large scale manipulation, threat and intimidation, secured majority while the TMC fared very badly. From then on, the TMC has started attacking our elected members, harassing them in every way and also dangling carrot of pelf and power before them to grab the panchayat. This gruesome murder of Comrade Sudhanshu Jana and the reign of terror unleashed by the TMC goons is a part of that ongoing assault.
But no amount of attacks and intrigues would be able to demoralize the struggling peasants and the oppressed masses who are imbued with the thoughts of Comrade Shibdas Ghosh, the great leader of the proletariat, organized under the Party founded, reared and steered by him, and roused to ring about anti-capitalist socialist revolution. It is only the people who have always pronounced the last word and not the autocratic rulers and their repressive machine.
