 "Mamata Banerjee")
The recent violence in Kaliachak in the Malda district of West Bengal has happened at a time when the state is preparing for elections to the legislative assembly. A large crowd of Muslims, protesting the remarks made by jailed Hindu Mahasabha leader Kamlesh Tiwari against Prophet Mohammed in November, ransacked the police station and set several vehicles on fire. No life was lost.
While the Bharatiya Janata Party, which is struggling to make inroads in Bengal, accused Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee of going soft on the perpetrators, she said it was a law and order problem and was being given a communal tinge. The Left parties and Congress too have refused to call it a communal flare up.
"The protest was peaceful but anti-social elements mingled with the crowd and attacked a Border Security Force vehicle and the Kaliachak police station. This wasn't actually a communal riot," Mausam Noor, Congress MP from Malda (north), says.
The BJP, however, has said that Edara-e-Sharia, a Muslim socio-religious organisation, was involved in the incident and that it wrecked havoc on "select targets".
Thanks to the porous international border that Malda shares with Bangladesh, the district has become a hotbed for cattle, contraband and human traffickers. The BSF has repeatedly apprehended smugglers and miscreants, and the police, according to Noor, had prepared a list of such people based on which action could have been taken. The actual motive of the riot was to destroy those records, she believes.
The BJP says these rogue elements receive political patronage. Adding fuel to fire, the party has also accused the ruling Trinamool Congress and the state government of sheltering and harbouring illegal migrants from Bangladesh - to build a "vote bank".
The charge of sneaking in Bangladeshi illegal immigrants for political reasons is not new. During the Left Front's 34-year tenure which ended in 2011, the opposition had raised the same issue several times. Now the same charge has been levelled against the TMC government.
The Bengal government, for its part, says that communal and political violence in the state is under control. In 2014, of the 5,345 riots that were reported, 343, or a little over 6 per cent, were classified as political in nature and just 104, or less than 2 per cent, were communal.Opposition parties insist these figures do not reflect the current state of law and order in Bengal. Communist Party of India (Marxist) MP Mohammad Salim says: "There has been so much distortion of facts and suppression of incidents that it is very tough to believe these numbers."
Fourteen CPI (M) leaders and cadres were allegedly murdered and as many as 172 Left Front supporters fell to political violence from June 2011 to December 2015, the period of the TMC rule, he says. However, this total does not include those killed by Naxalites.
According to Left parties, in just two years, from May 2009 to May 2011, they lost 388 cadres and supporters to Naxalite violence.
TMC MP Suvendu Adhikari alleges that between 2007 and 2011, over 2,000 people were killed in several incidents of which 90 per cent were TMC supporters. The BJP too has started to cry foul. "During Banerjee's rule, there have been 200 major attacks of which 45 are serious, and 12 of our workers have been killed," party spokesperson Siddarth Nath Singh alleges.
However, the situation in Jangalmahal, the hotbed for Naxalites till recently, has been brought under control. In 2010, while 285 people were allegedly killed in this region, it declined to 98-100 during January-May 2011 and then dropped to just 6 between May 2011 and December 2015.
However, there is broad consensus amongst parties that the police are highly politicised which has reduced its efficacy. The police have admitted this in their Vision 2020 document which states: "A generation of police officers has witnessed undue political considerations in important postings and in daily functioning of police stations". In the document, it has also confessed "corruption at different levels" which is a key concern.
The police will have to rise above it because till the elections happen, the tension is unlikely to abate.
