With mounting pressure from the Centre and the alleged ‘regrouping of the Maoists’ in affected districts, the disconnect between Kolkata’s Writers’ Building and political initiatives to achieve normalcy is widening.
Sources told this reporter that while “there is apparent peace in West Midnapore, Bankura and Purulia after the assembly election, but intelligence agencies of both the state and central governments recently alerted the new government that the Maoists are “regrouping in all three districts of Jangalmahal with a design.”
A senior Trinamool Congress minister told DNA that “both the
Centre’s pressure and the Maoists’ supposed regrouping have the new government with no room to formulate a strategic plan to deal with this problem created by the Communist Party of India-Marxist.”
“Both (Centre and the Maoists) should have given a little more time to a month-and half-old government to take a strategic decision to resolve the crisis,’’ he said.
A top West Midnapore district police officer told this reporter, “We all know that the left wing extremists have made a huge ideological investment over the years and are not likely to give up pursuing its outcome.’’
Apparently, this leaves little time for the new government to work on a strategic decision on the issue.
Chief minister Mamata Banerjee, who recently took some socio-economic measures to see that poverty and hunger in the area ends, according to government sources, is now left with no alternative but to tighten the noose around the belt.
What seems to have activated the recent government actions are reports that point to CPI(M) cardres infiltrating the Maoists ranks!
The Maoists, however, see the tightening noose as a signal of Banerjee’s “clear departure from her earlier promises” of dialogue and withdrawal of paramilitary forces and release of political prisoners whom the CPI(M)-led administration sent behind bars on fake charges.
One such signal was the sudden arrest of Manoj Mahato of the People’s Committee Against Police Atrocities. Sources said that arrest was criticized within the Trinamool Congress, especially by the MLAs.
Police sources in West Mednapore, however, said that such arrests “are continuing. For example, last evening nine suspected Maoists were arrested by West Mednapore police from Jamboni, an affected bloc.’’
Interestingly, Mamata Banerjee unlike Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and CPI(M), at least before election never chose to see the Maoists issue as purely a law-and-order and internal security threat problem. Instead she took it as a socio-economic problem, “but given her government’s financial vulnerability” she is not likely to be in position to see any more the issue through her own lens, a top political observer said, adding, "the truce between the Writers’ and extremists is likely to end in the months to come."
Sources said Bengal Governor M K Narayanan, the former national security advisor, is also working hard to script a hard-line strategy for the Maoists.
