NEWDLHI: Petroleum Minister Jaipal Reddy was subjected to an unkind jab by a senior opposition leader at a private do in Delhi a day ago.
In seemingly non-political banter, he wondered aloud why the minister was bothering to hold the oil price hike till the last round of polling is over, since it’s “only the Maoists of Lalgarh who are left to vote and they’ve little use for petroleum”.
The tribals, he joked, are beyond the pale of oil and inflation.
A cruel quip, maybe—in line with the disdain mainstream India routinely displays towards those on the margins—but it expresses a certain truth.
Nandigram- Lalgarh is a ‘development wasteland’, if you will—or pristine green, if you see it that way.
And its tribal communities, caught between a violent insurgency and a state in retaliation mode, are still suffering the after-effects of their derring-do of 2009—of having ‘liberated’ themselves by cutting off the single road that connects them to the rulers in metropolitan Kolkata.
Even two years later, you hardly get to see any male members in and around the villages, unless they are of school-going age or old and infirm.
The only able-bodied men who roam the place are in uniform, speed-biking or lounging in barracks behind brand-new barbed wire—the concertina steel literally gleams, obviously put up after the Maoists butchered a whole CRPF battalion stationed at the local police station.
Little wonder, in a place like this, the most talked about candidate in the fray—Chhatradhar Mahato—is behind bars.
The man who mobilised the entire Jangalmahal region against police atrocities was finally nabbed in a stealth operation, by cops pretending to be journalists, fond as he was of giving interviews to the media at the peak of the movement in mid-2009.
Though labelled a “Maoist”, he was in truth a parallel entity, a dramatic overground dissenter behind whom all of Kolkata’s thinking elite gathered in support—even as his movement became a fertile opportunity for the Maoists to infiltrate the area.
One of his younger brothers indeed joined the Maoists and was killed (a fact Chhatradhar’s mother Bedana Mahato confirms, adding, “We had nothing to do with him.
He had left us and the village, long ago…”).
Once a Trinamool Congress (TMC) member, Chhatradhar is said to have been instrumental in giving Mamata Banerjee access to this remote tribal swathe.
Till then controlled by the local CPI-M outpost, Chhatradhar’s family claims he brought Mamata to Netai and Lalgarh, gave her a political foothold here.
The brutal Netai killings of January 7 are, in fact, the centrepiece of Mamata’s campaign.
Not a single speech goes without her mentioning Netai, not a single TMC poster omits it.
It even crept into Home Minister P Chidambaram’s speech when he talked of the ‘harmad’ (armed CPIM goons) phenomenon at nearby Garbeta.
Chhatradhar, however, was dropped like a hot potato by the TMC after the Maoist tag was stuck to him.
The branding of Chhatradhar as the big Maoist catch—while the actual Maoist top guns, Kishenji and Ganapathy, roam free—served everyone’s political purpose.
The Left Front was happy he was out of the way.
His complete hold over the local populace was coming in the way of CPI-M cadres, driven away by fellow villagers, from returning home—thereby reclaiming political space.
Chhatradhar’s increasing popularity among the liberal-left intellectuals of Kolkata and Delhi also irked the Left no end.
It was the lowest ebb in its popularity charts, and he was the man responsible for it.
The Maoists had no love lost for him either.
He had become too much of a hero, resisting their bid to hijack what was essentially a civil rights movement against non-implementation of NREGA and the Tribal Rights Act, sparked off by police atrocities against tribal women and under-age boys.
(This, in turn, was the state ‘response’ to a blast near Chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharya’s cavalcade when he was visiting the area with then mining minister Ram Vilas Paswan.) Today, in a quirk of fate, the CPI-M is surreptitiously supporting Chhatradhar—who’s contesting as an independent candidate— to ensure the TMC doesn’t break into what was once their monopoly.
Never mind that they had celebrated Chhatradhar’s arrest as a big victory against Maoist forces in West Bengal.
Sure enough, Chhatradhar’s semi-literate but extremely articulate wife, Niyanti Mahato, sitting in the forecourt of his two-storey mud house in Amaliya village, badmouths Mamata and her “deceitful ways”.
Niyanti, campaigning for her husband on foot or on bikes, is full of feisty words.
“Now she’s everyone’s Didi.
But who knew Mamata here? Now she says she’ll build her house in Lalgarh/ Nandigram, but who got Mamata here?” (Mamata will probably contest from Nandigram, if TMC wins.) Chhatradhar is said to have tried hard for a TMC ticket, but it just looked the other way and completely disowned him.
His angry wife now wants to avenge the insult, by helping her husband win.
But their aging adivasi neighbour, Laxman Murmu, is baffled: “How does it matter? Will they let him out? He lost his peace in search of prosperity.
He said he’ll get us jobs, but he got himself a jail term and we got CRPF in the village….”