Marxist writings still dangerous: Police

KOLKATA: Even after 25 years of ‘Marxist’ rule in West Bengal, the police view Marxist literature as “dangerous�.
This is clear from the repeated appearance of these in seizure lists from suspected “extremists�. In all recent raids the police have not only confiscated such material, but even chided people for reading or keeping these.
On June 23, the police raided the house of Kharagpur College English department head Arup Dasgupta at Midnapore.His apparent fault was to be the vice-president of civil liberties group Association for Protection of Democratic Rights.
However, they did not spell out the charge. Instead, Dasgupta recalls, they wanted to see his library and asked him why it contained so many Marxist books. They seized a number of them, including George Thomson’s classic From Marx to Mao Tse-Tung.
Incidentally, the FIR of this case does not mention Dasgupta’s name. But it talks about a “nexus� among “CPIML-PW, in Andhra Pradesh, MCC Lalkhandi of Bihar and Jharkhand, CPIML (Nepal), NSCN (Nagaland) under the banner of CPIML, MCC, 2nd CC/CPIML, MKSS, RYL, BKC, and MMS etc�.
Civil rights activists say they have been noticing the trend for the last two years. Almost a year ago, while arresting 70-year-old Bidhu Bhushan Mahato and two young women, Dipa Sarkar and Kakali Majhi, from Salboni in Midnapore, the police seized an “incriminating document� – The Manifesto of the Communist Party by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels.
In June 2000, the name of Indian Statistical Institute lecturer Guruprasad Kar figured in an explosives case. During the hearing of his anticipatory bail petition, the prosecution cited two seizure lists – one of the explosives, not from Kar though, and the other of some “books on the theory of Communist movement�.
Sixty-six members of Chhatra Yuva Sangram Committee were arrested after a public meeting in Siliguri last September. All the articles mentioned in the 44-point seizure list, apart from audio equipment, were books, pamphlets and posters. All this, to back up the charge of “waging war against the state�!