Murder victims’ kin stunned as once deadly rivals turn allies

KOLKATA/DOMKAL: Between 1977 and 2004, it is alleged that 74 Congress supporters were killed by CPM men in Domkal alone, an assembly segment in Murshidabad district. The figure now stands at 90. In large swathes of Bengal, Congress-CPM animosity has for years led to violence. The arch rivals are now allies and the victims’ families are at a loss, hard put to accept the new reality.
“It pains me, but that’s politics,” says Anup Kumar Chakraborty (56).Anup vividly recalls the morning 45 years ago. He was playing football with friends in Tollygunj’s Netajinagar, metres from Vidya Mandir School, where exams were on. For some days, this CPM bedrock had been simmering with tension. But there was a lull that day — for the exams, or so they thought. Chakraborty’s brother Chandrasekhar, then a physics undergraduate student in Charu Chandra College, had been tasked to “guard” the school. Stylish — he sported a gold wristwatch those days — Chandrasekhar took his party-assignment seriously. Then the fi ring started. Jadavpur’s Circle Inspector Ramkrishna Mohanty’s alleged notoriety was the stuff of folklore. That day, he allegedly led a CRPF team, along with armed Congress goons, in a multi-pronged attack, sealing off escape routes. The young Chandrasekhar took a bullet in his chest.
As he fled, police chased his trail of blood and allegedly shot him pointblank. Two others — Deepak Niyogi and Dalim Bose — fled into a house. Police, it is said, rammed in and gunned them down.
Their family’s allegiance to CPM has been unwavering all these decades. Anup is in the party’s local committee; “a disciplined member” he calls himself. Their mother, who died in 2014, attended party meetings till her last breath. For them, Congress symbolised a “semi-fascist, murderous regime”.
But now they are at cross-roads. “The party’s decision is my decision. Having said that, I am at a loss what to answer when my older brothers ask me if this alliance is really inevitable. It pains us. The pain befuddles reason,” Anup says.

Sushil Bose lost his brother Dalim the same day. “Those who led the attack that day are now Trinamool netas. Losing a younger brother is a painful lifelong void. Others tormented by this regime feel this pain now. This alliance may ensure people no more feel this pain,” says the now 75-year-old. Over 224 km away in Murshidabad’s Domkal, Moniruzzaman Mondal (41) runs a hardware shop.

Politics, or rather CPM, he says, led to his father’s brutal murder December, 1984. A murder he witnessed as a nine-year-old. His father Abu Taher Mondal — a Congress Seva Dal neta — had taken Moniruzzaman to the market, when he was gunned down in broad daylight. The memory still scares Moniruzzaman, in class III at the time. “They (Congress) are joining hands with those who spilled our blood in Domkal,” he says, uncertain what to make of it. For these families, the CPM-Congress alliance begs the question can “political necessity” wipe away years of pain?