Did Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee personally order police to fire on March 14?
Dropping a virtual bombshell in the run-up to the second phase of Lok Sabha polls, Forward Bloc state general secretary Mr Ashoke Ghosh, today disclosed that it was chief minister Mr Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee who had ordered police to fire on Nandigram villagers on 14 March, 2007 that killed at least 14 persons and triggered an unprecedented political turmoil in the state.
Mr Ghosh, who was speaking at a meet-the-Press programme, said he had asked in a Left Front meeting the day after the firing at whose orders the police had fired and the chief minister had stood up to say it was at his express orders that triggers had been pulled. The FB state general secretary was asked whether the firing and the turmoil the state had plunged into thereafter would have any impact on the electoral fortunes of the LF candidates in the LS poll. While stoutly denying that the issue would influence the voters, Mr Ghosh sought to give a backhanded compliment to the chief minister. “Only a Marxist chief minister (like Mr Bhattacharjee) could display such political honesty by admitting that he had ordered the police firing. Which other chief minister in the country can show such courage?” he said.
Mr Bhattacharjee had been saying all along that “had I known that they (police) would open fire, I wouldn’t have sent them at all”. But then, the then home secretary, Mr Prasad Roy, who had been in the eye of the political storm that the firing raised, was on record as saying: “The firing wasn’t without the chief minister’s knowledge.” Mr Roy’s remark triggered a virulent reaction from Alimuddin Street which bayed for his blood and ensured that he was transferred at the earliest opportunity.
Rubbing salt on the CPI-M’s injuries, Mr Ghosh insisted that he still maintained as before that it was entirely wrong for the state government to acquire fertile farm land at Singur and give it to the Tatas for setting up a small car project there. “The Tatas had to move out, after all, and the people are blaming Trinamul Congress chief Miss Mamata Banerjee for the loss of an opportunity to set up an automobile factory in the state. But, the state government shouldn’t in the first place have chosen a multi-crop land for the project. It could have arranged land at Kalaikunda, for example,” he said.
The FB state general secretary iterated his party’s stand that no industries can be set up on fertile farm land. “A proper rehabilitation package has to be formulated before any such venture is taken up,” he said. Mr Ghosh, however, said the LF partners had by and large sorted out their differences that had cropped up during last year’s panchayat poll and led to a Left rout in nearly half of rural Bengal.
Trinamul chief Miss Mamata Banerjee said it was good that Mr Ghosh had admitted what the Opposition had been saying for so long. “But, he has the knack of denying his own remarks. It’s to be seen if he practises double standards this time as well,” she said.
