Raped

Raped

Indian HOLOCAUST My Father`s Life and Time- One Hundred ELEVEN


Palash Biswas


THEN ALL MY ART IS GENOCIDE FROM TODAY



Joy Goswami


Translated from the original Bengali
by
Sampurna Chattarji
Dedication


To Saoli Mitra
These poems were all written in response to current events, except the poem on the back cover, which was written during the Gujarat genocide. For me, the Gujarat of 2002 and the Nandigram of 2007 are both symptoms of the same kind of state-sponsored terrorism.
- Joy Goswami [Joy Goswami is a leading living Bengali poet giving voice to the voiceless.] TO THE POWERS THAT BE
Whatever you tell me
I’ll do just that
I’ll eat just that
I’ll wear just that and go out
In fact I’ll leave my own land and go away without a word.

You’ll tell me, put a rope around your neck
and hang yourself. I’ll do just that. Just that. But
the next day when you tell me,
now come down,
I’ll need someone to help me then
I won’t be able to do it alone.

I hope you’ll forgive me for such a small failing!

Today all my words are infants hurled into the fire
All my shouts are shouts of victory, weapons of death
All my rhymes are swords raised in slaughter
All my verses embryos spiked on sword-tips
All my love is nothing, nothing and for no one
But the rape of a mother before the eyes of her son

Even now, now if I sit in my room and save myself
If I don’t try and stop them, if I theorize on who is guilty for what
If I can stop no one, if I cannot jump into the fray
Then all my art is genocide from today



Pl Visit this site to feel COLD HORROR:
http://nandigramlalsalam.blogspot.com/index.html

Notwithstanding the furore over the reported rape and molestation of three women in West Bengal's Burdwan district, a top police official on Monday claimed that the state had the lowest incidents of rape in the country.

"Compared to other states, incidents of rape is the lowest in West Bengal. On the basis of the reported incident at Burdwan, it cannot be said that the number of rapes are on the rise in the state," IGP (Law and Order) Chayan Mukherjee told newsmen.

Pointing out that the state had 411 police stations, he said, "rapes may take place in one or two PS areas, but in 95 per cent of the cases, the culprits are arrested and chargesheeted."

Earlier, Chief Minister Buddhadev Bhattacharjee said eight people had been arrested in connection with the incidents in Burdwan.

They claim that woman is Progressive, Well Cultured Bengal is more Independent tahn those living elsewhere.
What is the reality? Capitalist Superhighway of MNC development with Special Exploitation zones, entry of The killers like Salim and Dow herald a new Era of Blu Revolution in which Manusmriti is most relevant for woman in progressive bengal! So are the fatwas!

Raped Women in West Bengal never get justice!


A woman in this subcontinet is considered either SHUDRA or NAPAK , a tool for SEX. Post modern woman or the dalit illeterate woman both are destined in the same way. Post Modern Manusmriti has presentd the continuous live SEX shows to promot OPen Market and the much hyped information explostion is nothing but SEX EXPLOITATION! It has indigenous flavour every where and State Power sponsers SEX Tourism playing a role of pimp.

It is surprising that an individual like Taslima Nasreen expects justice from the gang of Rapists and Pimps, who consist of Ruling Classes and NRI , MNC Raj and Hindu Zionist MNC raj!With 80 million inhatitants, West Bengal is the fourth most populous state in India. It has been ruled by the Communist Party of India (Marxist)-led Left Front (LF) coalition for three decades. This government, however, has regularly used police repression against workers and peasants to defend big-business interests.

Nandigram rapes are nothing new. Woman is victimised everwhere and she has no identity but the biological sexuality! Manusmriti and every religion, every nationality have denied human and civil rights for Woman.
So Taslima is most despised woman by those who represent State Power and Worship industry cutting accrose ideology, culture, geopolitics and nationality.
nandigram Rape Victims would never get justice neither West bengal Ruling Classes, the most elite part of the Brahminical system would allow Indian citizenship to taslima nasreen!


Pakistani Rapist Army and Buddhadev`s Gestapo played identical role against humanity in divided two parts of Bengal in different Time and space frame! Massacre and Rapes are the best expression of State Power all over this Subcontinent. So Buddha`s action is justified by a writer like Mallika Sengupta ( Once upon a time , she wrote Seetayana against manusmriti and Brahminical System) criticises Poet Joy Goswai for writing poetry on Nandigram!
Why only mallika? Soft Porn Novelist Sangeeta to Porn Specialist Sunil gango and buddhdev Guha and the poet who wrote Naked KING, Neerendra nath Chakrobarti, Debesh roy - and all Academic writers and artists stand strongly United to defend Buddha`s capitalist ways. Massacres or Rapes are justified for Industrialisation and Urbanisation.In retrospect, it was only in the late seventies and eighties that militant trade unionism in the gateway state of West Bengal and administrative slackness in Bihar that kept corporate houses wary. The business establishments at various layers being the initial adopters of IT, the technology boom was only seen in hubs like Bangalore, Hyderabad and outskirts of Delhi like Gurgaon. For long, eastern India has been designated as the laggard region in terms of adopting newer technologies including IT. But there has been a major change in the scenario during the last four-five years with the region making a bid to catch up with the rest of the nation.

Pro Buddha Intellectuals declare that BC Roy did nothing. The builder of Prosperous and Progressive Post Modern bengal is Buddhdev Bhattacharya! Eastern India, comprising Orissa, Jharkhand, Bihar, Bengal, Assam and seven other states, has been lately witnessing steady demand for IT products and infrastructure facilities like networking, not only from the respective state capitals but also from the upcountry markets.

Please Read the States man report to know your literary Icons better!
Pro-left intellectuals bat for Buddha

Statesman News Service
KOLKATA, April 21. — They showered him with adulation. They offered to back his industrial policy all the way. And, never for a second, did they add to his discomfiture, by mentioning that 14 villagers had fallen to bullets, mostly fired by the police and some by goons dressed in khaki, at Nandigram on 14 March.
Today, a sizeable section of pro-Left intellectuals of Kolkata - headed by actor Mr Dilip Roy, litterateurs Mr Nirendranath Chakraborty, Mr Buddhadeb Guha, Mr Debesh Roy and Mr Amitava Chaudhury, architect Mr Shailapati Gupta, historian Mr Aniruddha Roy and former football star Mr PK Banerjee - shared the dais at the Science City auditorium with the state’s beleaguered chief minister Mr Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee to salvage the situation for the chief minister and help him send out a message that the government was willing to discuss every new industrial project with the Opposition to avoid confrontation.
Only time will tell whether this exercise - the third since 14 March - will silence Miss Mamata Banerjee and anti-Left intellectuals or make land acquisition any easier for the government. But, Mr Bhattacharjee’s admirers waxed eloquent on how agricultural land would have to be acquired to pave the way for a new Bengal.
Although Rabindranath Tagore renounced his knighthood after the Jallianwalla Bagh massacre, the intellectuals thought it prudent to quote the poet in support of their cause.
Mr Nirendranath Chakraborty offered a bouquet to the chief minister, Mr Dilip Roy announced: “Imagine how much pain we have caused to a man who loves flowers so much.”
Mr Debesh Roy confidently declared that “no private investment was made in West Bengal between 1947 and 2005” and the first successful effort has been made by Mr Bhattacharjee.
http://www.thestatesman.net/page.news.php?clid=6&theme=&usrsess=1&id=154270


Children on the prowl

During a study on child abuse in Kolkata, Elaan, an NGO, found that four out of 10 boys faced sexual harassment in school. “The abuse ranged from an ‘accidental’ brush of the private parts to something that was done on purpose,” says Elaan’s founder-director Pranadhika Sinha.

When the Tulir Centre for the Prevention and Treatment of Sexual Abuse set out to conduct such a study on Class XI students of schools in Chennai, it found that one out of two boys had been abused as compared to two out of five girls (though not necessarily in school).

It has been proved that boys are equally, if not more vulnerable to sexual abuse as girls, says Ravi Karkara, the South Asia moderator for Save the Children organisation, which was part of the government study on child abuse. Karkara shares his own experience: “I was five when a family friend sexually abused me. My mother made sure that the abusive lady never came home again.” The scars of abuse remain with the child for a long time, he adds.
http://www.hindustantimes.com/storypage/storypage.aspx?id=1cb28e5a-5c3c-46e3-98d8-7a4f104adb18&


Two women allegedly raped by policemen in Nandigram during the violence that broke out on 14 March, have given their submission of that days’ incident in an affidavit before the Tamluk Notary Public, which would be submitted before Calcutta High Court soon.
Dr Angshuman Mitra, secretary, Medical Service Centre (MSC), an NGO which had sent a doctors’ team to Nandigram for treatment of the injured people, said this today. The affidavit and statements of the victims of sexual assault will be submitted before the High Court and the West Bengal Human Rights Commission, he said.
Mr Mitra claimed that 37 people injured in the Nandigram violence on 14 March, described the police brutalities in affidavits before the Notary Public at Tamluk recently. The state government, after being criticised over the Nandigram carnage, denied the charges of rape by the police.
A 35-year-old woman of Nandigram, however, stated in an affidavit before the Tamluk Notary Public that she had been “raped” by three policemen on 14 March during the police action on farmers. Another 45-year-old woman, a resident of Gokulnagar in Nandigram, said in the affidavit that three policemen took her to an abandoned place and “sexually assaulted” her the same day.
Five other women from Nandigram gave written statements alleging that they were either “physically tortured” or “sexually assaulted” by the police on the day of carnage, MSC doctors claimed, observing that the Nandigram violence had affected children as well. They are suffering from post traumatic stress disorder, having stopped going to school. The doctors also said a few women of Nandigram have developed hormonal disorders after the “torture” on them.

Nandigram: Rumours And Truths
Debranjan

AS if the death of 14 people is not enough unfortunate, deliberate rumors are being spread now about the Nandigram incident. Every possible medium —television channels to Internet, are being used to magnify the “horror”.

NUMBERS INFLATED

To portray the March 14 incident as a “mass killing”, the number of those actually killed is now being inflated to infinite. If one reads through various statements by the opposition leaders and a section of the media, the number of dead can be anywhere between 50 to 200, even “thousand” as claimed by an actress in her column in a Bengali daily. Some like Medha Patkar have alleged that the children were beaten to death –– without providing a single instance, without naming a single child. The reality is that by March 20, the number of dead remained at 14, including one killed in bomb injury. Two bodies remain unidentified, unclaimed, fuelling suspicion that they were outsiders brought in for “action” by Trinamul Congress.
There is also a constant rumor of large number of people being “missing”.
http://pd.cpim.org/2007/0325/03252007_debranjan.htm

Kolkata is the hotbed of desi porn market
Sumanta Ray Chaudhuri
Thursday, April 19, 2007 23:25 IST


KOLKATA: West Bengal, especially the suburbs around state capital Kolkata, is fast becoming the hub for “desi” pornographic business.In a startling revelation it has been found that youngsters from established families, influential and educated people are voluntarily participating in the flesh trade.The CID and the Detective Department of the West Bengal police are baffled following the revelation that the operators of the trade no more hire professional sex workers or use hidden cameras in hotel rooms to shoot the “desi” pornographic movies.Educated people, including doctors, small businessmen and young college students sometimes volunteer to take part in the movies in the lure of easy money. This came to light following the investigation of the recent murder of Jayanta Bag, a medical practitioner and his daughter at Jagacha in Howrah district.
http://www.dnaindia.com/report.asp?NewsID=1091928

Anemia returns in W Bengal: report
The National Family Health Survey Report (2005-2006) has pointed out that anemia has returned to West Bengal, especially among women of 15 to 49 years, with a one-percent increase over the last eight years. The report says that anemic cases have increased from 62.7% in 1998-99 to 63.8% in 2005-6. Whereas, anemia has grown by 6% among pregnant women over these years.
http://www.hindustantimes.com/StoryPage/StoryPage.aspx?id=b7b54d58-d269-4be7-b57e-2fee5cb1e150&

SUCI central committee member and UTUC (Lenin Sarani) national president Krishna Chakraborthy has said that the CPM gave the green signal for police action against farmers at Nandigram in West Bengal to favour the Salim group which supported the massacre of communists in Indonesia under the rule of Suharto.
http://www.newindpress.com/NewsItems.asp?ID=IER20070422015427&Page=R&Title=Kerala&Topic=0

>> Against Our Will : Men, Women and Rape
>> By: Susan Brownmiller


Indira Gandhi's Indian Army had successfully routed the West
Pakistanis and had abruptly concluded the war in Bangladesh when
small stories hinting at mass rape of Bengali women began to appear
in American newspapers. The first account I read, from the Los
Angeles Times syndicated service, appeared in the New York Post a
few days before Christmas, 1971. It reported that the Bangladesh
Government of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, in recognition of the
sufferings of Bengali women at the hands of Pakistani soldiers, had
proclaimed all raped women "heroines" of the war of independence.
Farther on in the story came this ominous sentence: "In the
traditional Bengali village society, where women lead cloistered lives, rape
victims often are ostracised."

Two days after Christmas a more explicit story, by war correspondent
Joseph Fried, appeared in the New York Daily News, datelines
Jessore. Fried described the reappearance of young Bengali women on
the city streets after an absence of nine months. Some had been
packed off to live with relatives in the countryside and others had
gone into hiding. "The precautions," he wrote, "proved wise, if not
always effective."

A stream of victims and eyewitnesses tell how truckloads of
Pakistani soldiers and their hireling razakars swooped down on villages in
the night, rounding up women by force. Some were raped on the spot. Others
were carried off to military compounds. Some women were still their when
Indian troops battled their way into Pakistani
http://www.drishtipat.org/1971/war-susan.html


Amnesia of war
NILANJANA S. ROY
In times of war, the rules of rape change. There is no need for secrecy or concealment. The men, usually soldiers, who rape form a band of brothers; they know they will not be held accountable. Other crimes might come back to haunt them, but not rape.

Darfur, Rwanda, Bosnia: if you drew a map of the world that marked places where crimes had been committed against women, these places would form knots of scar tissue.

In Sudan, the militia known as the ?Janjawid? rape women as a matter of routine. The government claimed recently that Darfur, where the conflict is centred, had seen only two cases of rape. But an Amnesty team recorded 250 cases of rape from just three relief camps in the Darfur area. Women in Sudan are especially vulnerable. They are the chief providers and firewood collectors; many women have been waylaid on their way to the forest, to draw water, to outdoor toilet areas, and even, cruelly, on their way to seek medical help after being raped.

Filing a police case in an area where Islamic law is adhered to strictly, and demands that a raped woman produce four witnesses to the crime, is almost impossible. And there is no support: rape is seen as an act that shames the woman, her family and the entire community. Silence wins over justice.

Then there?s the recent Amnesty report on the Democratic Republic of Congo. It?s estimated in six years of war, over 40,000 women have been raped or used as sex slaves. Like the government in Sudan, the government in the Congo sees rape as a minor, even insignificant, issue: few rapes are recorded. And both arenas of war report that torture is used casually, as a means of forcing women to submit to rape.

From the Geneva Convention onwards, rape has been considered a serious crime of war. In 1998, a tribunal in Rwanda found a former mayor guilty of genocide on nine counts ? including rape. It was the first time in contemporary human history that rape was found to be an act of genocide.

The events of February 2002 in Gujarat have been described as genocide, if not war. Two years after the massacre of Muslims in ?revenge? for the slaughter of train passengers in Godhra, witnesses to what happened in Best Bakery, Naroda Patia and Gulbarga are finally being heard.

As independent human rights groups and scholars like Tanika Sarkar, Martha Nussbaum and Flavia Agnes have testified from March 2002 onwards, the Gujarat riots were marked by unprecedented violence against women. In case after case, they narrated the same story: of torture, abuse and rape, followed by murder. ?Leave no evidence,? said one rioter before setting on fire women who had already been raped.

What separates the mass rapes of women in Gujarat from the those of women in Darfur, in Bosnia, in the Congo? The rapists in those instances have remained unpunished. But in Gujarat, not all the ?evidence? was burnt alive, and India has better courts than Sudan or the Congo. Bring the rapists of Gujarat to book. In times of war, rapists and murderers might escape justice. In times of peace, they shouldn?t be allowed to walk free.
http://www.telegraphindia.com/1041031/asp/look/story_3940511.asp



Rape
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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This article is about a form of sexual assault. For other uses, see Rape (disambiguation).
Rape is a form of assault involving the non-consensual sexual violation of the sexual, anal, or oral organs of another person's body. The assailant can be of either sex, as can their target.

Rape is generally considered one of the most serious sex crimes and can be very difficult to prosecute. Sexual violence can also be a war crime under international law. Consent may be absent due to duress arising from the use, or threat, of overwhelming force or violence, or because the subject is incapacitated in some way such as intoxication and/or underage innocence. In some cases coercion might also be used to negate consent.

There is no universally accepted distinction between rape and other forms of assault involving one or both participant's sexual organs. Some criminal codes explicitly consider all kinds of forced sexual activity to be rape, whereas in others only acts involving a coupled penis and vagina are included. Some restrict rape only to instances where a woman is forced by a man. Other assaults involving sexual organs in some way may then be grouped under the term sexual assault. In some jurisdictions rape may also be committed by assailants using objects, rather than their own body parts, against the sexual organs of their target.

The rape of women by men is the most frequent form of the assault. Male-male rape is common, primarily in correctional facilities. There are an increasing number of female assailants being convicted for the rape of men, most commonly, statutory rape. It is thought that female rapists who rape other women are almost never caught or convicted [5] and research on female rapists is rare [6].
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rape



Nandigram rape: CPM man owns up

Joydeep Thakur
NANDIGRAM, March 20: Villagers have been looking for some people who came in on 14 March disguised as policemen to rape and murder women. They chanced upon Sahadev Pramanick (30), who had raped at least two women. The CPI-M activist from Gangra, Sonachura, left the village after the first spell of violence in January and sought refuge in a party camp at Khejuri. Last evening, whilst trying to sneak into Sonachura along with four accomplices, he found himself captured. Pramanick admitted to two rapes, including that of a 13-year-old girl. “At least 17 girls were raped inside a deserted house near Bhangabera on 14 March when police opened fire near a bridge. The victims were dragged into the house of Shankar Samanta by CPI-M cadres,” Pramanick said. Samanta had been burnt alive by villagers on 7 January and his dwelling since then lay vacant.
CBI officials have visited it, collecting pieces of torn cloth, bangles and undergarments. It was also stained with blood. Villagers had heard women forced into the house cry out in agony but there were CPI-M goons guarding it. Haldia’s sub-divisional police officer, Mr Swapan Saha, said if the CBI wanted Pramanick for interrogation, he would be handed over to it.
Kolkata/Nandigram, March 5 (IANS) The wife of a Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPI-M) supporter in trouble-torn Nandigram has alleged that she was gang-raped by men opposed to land acquisition for a proposed Special Economic Zone there, triggering an angry denial from a group against whom the allegation was hurled.

News reports Monday said the 35-year-old woman was allegedly raped on Saturday afternoon and her husband and two teenage sons were confined to their house by the rapists and a group belonging to the Bhoomi Uchchhed Pratirodh Committee (Committee to Oppose Farmland Eviction), which has been formed to resist the acquisition of land for industry.
http://in.news.yahoo.com/070305/43/6ctkb.html



Taslima Nasrin's column
http://www.mukto-mona.com/Articles/taslima/index.htm
http://www.amazon.com/Game-Reverse-Poems-Taslima-Nasrin/dp/0807613924

NOW activists supported Bangladeshi feminist author Taslima Nasrin in a demonstration outside the Embassy of Bangladesh, demanding that the government withdraw its warrant and provide Nasrin with protection.
http://www.now.org/issues/global/nasrin.html

In Defence of Taslima Nasreen



View Current Signatures - Sign the Petition


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


To: Indian Government
We, the undersigned, are writing to register our strongest protest at yet more death threats made against writer, humanist, secularist and human rights activist Taslima Nasreen. This time, Taqi Raza Khan the president of an Islamic group, the All-India Ibtehad Council, has offered a bounty of about £8,000 for her beheading. This and other clear threats to her life require that the Indian government bring the full force of the law to bear on him and those who threaten and incite murder and terror.

Taqi Raza Khan has warned the Indian government that if she is not driven out of India within ten days ‘all hell will break loose’. In fact, it is the other way around.

Taslima has every right to freely express her views on Islam and Sharia law and in favour of women’s rights and equality. The Indian government is duty bound to protect her from these threats and grant her the citizenship she requires so that she may live without fear of expulsion.

Sincerely,

The Undersigned
http://www.petitiononline.com/taslima/petition.html
One Brave Woman vs. Religious Fundamentalism
An Interview With Taslima Nasrin
http://www.secularhumanism.org/library/fi/nasrin_19_1.html
Lajja (Shame)
Taslima Nasrin
1995 at Eliane's House
Synopsis
The Duttas - Sudhamoy, Kironmoyee, and their two children, Suranjan and Maya - have lived in Bangladesh all their lives. Despite being part of the country's small Hindu community, that is terrorized at every opportunity by Muslim fundamentalists, they refuse to leave their country, as most of their friends and relatives have done. Sudhamoy, an atheist, believes with a naive mix of optimism and idealism that his motherland will not let him down...

And then, on 6 December 1992, the Babri Masjid at Ayodhya in India is demolished by a mob of Hindu fundamentalists. The world condemns the incident but its fallout is felt most acutely in Bangladesh, where Muslim mobs begin to seek out and attack the Hindus... The nightmare inevitably arrives at the Duttas' doorstep - and their world begins to fall apart.

First lines
Suranjan lay on his bed. Every now and again his sister Nilanjana, whom they all called maya, would come into the room and say 'Dada, aren't you going to wake up and do something before it is too late.'
http://www.stokenewington.net/readinggroup/books/nasrin.html
Nasrin, Taslima

Year in Review 1994
In early August 1994 the Bangladeshi feminist author Taslima Nasrin, disguised in the traditional shrouding dress of Muslim women, made her way through Dhaka and onto a plane. Thus began her flight to sanctuary in Sweden. Left behind was a major fundamentalist Islamic uprising demanding her death for "blasphemous" writings and statements. Militant Muslims had issued…
http://www.britannica.com/eb/article-9115391/Nasrin-Taslima

Politics of rape
Author: Sunanda Sanyal
Publication: The Statesman
Date: April 15, 2003
Introduction: Ways of beating opposition in Bengal

It takes a lot of courage for someone in the CPI-M now to advise one of its outfits to mind its own business rather than bother about how its work, honestly done, might affect the government. Chief minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee did precisely this when he told Ganatantrik Mahila Samiti (GMS) on 25 March that it should earnestly investigate atrocities against women, and pull up the government, if necessary. The advice came not a day too soon after the horrific triple crime of rob-rape-murder at Aishmali in Dhantala, Nadia. It must not be confused with the routine robbery, rape and murder, which rarely get noticed these days.

Woman's Commission

According to Archisman Ghatak, a former Director General of Police, West Bengal, police have but few records that match the horror of Dhantala. Yet the word GMS and West Bengal Women's Commission spread was that the Dhantala incident was just overblown media hype. However, these aren't the only competent authorities that have failed to adequately respond to the enormity of the crime.

Police, for example, kept no tabs on the increasingly violent divisions within the local CPI-M. They had no information either that one of these was ganging up to waylay the guests of the other faction. The gang stopped an auto-rickshaw the first thing as a warm-up for the main deed to be done. They tore down a part of a madrasa and set up a roadblock with the bricks. Arrived a busload of wedding guests. The gangsters robbed them all. They killed the driver and forced the male passengers on to the roof of the vehicle. They raped the women. They inflicted similar indignities on the passengers of the next bus, too. All this went on for hours together with men and women screaming for help within the earshot of the police station. Yet police heard nothing, saw nothing, and rebuffed attempts at lodging an FIR. Next morning police visited the spot, accompanied by the criminals concerned, and the victims were duly frightened into silence.

Next to fail was the Women's Commission, a statutory body, of which all but one member belong to the ruling Left Front. A week after the occurrence, its chairperson told a TV channel: "It's not very late yet for us to visit Dhantala". Surprisingly, she doesn't seem to know that as time goes by, feelings, which are acute immediately after an occurrence, lose their intensity, myths grow, and victims get increasingly fearful of social stigma. So to waste time is to get the victims tongue-tied.

Eventually the Commission did send a team, on 22 February, patently to pre-empt another from Delhi. However, a CPI nominee on the Commission, Shyamasree Das, somewhat redeemed its credibility by frankly commenting, "Never before had the criminalisation of West Bengal politics been so glaringly laid bare". But Shymasree was summoned to the CPI-M local office in Nadia and severely reprimanded for spilling the beans. And Dr Chandan Sen, who had treated some of the rape victims at Ranaghat Hospital, died shortly thereafter under mysterious circumstances.

Cover up

In an article called Narir Morjada Lunthito Holo Byekti Akroshe (Personal Animosity Ends up in Violation of Womanhood) in Kalalntar (12 March, 2003), a CPI daily of long-standing, Shyamasree recounts how on the fateful night of February 5 a gang of 17-18 criminals subjected the women to an "unspeakably disgusting person search". She adds: "A factual account of how the young and unwed women were taken to an open field and behind a plantain grove, and brutalised, is so sickening that civilised society would consider it unprintable". The witnesses informed the members of the commission that the gangsters were actually gunning for another bus, which had left the CPI-M local committee secretary Sanat Dhali's house with wedding guests.

Shyamasree says the crime had stemmed from a factional feud within the local committee of the CPI-M; it surfaced over the nomination of candidates before the last assembly election, and had become increasingly fierce since. Sanat Dhali had fallen out with the two accused, Subol Bagchi and Saidul Karigar, of whom the latter was a former Panchayat Pradhan. "Most unfortunately", says Shyamasree, "police actually tried to cover up the crime involving rape". And Subol Bagchi even tried to give the incident communal turn. The Association for Protection of Democratic Rights reports that the victims had indeed complained to an additional superintendent of police, who in turn met the SPs of Nadia and North 24 Parganas to review the situation. Why didn't they register an FIR on their own?

The CPI-M has fared no better. Alas, says Radhikaranjan Pramanik, a CPI-M MP, that his party has now only "managers and manipulators" but no true politician. What kind of management is it, one wonders, that while Anil Biswas, chairman of the Left Front, exchanges arguments of whodunit with his political rivals, reports of gang rape involving his party men pour in from all over the state - Baranagar, Malda, Murshidababd, Oxytown, Birbhum, North and South 2 Parganas - and South Dinajpur at the time of writing.
http://www.hvk.org/articles/0403/214.html

Born unfree
A failed society and decadent mores
Never was the appellation Incredible India more agreeable. The reality is as chilling as it is damning for a nation that rather hypocritically perceives itself to be on the roll towards a world power. Last year’s statement on the disappearing girl child was shameful enough; if that admission by the minister for women and child welfare pointed to female foeticide and infant mortality, the latest data on gender studies is confirmation - if confirmation were needed ~ of a failed society and decadent mores. Child abuse has assumed almost dehumanising proportions, if the Study on Child Abuse: India 2007, released by Renuka Chowdhury last week is any indication. Indeed, this first-ever nationwide study on child abuse must have a cruelly ironic shelf value for a bumbling government, social do-gooders of the NGO variety and above all self-righteous parents who have been referred to as the “major perpetrators of physical and emotional abuse”. As high as 89 per cent of sexually-abused children revealed that the culprits were parents or members of the family.