A FACT FINDING REPORT OF 2nd OCTOBER 2014 BURDWAN (West Bengal) BOMB BLAST The incident happened on 2nd October 2014 at around 11 O’ Clock night: a deafening explosion rocked the middle-class locality of Khagragarh in Burdwan town. When police forced their way into the first-floor flat, they found three people lying in a pool of blood. Two women and their children had escaped unhurt as they were in an adjoining room. The explosion had ripped apart Shakil Gazi’s body while Swapan alias Sobhan Mondal and Abdul Hakim were bleeding profusely. Mondal died on his way to hospital but Hakim survived. Gazi’s wife Razia and Hakim’s wife Amina Biwi were taken into custody. A large number of chemicals, explosives were also recovered from the spot, at the house of Haji Hasan Chowdhury, Mohalla Khagragarh, p.o. Rajbati, Bardhaman -713104. House owner Haji Hasan Chowdhry, a retired employee(an engineer) of West Bengal Electricity Department, said about the incident “The blast occurred at the residence opposite to his house which had been rented by him on 2nd June to Shakeel Gazi and Kausar Ali at a rent of Rs.4200 per month (the written agreement for which was never completed).” This was the first floor room of the house where the blast took place. According to Hasan Ali the ground floor was given temporarily to TMC as an election office. The other ground floor rooms adjoining TMC office is a Homeopathic dispensary and a garage. Two persons were killed on the spot due to the blast were (1) Shakeel Gazi and (2) Shobhan Mandal. Besides these two, one person whose name was given as Abdul Hakim was hospitalized and was in the custody of National Investigative agency (NIT). One of these women is a wife of Shakeel Gazi and the other one is the wife of Abdul Hakim. Anand Bazar Patrika on 9th October had given the names of these two women as Razia and Amina. Out of these two is Razia Bibi, wife of Shakeel Gazi killed in the blast. The second is Amina Bibi wife of Abdul Hakim injured and in NIA custody. Shobhan Mandal along with Shakeel Gazi were staying in the house of Haji Hasan Chowdhuri since 2nd June 2014. A large number of chemicals, explosives were also recovered from the spot. Investigators soon said that the five in the house were involved in making crude bombs and IED in guise of running a burqa tailoring unit, which were recovered from the spot.NIA director Sharad kumar has raised a question after Burdwan incident : why Burdwan and surrounding areas have become an explosive hub? But as The Sunday Express pieced together a picture of the region from talking to people and officials, it is clear that the theatre of this blast-- Burdhman, Nadia, Birbhum and Murshidabad – was for long one of the most volatile regions in the state, the site of pitched political turf-wars and are regarded as the most sensitive areas. Extortion rackets connected with political parties are active here which result in intense competition and violence between political parties, at present going on between BJP and TMC. The blast in Khagragarh have led to growing anti- Muslim propaganda in the state. Such incidents related to political violence have their roots in the political-economic structure of central Bengal where rural surplus has led to uneven economic growth, paving the way to political domination of one class over another. This can be seen from the class structure of the rice belt of Burdhman, Hooghly and part of Birbhum districts, where the proportion of agricultural labour is still very high. There is an urgent need to separate such instances of criminal activities, related to the political economy, from those of the purported Islamic Jihad There is a Madarsa situated within a distance of around 200 meters from the blast house. The name of the Madarsa is Madrasa Dinia Madania at Mohalla near GT Road 1km distant from main road which was established in 1968.This is spread on a 4 Bigha land donated by the locals. At present the number of students is 31, between the age group of 9-22.This Madrasa had remained closed between 2nd October and 17 October 2014 due to EID vacation. The Madarsa authorities have maintained that they do not have any relation to the blast and no one from the media even met them till today. They said that we are the first persons from civil society to meet them. But the print and electronic media has highlighted this Madarsa as the epicenter of the blast incident whereas no one from the Madarsa has been arrested and interrogated so far. The Madarsa is still working normally. The Madarsa is surrounded by houses and it does not have a proper compound wall and is open from one side. Madarsa authorities have also said that no one from the Anand Bazar Patrika came to enquire from them. But the story which appeared on 8 October Anand Bazar Patrika says that police are looking for 8 people who are absconding. Simultaneously 5 students are reported to be absconding from this Madarsa as well, who have gone over to Bangladesh. The Madrasa authorities have also said that no one from NIA has approached them so far. Another place under scanner is Gram Simulia situated between Bardhman and Katua Road which is 30km away , block and police station Mangalkot. The population of this village is 7-8 thousands which is divided between 50% Hindus and 50% Muslims. A girls’ Madarsa has existed here since 2010 which had 40 girl students from out of the village (since villagers could not afford to send their girls due to high cost of education here) and 4 lady teachers. One Anis Shekh who is no more had donated 2 Bighas to the Madarsas. The Madarsa was built out of mud without the use of cement. The teachers cultivated the remaining land. This Madarsa is being targeted as a sleeper cell of women Jihadis. The media arrived on the scene for the first time on 8th October followed by police. After one week NIA arrived and the police of Mangalkot thana are camping there since then. But neither the state CID nor the NIA found any explosives in the half dozen Madarsas they raided since the blast. The only seizure they made was air gun pellets that were found in the Simulia Madarsa along with huge volumes of religious scripts and literature written in Arabic, the investigators described as “jihadi”. Air gun pellets are sold in open market and are not banned items. A villager who lives in a house adjoining the Simulia Madarsa did not reveal his name but did nothing to hide his sarcasm. The police pumped water out of the two ponds next to the Madarsa and found a black umbrella handle. He heard them saying that it could be the butt of a gun. They must have mistaken the white and black toothpowder many of us use, “as some explosive substance”. Burhan’s age is 35 and is absconding. They are not a landlord family but marginal farmers and their sons are construction worker and carpenter and had given away the land as part of a religious belief. The elder brother Suleman have been summoned to the police station repeatedly.NIA visited their place twice and confiscated their voter card. Police enquired from their relatives as well. Asura Bibi said the Madarsa had nothing to do with Jehadi activities and for saying this to the police she was beaten. The villagers we met also corroborated the story given by this family and were angry at their village being targeted by the security agencies. More than 500 young men of this village are in Kerala to earn their livelihood. Burhan’ along with his wife Shanaz and theirs have left their house since the day of the Burdhman incident but the villagers have no suspicion about them and have said that they would have themselves handed them over to the police if they had any doubts about them. Aakash Rahman a resident of Simulia and a construction worker now working in Ernakulum, Kerala was very disturbed and said that he was made to vacate his rented room in Ernakulam after the incident. Only after arguing with his owner that he could not have been involved in the incident since he was in Ernakulam on the day of the blast, that he was allowed to stay there. He said that he is being looked at with suspicion on hearing the name of his village and this is humiliating for him. Another 3 persons from Simulia working in Kerala as construction workers were not allowed to leave Simulia by Simulia Railway Station Authorities and were denied railway tickets because of the ongoing probe in the blast. When Hara Sheikh, Khairul Sheikh and Azaur Sheikh, all in their twenties, went to the Simulia railway station to buy tickets to Kerala, where they work as construction workers, the man behind the counter took one look at their identity cards and said they could not leave. They had come home for Eid and were hoping to get back to work, but the October2 blast in Burdhman town, about 30 km from their village, upset their plan. Till last week, on the Durgapur Expressway that is part of the golden quadri-lateral road network that connects Burdhman with Kolkata on one side and Dhanbad on the other, search parties flagged down men on motorbikes and meticulously searched their belongings. The lack of subtlety was evident: most of the men who were stopped had beard or other distinct markers. The police held similar searches on buses and other vehicles. A top district police officer, who did not want to be named, admitted the search operations seemed to be making a point to Muslims: “you are a suspect”.’ (Indian Express 26 October) “Word has spread that mobile phone SIM cards should be given to Muslims only after ‘proper identification and verification’ of their antecedents”.(I.E. 26 October) After this conversation with Aakash Rahman we decided to meet the Hindus of the village and met them at the village centre. They also corroborated the story told by the Muslim residents that they did not find anything suspicious in the Madarsa and that their village was being targeted without any reason and were sad because of that. We suggested to them to file a defamation suit along with Muslim residents against the media and the administration and to submit a joint memorandum to the dist. Administration regarding this defamation of their village and they agreed. They also said that we are the first persons from civil society to come and talk with us on this issue. A Note about Madarsas. The Symbiosis of Terrorism and Religion: The trauma started in Pakistan From 1979s when Soviet Army entered Afghanistan. The US, after the election of Ronald Reagan as president, considered Afghanistan an important arena to check the Soviets ambition. A jihad was launched in Afghanistan, with Pakistan as the inevitable conduit and a frontline supporter because of its contiguity to Afghanistan. Afghan warlords and their militias were armed and financed to fight the Soviets. Alongside 20,000 to 30,000 Mujahideens from all over the Islamic world, students from some seminaries of Pakistan were encouraged, armed, financed, and trained to reinforce the Afghans and confront the Soviet war machine. Before 1979, Madrasas were quite limited and their activities were insignificant. The Afghan war brought them into the forefront, urged on by President Zia ul –Haq, who vigorously propounded the cause of jihadis against Soviet occupation. CIA tried to use Madarsas of Pakistan to train jihadis for war against Soviet Union. The training was given in the areas of North Western Frontier as well as the Madarsas of Lahore and Islamabad. The news about Madarsas as the hotbed of jihadI activities were propagated extensively through the Indian media, although the Indian Madarsas had nothing to do with it. But the then chief minister of West Bengal Budhhadev Bhattacharya had given a statement that Madarsas are the centers of terrorist training, which had earned praise in the Sangh Parivaar and the BJP circles. It is possible that Budhhadev got his information from his police sources. But it is well known that V.N. Roy, an ex-IPS officer, had written a theses under Sardar Patel Police Academy, Hyderabad in which he had written clearly to what extent the police in India are biased against the Muslims, and therefore the police sources are not always reliable. The role of the police and armed forces during the communal riots in Bhagalpur, Meerut (Malina), Gujarat, Mumbai, Malegaon, Kandhamal and very recently in Muzaffarnagar is well known. Volumes of reports and books are available on the atrocities of the armed forces in North- East and Kashmir. In west Bengal too, the blame game indulged in between police and the NIA on the Burdhman blast has provided opportunities to political parties (especially BJP and the TMC) to declare war against each other vitiating the political and social atmosphere in the state. The involvement of the ruling party in the Sharada Chit Fund scam is adding fuel to the fire of Burdhman blast which is becoming more and critical with each exposure of the involvement of TMC in the scam. It is beyond doubt that a bomb had blasted at the house of Haji Hasan Chowdhuri on 2nd October but by linking it with Madarsas and Bangladesh Mujahideens there is a possibility of deviation in the investigation from the real situation in West Bengal. It is well known that that there is a tradition of bomb making from 1970s in West Bengal and there is no monopoly of Muslims over it. Bomb –making has become a cottage industry in West Bengal and these bombs are used by political parties against each other. The investigation, so far, has focused on an alleged Jihadi plot in Burdhman, part of a larger cross-country terror campaign involving outfits such as Jamaat-ul- Mujahideen Bangladesh. The BJP, too, found a perfect pitch that involves Muslims, Madrasas, infiltration, Bangladesh and terror networks to attack the Trinamool Congress government and mount enough pressure for the Centre to step in and order an NIA investigation into the incident. But as The Sunday Express pieced together a picture of the region from talking to people and officials, it is clear that the theatre of this blast—Burdhman, Nadia, Birbhum and Murshidabad—has for long been one of the most volatile regions in the state, the site of pitched political turf wars and extortion rackets.This100-sq-km agrarian and semi-industrial belt, hemmed in by a number of Jharkhand districts, has a large number of crime syndicates that deal in sand quarrying, stone crushers and illegal mining. Over 80 per cent of the state’s recorded seizure of explosives comes from Burdhman and nearby districts. Of the 9,000 bombs seized in 2013 in the entire state, nearly7,000 were from the districts of Burdhman (1,485), Birbhum(2,910) and Murshidabad(2,910). Of the 2,285 kg of explosive substances seized from the state, 1,701 kg were from Burdhman and 143kg from Murshidabad. The explosives and bombs that are crudely put together here need not travel far either to find a market. Statistics show how Burdhman, Birbhum and Murshidabad account for a large number of cases in which explosives were used. For example, between January 2012 and June 2014. Burdhman recorded 357 incidents involving explosives. Birbhum had 264 such cases and Murshidabad 600. Besides, this region abuts Jangalemahal, the Maoist areas spread across Purulia, Bankura and West Midnapur wich witnessed large-scale violence from 2008 to 2012.During those troubled years, the region saw the use of improvised multi-dimensional mines, that were made out of huge iron pipes. The bomb-making units in Purbastali, Mongalkot, Raina and Ausgrm in Burdhman; Beledanga and Lalgola in Berhampore; Karimpur in Nadia; and villages in Birbhum cater to this ready market. Hence if there is a proper enquiry of the Kharagarh bomb blast it might lead to the root of the politics of violence in West Bengal. Pointing just towards the Madarsas and the jihadis is likely to mislead the investigation. The low credibility of most of the investigating agencies has been revealed in many of the previous incidents of terror in this country due to their biased approaches. Investigations into the incidents of Malegaon, Nanded, Samjhauta Express, Macca Masjid (Hyderabad), Ajmer, RSS headquarters (Nagpur) etc may be cited as examples . Media has not played any positive role either. It has not fulfilled the minimum discipline of investigative journalism, and has played the role of P.R.O of Investigative agencies (with some exceptions).Mostly the media carries the reports of investigative agencies as they do not take the trouble of cross-examination. This approach of the media not only influences common readers and viewers but even many of the secular, humanist, leftist, progressive elements. Hence it may be said that they are responsible for the increasing distance between Hindus and Muslims today as long as these agencies remain what they are, the superficial slogans of ‘Hindu-Muslim brotherhood’ does not make any difference. What is urgently required is fundamental reform of investigative agencies, security forces, media, administration, judiciary and political power in this country. A politics of communal riots has followed the Babri-Masjid-Ram Janmabhhomi movement. In these series of riots we have witnessed Bhagalpur riots of 1989, Mumbai riots of 1992-93 and the Gujarat riots of 2002, not to speak of many ‘small-scale’ riots in between. However the biggest Hindu-Muslim riots of post-independent riots were Bhagalpur, Mumbai and Gujarat in which even Dalits, Adivasis and women have participated. This politics of riots were followed by the so-called politics of terror in 2006 which continues till today. This has sharpened the process of polarization between Hindus and Muslims in this country. The incident at Burdhman makes sense when seen in the chain of these events. Why this deafening silence? We are surprised that no one from the civil society of West Bengal has yet visited the place of the blast in Burdhman. It is doubly surprising since West Bengal is a state with a tradition of human rights activities pioneered by Rabindranath Tagore, a state which has given birth to innumerable human rights organizations in the 1970s and 80s.Why these organizations have chosen to remain silent today? What has happened to the major opposition parties in West Bengal like the CPM and the Congress and the intelligentsia of Bengal who have played a positive role at different phases of social life in West Bengal like during Kanoria workers struggle, Singur and Nandigram movements? The intense polarization between Hindus and Muslims in West Bengal In the backdrop of Burdhman blast is a clear indication towards a frightening future. Even today the proportion of Muslims in West Bengal vis-a vis Hindus is much higher than in any other state. (Vide Sachchar Commission Report).Hence it is feared that this polarization may lead West Bengal towards a situation similar to that of 1946-47. Unfortunately the media is playing an extremely dangerous role in this episode facilitating speeding up of this process of polarization. A journalistic attempt is being made to bring in the scenario of Iraq’s ISIS and other Islamic movements to create a frightening picture of “Islamic jihad” in West Bengal. This is not only affecting the minds of the common masses, the viewers and readers of the media, but even the ‘secular, radical” people in the state. Unfortunately there is no Forum to intervene and halt this process of polarization and this may worsen the situation. Hence as conscientious citizens we cannot be mere silent spectators of this worsening situation. All those who dream of a society based on justice and equality, must intervene now before it is too late. The West Bengal government as well as other political parties in the state, in an attempt to get political mileage out of the incident is further aggravating the situation in their own ways without realizing the dangerous consequences of their activities. In comparison to 1946-47 there has been a tremendous technological development in every field but ironically this has also provided more destructive means for communal violence. Similarly, if on one hand there is an unimaginable progress in the field of communication compared to 1946-47, the society today is much more divided and the relations between Hindus and Muslims have become much worse than before. It is a situation of a ‘nation within a nation’. The minds of both the communities are today full of misunderstanding and bitterness about each other. In circumstances like this, there has to be concerted efforts to bring the two communities together in order to remove their misunderstandings towards each other. However this cannot be achieved through the approach of law and order alone. This cannot also be done by the people in power alone although they also have a role to play. The responsibility for this lies squarely upon the shoulders of all peace-loving citizens who dream of a equality based sane society and it is they who must make an all-out effort to free our society from this nightmare of communal polarization. It is only by collective efforts by writers, artists, intellectuals, social activists and all other conscious, active citizens, that we may overcome this forthcoming communal crisis which is looming large over the state of West Bengal as well as the entire country. DR.SURESH KHAIRNAR, (CONVENOR ALL INDIA SCULAR FORUM,
Posted on: Tue, 30 Dec 2014 15:12:57 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015