Caught in a phalanx

Uday Basu
The Statesman, 9 October

‘Ah, me! It’s a wicked world and when a clever man turns his brains to crime, it is the worst of all.”

Sherlock Holmes conjured up such a dark vision of the world when he was confronted with an inveterate criminal who was planning to snuff out the life of one of his step-daughters after murdering her twin sister in a blood-curdling manner for grabbing money.

But we don’t need a Sherlock Holmes to pinpoint who the “clever man” is and how he turned his brains to crime to make the “wicked” world the “worst of all” for the suave, young Rizwan-ur-Rehman whose only “crime” was to forget his socio-economic standing because he believed love doesn’t admit such artificial barriers.

Since he was a student of English literature, it’s tempting to conjecture whether he had read Browning’s famous lines: “It’s better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.”

And this brings us to another connoisseur of literature who also happens to be the state’s chief minister who has been crying himself hoarse about the need for the administration he presides to be “sensitive, humane and prompt” in dealing with the people’s problems. His police behaved exactly the way their minister-cum-chief minister had asked them not to in Rizwan’s case, except that they were frightfully prompt. But their swiftness was not to give protection to the hapless youth, but to hound and harry him so that he ended up in a lump of lifeless flesh.

Ironically, it was the same Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee, who as home minister in the Jyoti Basu Cabinet, took only a few days to show the then Police Commissioner, BK Saha, the door. Saha’s misdemeanour was that a criminal, a terror in the area surrounding the Keorotola crematorium repeatedly called out his name in a drunken state when he wasn’t allowed to be inside the crematorium to be a witness along with the city’s cultural icons the cremation of Satyajit Ray.

This reporter, who was covering the funeral, can distinctly remember the words of the criminal: “How is it that I can’t be let in? The whole day I have worked to ensure all’s well here. Where’s Saha-da (the CP)?”

The then deputy commissioner (headquarters) swung into action trying to push him away, but the drunken man had such strength that he knocked him out of his way. A whole police contingent went to the DC’s rescue as bricks were showered on one side of the crematorium.

When the CP was asked within minutes that the criminal had taken his name, he flatly denied he knew him. Mr Bhattacharjee, who was present at the funeral, requested the media at the crematorium not to go overboard with the ugly incident as international attention had been drawn to Ray’s last journey, but he assured them that he would act appropriately in a few days. He kept his word and Saha was unceremoniously removed from his post.

But much water has flown down the Ganga since then. Mr Bhattacharjee is now the chief minister and the CP of the day, unlike the CP of the other day, is his protege, whom he declared to be his candidate for the election to the CAB president’s post, though he lost.

In a strange twist of coincidence the CAB turns out to be Mr Bhattacharjee’s nemesis. When the chief minister announced that the CP, Mr Prasun Mukherjee, was his candidate for the CAB top post, he was at the apogee of his political success. The CPI-M had been returned to power with a thumping majority, decimating the Opposition and there was a chorus of praise from his shameless sycophants who attributed the electoral victory to Mr Bhattacharjee alone.

And this got into his head so much that he thundered that the defeat of his candidate in the CAB elections meant the “triumph of evil over good” and wanted the democratically elected president to immediately step down.

Such a demand was so patently preposterous that Mr Jyoti Basu wondered “how an elected person can be asked to leave office like that.”

Then followed in a bewildering and breathtaking succession a series of cataclysmic events that made it crystal clear that Mr Bhattacharjee had lost his touch with the common man, the ill-fed, ill-clad, tiller who often cannot live from hand to mouth.

Singur and Nandigram proved beyond doubt that Mr Bhattacharjee’s heart bleeds more for the rich, the scheming, cunning operators than for the naive, innocent men, women and children. Police brutality perpetrated on these villagers is now history or rather part of a new folklore of resistance against Marxist sham.

At this stage, a new plot seems to have been hatched by some of the dramatis personae of the CAB! An assistant secretary, the brother of a high profile cricketer and himself no mean cricketer, “introduces” Mr Ashok Todi to the CP, who doubles as CAB president, to “help” him out in his “personal, family problem” about which he claimed to have no inkling.

Not even a child would accept the CP’s claim that this was how he came to know Mr Todi. That’s indeed bad cricket and worse criminal jurisprudence!

The Marxists have a proven record of interfering with the personal lives of the state’s people, especially in their conjugal life. The CPI-M women’s wing and local committees have all these years played a dubious role in “settling” marital disputes. The party’s might has been in evidence in forcing more often than not young men and their relatives to accept a solution that they hated most fearing reprisals from the cadres.

But when the police replace CPI-M satraps, the result can be infinitely more horrendous because they have the state machinery, the third degree and all other tricks of their trade at their disposal. And when money and political clout join the police, it’s a recipe for disaster.

Rizwan got himself into a phalanx that was in a way similar to the one that the ill-fated Abhimanyu of the Mahabharata confronted. How could he come out of it alive?

(The author is a Special Representative of The Statesman, Kolkata)