The ruling interests in India's north-eastern state of Bihar sent their killer gang, the Ranvir Sena, on a new rampage on June 16, which resulted in the massacre of nearly 50 villagers from Miyanpur in the Aurangabad district in central Bihar.
Ranvir Sena, backed by sections of the landlords and the Hindu fundamentalist Bharatiya Janata Party, which heads the 24-party Indian government, has regularly conducted killing sprees to ensure that its masters' will prevails over the impoverished rural population.
According to the Communist Party of India-Marxist Leninist (Liberation) (CPI-ML), Ranvir Sena has perpetrated 85 incidents of killings since 1995 in Bihar alone, including 20 massacres in which more than 300 people were butchered. The police generally turned a blind eye to these incidents and the central government forces "simply collaborated with Ranvir Sena in the name of crushing Left extremism", said the CPI-ML.
In the wake of the June 16 massacre, Ranvir Sena threatened to do it again. Its widely publicised statement said: "No administration can stop this killing spree, no power on earth can save Bihar from the destiny of shedding tears over heaps of countless corpses".
Deeply outraged, six left parties — including the Communist Party of India, CPI-ML, Forward Bloc, Socialist Unity Centre of India, MCPI — called a general strike in Bihar on June 21 "to give political expression to people's wrath against Ranvir Sena and demand the resignation of Rabri Devi [Bihar's chief minister]". On that day, rail tracks and roads were blocked, and educational institutions and trading outlets were closed in most parts of the state.
Many activities ground to a halt, except the spirited marches and mass meetings of strike participants. Despite the arrest of more than 8000 activists, the organisers declared the action a "resounding success".
Instead of taking action against Ranvir Sena, the Bihar government, led by Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD), announced the formation of yet another "crack force" to deal with the "Naxalites" (a wing of India's revolutionary left, including the CPI-ML, which organises the rural poor and agricultural labourers). The rulers have a long record of terrorising the rural poor for "harbouring" Naxalites.
Partly to counter this repression, the CPI-ML launched a "Stop the massacre" campaign on July 1 to heighten mass consciousness about "the dubious role of the ruling parties, in government as well as in opposition" in relation to terror campaigns. The Congress party controls other killer gangs.
From July 1 to 7, CPI-ML teams swept through the state holding public gatherings, street corner meetings and other mobilising activities wherever they went. The mobilisations will escalate to a gherao (siege) of the state assembly on July 11 "to demand stern actions against Ranvir Sena, to put a stop to massacres and ensure the protection of the rural poor". Some 20,000 posters have been pasted up and 25,000 pamphlets and 150,000 leaflets distributed for the July 11 action.
Until recently, CPI-ML supporters, mostly from the lowest castes, had been the main targets of Ranvir Sena's attacks. According to the June 21 issue of the party's weekly newsletter, ML Update, the RJD head, Laloo Prasad Yadav (until recently Bihar's chief minister for many years), had been "busy legitimising the [Ranvir] Sena as a 'peasant reaction' to the CPI-ML" and "continued to ask for more central forces to combat 'leftwing extremism', intensifying repression on the CPI(ML)".
However, the victims of the June 16 attack were mostly from the poor and lower-middle peasants of Yadav caste, the RJD's main social base. Now Laloo says the June 16 attack has set off a "political battle".
Ranvir Sena's brutality was breathtaking. Based on survivors' accounts, the CPI-ML investigators reported, "The professional killers went about their job in a very leisurely manner singing songs and shouting slogans as they showered bullets, occasionally blowing whistles and occasionally stopping for even half an hour to lure people who might have somehow managed to hide in some relatively safer corner to step out.
"After the massacre they [the killers] dispersed in groups of 10 each to Bhumihar
[an upper caste] -dominated nearby villages [Bhumihar is an upper caste] ... All this was known to the police but they did not raid these villages."
BY EVA CHENG
[To subscribe to ML Update and the CPI-ML's monthly journal, Liberation, email <cpimllib@bol.net.in>.]