Four villagers blinded for stealing paddy in West Bengal

Are policemen alone capable of such gruesome atrocities as gouging eyes and putting acid in the sockets? If the Bhagalpur incidents (India Today, December 16-31) created such an impression, evidence came in from neighbouring West Bengal's Malda district last month to suggest that there is a horrendous amount of violence pent up in society. And that the men in uniform are perhaps not the only guilty ones.Four villagers of Sehra in Malda district of West Bengal were blinded on October 21 not by policemen but angry villagers, many of whom knew the victims for years, on a charge as tenuous as having stolen paddy from the fields. The incident would perhaps have never come to light had public opinion not been enraged by the Bhagalpur incidents. Though the case was recorded at Harischandrapur police station on October 22, the state Government took notice of it only in the third week of December, and that too after it was raised in the Parliament. This fact alone gives a measure of the callousness and dehumanisation that have set in in the bureaucracy.Jamaluddin, Yakub Ali, Abdul Mia and Shahabul Mia, four Muslim share-croppers, stole across to adjoining Manoharpur village under cover of night and allegedly removed paddy from the stacks. However, some of the villagers, who were catching frogs - a lucrative export item - at night, raised an alarm, and the culprits were apprehended. They were beaten up, and then dragged to an open field where their eyes were lanced and extracts of akanda, a herb, were poured in to produce an agonising irritationVictims (from left) Jamaluddin, Abdul, Yakub and Shahabul await check-up: Pent up violenceThe blinded foursome were taken to Harischandrapur police station the same night and were put in the lock-up. The officer-in-charge of the police station, who has since been transferred, will perhaps never explain why he did not take immediate action. No cognisance was apparently taken of the blinding. The four men were left groaning in pain for three days in the police lock-up. As in the case of the Bhagalpur victims, enquiry started only after Qayum Bibi, wife of Jamaluddin, filed a petition, before the court of the sub-divisional judicial magistrate.She gave a gruesome account of how the men were dragged to an open field at Alinagar on the mere suspicion that they had stolen paddy, how a kangaroo court of villagers decreed that they be blinded, and finally implemented it. She named 53 persons involved in the crime. The district police however did not arrest any of them till the uproar in Parliament put the West Bengal Chief Minister, Jyoti Basu, on the defensive.Ananda Bazar Patrika, the Bengali daily with a gigantic circulation of 4.1 lakh, no admirer of the ruling Left Front, sent a journalist to the spot who reported that neither the blinded men nor their tormentors belonged to any political party. In fact, the locality had returned Congress(I) candidates in the 1978 panchayat elections. The area is a part of the parliamentary constituency of the powerful Union Energy Minister. A.B.A. Ghani Khan Chaudhury.However, the Congress(I), pushed to the wall by the Bhagalpur disclosures, clutched at the Malda incident and claimed it was a political vendetta. Even Basu over-reacted when he began harping on the theme that the Marxists were not involved in this crime, soft pedalling the embarrassing fact that the district administration under his government had taken no notice of the Windings till it hit the headlines. Blinded Abdul Mia with wife and baby: A measure of bureaucratic callousnessLater on, Indra Shekhar Roy, Calcutta's leading ophthalmologist, examined the victims and said that their eyesight could be restored with surgery and medical care. The state government is trying to salve its conscience by arranging for their treatment, though Basu made it clear that no compensation could be paid to them.Last fortnight, nine of the 53 accused were arrested. "Five of them are Congress(I) supporters," Jiban Mitra, the Marxist MLA from Harischandrapur, took pains to point out to every reporter who spoke to him. But the state Government stuck to the view that the incident was "non-political in nature."The moral of the story is that human cruelty disturbs politicians only when it is perpetrated by political groups. The other moral is that despite the facade of Marxist orderliness, the same law of the jungle rules in West Bengal's villages as in the rest of the country.Published By: AtMigration Published On: Nov 29, 2013 15:24 IST--- ENDS ---

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Four villagers blinded for stealing paddy in West Bengal

Four villagers of Sehra in Malda district of West Bengal were blinded on October 21 not by policemen but angry villagers, many of whom knew the victims for years, on a charge as tenuous as having stolen paddy from the fields.

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