UPA stops BSF troops from firing weapons, puts lives at risk – II

From

Bold and Right
Wednesday, August 21, 2013
By Priyadarshi Dutta on Aug 20, 2013 

This is the concluding part of a two-part article. You can read the first part here.

By muzzling the Border Security Force’s (BSF) firepower on India-Bangladesh border, the UPA Government has left frontier citizens to the wolves. The cattle traffickers, in collusion with raiders from across the border are regularly preying upon innocents on the West Bengal border. A two-part story carried by the Bengali daily Anandabazar Patrika on June 21 and June 23, 2013 would be illustrative.

On the midnight of Wednesday, June 19, a group of hoodlums broke into a house in a Kaijuri village under Swarupnagar PS, District North 24 Parganas. Their evil intention was to ravish a woman in that house. Her husband, who worked Kolkata was not present. But facing resistance from her, the hooligans first hit the woman on her head and arms with a bamboo pole. As the women fell screaming on the floor, they stabbed at her private parts. She had to be hospitalised in Bashirhat SD Hospital. At the very same hour, another housewife aged around 27 in the same village was being abducted by the raiders from across the border. She had presumably gone to defecate in the open fields. When the villagers gave a spirited chase to her abductors, they fled the spot dumping her in a millpond.

These terrifying incidents are by no means isolated. They have become regular features in border areas after the BSF had been denied firepower. The assailants, part of the cattle traffickers’ syndicate, are armed with choppers, spears and shotguns. They are literally running riot in the eastern periphery of West Bengal. Even the BSF camps have been attacked and set on fire. Bina Mondal, the Trinamool Congress MLA from Swarupnagar, describes the situation as worrisome. She promised to take up the issue with Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee for curbing the menace of cattle traffickers and reactivating the BSF. But it seems unlikely that the Chief Minister, besotted with minority politics, would take corrective measures. Her MPs in Parliament are never seen raising any issue that affects the security of the frontier State.

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As per the report, 10 families have left Kaijuri. They are apparently all Hindus and mostly SCs (Swarupnagar is an SC-reserved constituency). Those who have left include people like Dibakar Sarkar, Khagen Gayen and Ramesh Mondal. They had lost the nerve to hang on to the hostile zone by their teeth. A 72-year-old lady Subala Gayen told Anandabazar Patrika that assaults on women have become commonplace. Very few registered an FIR — a situation not uncommon in West Bengal when culprits happen to be Muslim. Few would dare venture out after sunset. An officer in Swarupnagar Police Station admitted that an exodus was taking place in border areas due to raids from across the Bangladesh border. The BSF personnel pleaded helplessness despite having a presence in Kaijuri.

The most important thing about the two-part story is it being actually printed. No Bengali mainstream newspaper would publish anytime remotely related to communal conflict or infiltration. No Bengali television channel, of whatever political orientation, would show anything remotely connected with communal conflicts. Thus while the 2010-Deganga riots (North 24 Parganas) were reported by national dailies published from Kolkata, Bengali newspapers skipped it altogether. It was the same in February this year when violence erupted in the South 24 Parganas following the death of a cleric Ruhul Kuddus. For the Bengali media these were non-events.

Thus, when a mainstream Bengali newspaper takes cognisance of the Kaijuri affairs it means one can no longer ignore the elephant in the drawing room.

http://m.niticentral.com/2013/08/20/upa-stops-bsf-troops-from-firing-weapons-puts-lives-at-risk-ii-121425.html