Even a year ago, Ranen Burman a lawyer’s clerk in Agartala was self-reliant, earning a decent living to maintain his family of 90-year-old father, wife and two sons. Now he is nobody. Running from pillar to post for a trifle engagement as his present address keeps on changing from the house of one party comrade to the other.
Burman has been an active CPI(M) member for decades. A local committee member — who could assemble five thousand people in one call — has been hounded out by the members of the new BJP Government. “I have no idea where my children and family are. Someone told me they are safe as my wife has decided to pick up the saffron flag for her dear life,” he says adding “the condition of the Leftists in Bengal is still better than those in Tripura.”
Bidhan Majumdar, another CPI(M) worker comes from West Tripura and has taken shelter in a relative’s house. “I have no other place to go. I don’t know why those people who were never harmed by me suddenly went berserk. I was eating rice when some of them barged in, kicked my plate aside spilled all the food and rained lathis on me until I fainted. “When I came round I found my entire house ransacked. Not a single penny was left. My wife escaped the attack as she was with her parents. Then next day they returned and asked me to quit CPI(M) or face bullet.” But he chose a third option, and fled Tripura.
“Police complaint would only invite more jeopardy and perhaps the complainant would be abducted and lost forever in a dead night’s darkness. Many of my comrades have already disappeared. I don’t know about their fate. So I preferred to come to Kolkata,” says Bikram Deb a farmer in East Tripura. He is not an active party member but is an avid Left Front supporter.
“I have seen the Governments of Nripen Chakrabarty, Sudhir Majumdar and Manik Sarkar. This was the best Government. During Majumdar people were tortured too but not like this. This is different.”
It seems every time you are being watched by someone. Your daily activities are reported up there and you are either troubled by the police or your house is ransacked and you are made to pay fine for supporting rival outfits.” Deb a 65-year-old retired government official is planning to shift to Bengal permanently.
At Khowai a school teacher was badly beaten up and burnt with cigarettes as he refused to subscribe to the saffron ideology. The said teacher who is living in his sister’s house at Behala in Kolkata complains “what TMC has done in Bengal the BJP has done hundred times more. Thousands of Left cadres are facing false cases against their names. Hundreds of party offices have either been closed, torched or captured. Such is the condition that a majority of us are not allowed to vote.”Says Ashis Molla another private teacher, he was “insulted, beaten, burnt and tortured though I was not a direct CPI(M) member. I only believed in Marxist ideology. When I protested my house was ransacked in the night.” As the torture increased by the day “I had to close my private tuition bureau to come to my relatives to Khardaha (in North 24 Parganas).” He could not believe his eyes when “the young boys whom I had taught were kicking me in my back and calling me names.”
At a time when the BJP national leaders had been literally ploughing Bengal crying hoarse against alleged Trinamool Congress violence perpetrated against their “pracharaks,” the Leftist comrades who have fled Tripura in hordes either to Bengal and other States struggle to find to name the “kind of fascism running in Tripura.” (All name changed for security reasons).