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Goghat (Bengal): Chaina Bag is the wife of Sahadeb Bag, who used to be a farm labourer in Kota village of Bengal’s Hooghly district. The village is under the jurisdiction fo the Goghat Police Station. Days after the Bharatiya Janata Party came to power in Bengal, Sahadeb was found dead in a drain. His family say he was beaten to death with clubs. Chaina and other locals blame BJP-backed men.

The reason, said Chaina, was that she is a Trinamool Congress-supported member of the Nakunda Gram Panchayat and Sahadeb had participated in TMC rallies.

Sahadeb Bag. Photo: By arrangement.

Sahadeb, says his widow, had encouraged her to contest the panchayat polls in 2023, despite the local BJP’s exhortations. “His greatest fault was his selfless service to the people of the village. From arranging medical help for the sick to working for poor families without taking any money, he would spend his days helping anyone in need, irrespective of political affiliation,” Chaina tells The Wire.

In the run-up to the recent Bengal assembly elections, the two ruling parties at the state and central levels – the TMC and BJP – repeatedly exchanged threats during their election campaigns, especially in rural Bengal.

Each warned the other of dire consequences after the declaration of results. Anxieties also peaked as many from the village found themselves among the 27 lakh whose names were removed from the voters’ list following the Special Intensive Revision or SIR process as “logical discrepancies.”

Speeches by BJP leaders, including Union home minister Amit Shah, indicating that those whose names were out of the list would eventually be considered non-citizens added to concerns.

Although polling on April 23 and April 29 passed without any major untoward incidents, violence erupted across different parts of the state from the evening of May 4, immediately after the election results were announced. Following BJP’s victory, those claiming to be BJP supporters have begun taking over several TMC offices across different parts of the state in a manner similar to how TMC took over the Left’s offices when it came to power in 2011. BJP supporters also carried out attacks on multiple Left offices. Raising slogans of “Jai Shri Ram,” BJP supporters vandalised statues of Lenin in Jiaganj of Murshidabad and in Garbeta of Medinipur. In Bongaon of  North 24 Parganas, BJP supporters also demolished a memorial commemorating the Indigo revolt.

The TMC party office in Kota village has now been occupied by BJP. Photo: Madhu Sudan Chatterjee.

At the same time, bulldozers are also being used in several parts of Kolkata to demolish roadside shops and tenements greenlit by the TMC government. Muslim communities also faced repeated threats and attacks in different........

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