Feared being killed in encounter, says arrested Cong candidate for Nandigram

Kolkata: “I was blindfolded immediately after being arrested and made to get on a police vehicle,” Milan Pradhan said as he came out of a jail in Haldia in the Purba Medinipur district of West Bengal on Wednesday. “I feared that they were taking me somewhere to stage an encounter and kill me.”Pradhan is the Congress’s candidate for the bye-election in the state’s Nandigram assembly constituency. Just a few hours after the Mamata Banerjee faction of the Trinamool Congress extended support to him, the 57-year-old was arrested by police from a hotel in Chandipur in Nandigram on September 18. A local court sent him to judicial custody in separate cases till October 3 and 5 – dashing his hopes of personally campaigning for the October 6 bypoll. The Calcutta High Court, however, granted him interim bail on Tuesday and he walked out of jail on Wednesday.The state police, meanwhile, detained Sukriti Ranjan Biswas and Manik Fakir, both well-known authors and socio-political activists, in Nandigram on Wednesday while they were on their way to campaign for Pradhan. The Congress protested the detentions, alleging that police were preventing its campaigners from reaching Nandigram.“I was first taken to a hotel where senior police officers were waiting in a room,” Pradhan told journalists, as Subhankar Sarkar, president of the West Bengal Pradesh Congress Committee, and other party leaders welcomed him at the prison gate. “I was told that if I withdraw my candidature for the bypoll, not only would the cases against me be dropped and I would be released, but I would also get whatever I could ask for.”He said that he had declined the offer despite being pressed by top cops not to contest against the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party’s candidate Hasi Rani Rath.Rath is the mother of Chandranath Rath, the slain personal assistant of Chief Minister Suvendu Adhikari. Rath was murdered near Madhyamgram on the outskirts of Kolkata on May 6, two days after the BJP had a landslide victory in the assembly elections in the state and three days before Adhikari took the helm of the state government, succeeding his former mentor Mamata.“I was then taken to the police station and presented before the court the next day,” said Pradhan, before paying obeisance at a local temple and beginning his campaign on Wednesday. “I don’t have much time left to campaign, but I would try to reach out to as many people as possible across Nandigram.”Pradhan, however, faces an uphill task, as the Congress has long been on the margins of West Bengal’s political landscape. With her own party routed in the state assembly elections earlier this year and subsequently facing rebellions within its ranks followed by a split, Mamata’s support for Pradhan in Nandigram, once a springboard for her rise to power, might not make any significant difference on the ground.Mamata’s aide-turned-adversary Adhikari turned Nandigram saffron ever since he quit the TMC and joined the BJP in December 2020. He had contested against Mamata as the BJP’s candidate in the March-April 2021 elections and beat her by a narrow margin. He won again in the assembly elections this year, beating the TMC candidate, Pabitra Kar, by more than 9500 votes. He, however, chose to retain his other constituency, Bhabanipur in Kolkata, where he again beat his former mentor by more than 15000 votes, and vacated Nandigram, necessitating the bye-elections.Calcutta High Court grants interim bail to Congress candidate for Nandigram bypoll in 6 criminal casesPradhan was one of the front-line activists of the Bhumi Uchchhed Pratirodh Committee, launched by the farmers of Nandigram to resist the proposed acquisition of about 10,000 acres of land by the then Left Front government of the state for the Salim Group of Indonesia to set up a hub of chemical industries. The agitation had led to violence, and at least 14 people had been killed in police firing during a crackdown on the protesters on March 14, 2007. Mamata, along with other social organisations, had played a key role in the protest, which had helped the TMC replace the Left Front in power in 2011 and had catapulted her to the office of the chief minister.Adhikari had then been a close aide of Mamata and had played a key role in the TMC’s rise during and after the 2007-2008 agitation in Nandigram.Pradhan’s return to Nandigram’s political arena carries a striking twist of history. The cases in which he was arrested stem from the very agitation that helped propel the TMC to power. With Adhikari being a heavyweight in the ruling TMC then, the cases had been withdrawn after the change of regime in 2011. But the Calcutta High Court subsequently set aside the withdrawal and ordered the cases to be revived. So, nearly two decades after the agitation in Nandigram, with Adhikari leading the state’s BJP government now, the police arrested Pradhan in connection with six cases, which were registered during or after the stir by the farmers in 2006 and 2007.When Pradhan was incarcerated, his wife, Arpita, stepped into the political arena, campaigning across Nandigram in his absence and questioning the timing of his arrest in cases nearly two decades old. The couple’s teenage daughter, Arunima, also appealed online to voters to support her father. She questioned why her father had been arrested for his role in the agitation while others who had participated in it remained free.Pradhan on Wednesday questioned why Adhikari, after taking over as the chief minister, had resigned as a legislator of Nandigram and retained the Bhabanipur seat in Kolkata. He also questioned why the BJP had fielded Hasi Rani Rath and not a local resident as its candidate for the bypoll in Nandigram. He alleged that Adhikari often bragged about development works in the constituency, but, in reality, only a few concrete roads had been built. “People of Nandigram will protest lack of development by voting for me,” he said.Adhikari has already vowed to ensure the BJP candidate’s victory with a huge margin. The chief minister is also likely to address two election rallies in Nandigram on October 2 and 4.

Source: Deccan Herald