Convention against State Terroism, Siliguri, 6 December 2009

Provisional Central Committee

Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist)

North Bengal Regional Committee

Address for Communication

C/o Vaskar Nandy, Kadamtala, Jalpaiguri

18 October 2009

Dear Friend,

The situation in Lalgarh and the vast hill-forest-plateau extending through Jharkhand, Orissa, Chhattisgarh, Andhra, Madhya Pradesh and Maharashtra of which Lalgarh is a part, both geographically and culturally, is very grave and extremely precarious in terms of the lives and livelihoods of the indigenous population there.

Governments of all parliamentary hues who rule or have ruled in this region are all champions and executants of the Washington-dictated and corporate-driven policy of displacing lakhs of people from their lands and villages and destroying the environment through extractive and polluting industries. This region has also borne the main brunt of the withdrawal of social safety nets, causing starvation and malnutrition deaths a common occurrence.

The misery and suffering of the affected people, mostly of the first nations of India known via imperialist anthropology as tribals, is a human rights story comparable to the internal history of such apartheid states as Boer-ruled South Africa or Israel. But our corporate media, fawning over the corporate growth story, have naturally missed the real story, more or less.

It is a story of extreme misery and starvation that must be told over and over again. But it is also a story of militant resistance that defies Heaven. That story has also been submerged in the endless litany generated by the pincer attack on this resistance by two forces: on the one side, the brutal attack on that resistance by the central and state governments and on the other side, the retaliatory, ultimately counterproductive, and often pointless attack by the Maoists on the state forces and any one among the people who disagree with them.

The Maoist activities have been used by central and state governments as the justification of its suppression of the people’s movements not only in the hill-forest-plateau area but throughout India. Anyone opposed to state terrorism, the main danger today, and anyone sympathetic to the people’s cause are arrested and/or threatened by preventive detention and torture most foul. Countless women have been arrested as armed Maoists for possessing such lethal weapons as brooms, as admitted by the police in a magistrate’s court in West Bengal.

Now it is not just a question of suppressing the masses in the region, but the suppression of all solidarity with those masses. Leading intellectuals, artists and activists are being tarred with the Maoist brush and threatened with preventive detention. It is almost the second coming of the Emergency. But this time the whole political class of official India remains united, so there is no need for a formal declaration.

It is now therefore important that all democrats and all those who want peace with social justice to unite and oppose state terrorism and its Maoist counterpart. It is time to roll back the black laws now in force and it is time to unite in struggle.

We invite you to come together at a convention (not a party meeting) that is being organised in Siliguri, West Bengal on 6 December 2009 at the Bagha Jatin Hall (beside Siliguri College) at 11 a.m. so that all opinions are heard and a broad based movement in a consensual direction can be launched fr4om here in North Bengal and move on towards wider unity throughout the state and country.

Yours sincerely.

Tapan Nag