D N Singh/Zee News
Kandhamal, Orissa Sept 16: In the early hours of Tuesday an angry mob of 500 attacked a police in a place called Gochhaguda, in Orissa’s Kandhamal district, and set the police station and a police van on fire. One police jawan from the State Armed Police was killed in the arson, while about 10 personnel are also reported to be missing from a police camp there.
The incident took place at about 4.00 am and the security men deployed at the police station were practically caught unaware and perhaps had no time to defend themselves.
On September 13, in a similar incident in the Tumudiband area four villagers fell to CRPF bullets when the latter was forced to open fire in response to a sudden attack from the villagers. First, it was the villagers who fired at the CRPF personnel on guard and injured one jawan seriously.
These two incidents have negated the official claims about normalcy being restored in the riot-hit district. The situation, in fact, is still very tense and over 40 companies of Central forces, deployed in various locations in the district, are having a tough time to keep the vigil as incidents normally take place in a sporadic manner in different corners.
Smouldering Disquiet
Although the frenzied backlash has stopped for sometime, but normalcy seems far off in the riot-hit district. More than 15,000 people are in the relief camps licking their wounds and the security forces lay siege to half of the district, but the recent firings in the Tumudiband area show no sign of any let up so soon. The incident of last Saturday was like a flame out of the smouldering rubble.
Meanwhile, a lot of water has flowed down the drain. The venom of the divisive uprise has spilled out to other areas beyond Kandhamal. Be it an orchestrated campaign or an unwittingly committed error, but the message has gone all across the world that the people of a certain religion are, as if, being mayhemed by trigger-happy fanatics. Even the role of a certain section of the media was not free of the ingredients flaring up the emotions. Ironically, many of the leaders, be it from the Christian or from the Hindu camps, have been making inflammatory statements from the state capital without going to Kandhamal for once.
Even the recent visit of Union Home Minister Shivraj Patil to the riot-hit district had raised many eyebrows because the minister could not touch the rock-bottom of the issue by just visiting a relief camp at a place called G Uadaygiri. He only gently managed to dish out tonnes of sermons through the media with a diagnostic dexterity. On the other hand the state's Home Minister-cum-Chief Minister, Naveen Patnaik keeps shuffling his rhetoric with a load of statistical sophistry and maintains that the situation in Kandhamal is fast limping back to normalcy.
The incident that took place last Saturday, i.e. on September 13, near Tumudiband can not be wished away as a chain of a series of incidents after the murder of Lakshamanand.
It was a well calculated design to frustrate the security network there. It cannot be a mere act of a handful of fundamental village hooligans to dare the CRPF in broad daylight. Many things would come to light once the indentification of the three people killed in the exchange of fire-arms is established. And if that really happens!
Who were the real men behind the firing and from where they procured the arms to match the CRPF armoury and expertise? Or was it an accidental incident that provoked the CRPF to go on a vengeful retaliation by mistake? So far the death of four villagers has been confirmed, and it is suspected that about 12 people in total had fallen to CRPF bullets and more lashes are yet to be recovered.
Two days after the killings at the Jalaspeta Ashram the police had claimed that it had apprehended four youth as suspects but today, nobody knows what happened to them. Where are they? Likewise, many more were arrested soon after the backlash but there is no concrete information about the outcome of such arrests. The top police brass, clearly suffering from 'daddy knows the best' syndrome, are too tight-lipped to share anything with the media and in them the defeatist impulse is quite evident.