Suvendu Adhikari’s aide shot dead: Tracing Bengal’s ugly history of political violence

West Bengal has been rocked by post-poll violence again. Senior Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leader Suvendu Adhikari’s executive assistant, Chandranath Rath, was shot dead while he was on his way home to Barasat last night.

The assailants on a bike reportedly pulled up next to the co-passenger seat of the car where Rath was sitting and fired multiple rounds through the window. Three bullets hit Adhikari’s close aide, who died from the wounds. The driver of the Scorpio SUV was also injured.

Political violence has become endemic in Bengal. From the brutal suppression of the Naxalbari uprising to poll violence, here’s how mayhem has gripped the eastern state.

Bengal’s violent history

Political violence has been entrenched in Bengal’s history since the 1960s.

The Maoist movement in India traces its origin to the 1967-1971 Naxalbari uprising, an armed peasant revolt led by a splintered group of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) in West Bengal.

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In May 1967, around 150 peasants, carrying sickles, daggers and spears, attacked the properties of landlords, seized maunds of paddy and captured land. The Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) engaged in the “annihilation of class enemies”, killing land owners and those they suspected of siding with the regime, noted Hindustan Times (HT).

Between 1972 and 1977, the Congress-led government's crackdown on the Naxalites put an end to the original uprising, with many leaders captured or killed by security forces.

Other leaders surrendered or went underground.

Speaking to DW, Niranjan Sahoo, a senior fellow with the Observer Research Foundation (ORF) think tank, said that West Bengal is especially vulnerable to "culture of political violence" due to the "political history of social upheaval and violent mobilisation for political control."

Poll violence in Bengal: From Left to TMC rule

Poll violence in Bengal goes back to the 1950s, with the ruling party often accused of oppressing the opposition parties.

The eastern state’s cadre-based politics has been blamed for electoral violence. During the 34-year Left Front rule in Bengal, local party networks deepened across rural areas, often acting as “parallel power structures backed by muscle,” Priyal Bhardwaj, general secretary, BJP Mahila Morcha, wrote in an opinion piece for Indian Express.

“These networks exercised influence over local administration, welfare distribution, and electoral participation. The politicisation of institutions became deeply entrenched,” the article read.

Critics say bloodshed became a mainstay of Bengal politics during the Left rule from 1977 to 2011. However, the violence did not abate even after Mamata Banerjee’s Trinamool Congress (TMC) came to power.

Zaad Mahmood, professor of political science at Kolkata’s Presidency University, told The Telegraph that the political violence can be attributed to the characteristic Bengali revolutionary sentiment, a community that celebrates its rebel leaders such as Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose and ‘Master da’ Surya Sen.

“In Bengal, violence is justified if it is for a noble cause”, he said.

In 2011, Banerjee’s TMC ended the decades-long rule of the Left in Bengal. A major incident that helped the party's rise to power was the lynching of 11 landless Muslim labourers by CPI(M) cadres at Suchpur village in Birbhum district on July 27, 2000, during the Jyoti Basu-led government.

After Buddhadeb Bhattacharya came to power in November 2000, there was peace in the state, initially. However, violent clashes erupted between CPI(M) and TMC workers at Nandigram in East Midnapore over the government’s plan to set up new industries and the issue of land acquisition.

On March 14, 2007, 14 protesters in Nandigram died in police firing when they put up a blockade to prevent the building of a chemical hub.

Even though the project was later abandoned, more than 50 people were killed over two years.

During the 2008 panchayat polls, over 20 casualties were reported as the TMC challenged the Left's rural hold.

A year later, many local CPI(M) leaders were killed during the Lok Sabha elections in Bengal. The house of the party’s Lalgarh zonal committee secretary, Anuj Pandey, was also demolished by a mob.

Left Front chairman Biman Bose confirmed to The Hindu that 269 supporters were killed since the 2009 Lok Sabha polls up until the mid-2010 period.

Before Banerjee came to power in 2011, she promised: “We will bring in the politics of change, not vengeance.”

However, political violence and turf wars continued during the 15-year TMC rule.

In February 2012, TMC workers were accused of brutally killing former CPI(M) MLA Pradip Tah and Burdwan district leader Kamal Gayen.

As many as 56 CPI(M) leaders and workers lost their lives in just nine months after the 2011 Assembly polls.

Several cases of sexual assault and intimidation were also reported.

Experts say that the winning party is often behind post-poll violence, while pre-poll violence could be sparked by the ruling as well as Opposition parties.

“If you look at Trinamool, their cadres have unleashed violence while they were in the Opposition shortly before coming to power,” Zaad was quoted as saying by The Telegraph.

During the 2018 panchayat polls, 10 fatalities were reported on the day of polling. The TMC was accused of perpetrating violence in all districts, with crude bomb attacks and booth-capturing incidents reported across the state.

Banerjee’s party won 34 per cent of the seats uncontested. “2018 panchayat election broke all records. The state had never witnessed this level of violence before,” Sourish Ghosh, faculty at St. Paul's College, told The Telegraph.

Eleven men and a two-year-old child were killed in the post-poll violence in 2019 when the BJP won 18 of the 42 Lok Sabha seats in Bengal.

The BJP claimed that 130 of its supporters were killed between 2019 and 2021.

Banerjee returned to power for a third straight term in the state following the 2021 Assembly elections. As many as 1,300 incidents of violence, 17 deaths and 7,000 cases of molestation were reported at the time, according to a Call of Justice fact-finding committee report.

The 2023 panchayat polls and the 2024 Lok Sabha elections were also marked by several incidents of bloodshed.

“Previously, there used to be only political violence. Now, there’s communal violence as well. One shouldn’t mistake violence, which is a natural by-product of social change, like during the land redistribution efforts by the Left, with violence over a turf war, which happens often under TMC rule,” Zaad said.

BJP wins, violence continues

Bengal witnessed political unrest on Monday (May 4) as the counting of votes showed that the BJP had defeated the TMC.

Both parties have claimed that two of their workers were killed in the violence that erupted after the results became clear.

The TMC offices in Tollygunge and Kasba in Kolkata, and Baruipur, Kamarhati, Baranagar, Howrah, and Baharampur were vandalised by mobs since Monday morning, PTI reported, citing the West Bengal police.

India Today Digital's assessment found that at least a dozen places in West Bengal reported post-poll violence in the first two days of the week.

The death of Chandranath Rath, Adhikari’s close aide, on Wednesday further put the spotlight on the menace of political violence plaguing Bengal.

“Five BJP supporters have been injured allegedly in a bomb blast in Panihati in West Bengal’s North 24 Parganas district,” police said on Thursday (May 7).

Bengal continues to experience political chaos and unrest despite Prime Minister Narendra Modi's appeal on Monday to shun violence. In his victory speech, he said, "When the BJP has won, the focus should not be on revenge but on change; not on retaliation, but on the future."

The PM called on party workers to end the cycle of violence, urging people to forget who voted for whom and, instead, focus on Bengal's development.

Calling the BJP's thumping majority a "resounding expression of unwavering faith", Modi said it had uprooted the politics of fear, appeasement, and violence.

Questions about the law and order situation in the eastern state have refused to die down, no matter which party is in power.

As many as 70,000 personnel of the Central Armed Police Forces (CAPF) remain on the ground in Bengal. But can the state rid itself of the epidemic of poll violence?

With inputs from agencies