West Bengal: Kurmi leaders held for attack on Abhishek Banerjee’s convoy

West Bengal’s Jhargram district police have arrested eight members of the Kurmi community, including two frontal leaders, for the attack on several cars in Trinamool Congress (TMC) national general secretary Abhishek Banerjee’s convoy at Salboni on Friday evening, officials said.

While four men were arrested on Saturday, the others, including Rajesh Mahato, a central committee member of the ongoing ‘ghagar ghera’ (surround from all sides) agitation demanding Scheduled Tribe (ST) status for Kurmis, were held on Sunday. They have been remanded in judicial custody for 24 hours by a local court.

The other arrested leader is Anup Mahato, state president of the Adivasi Negachari Kurmi Samaj.

At least six organisations are taking part in the movement. Various sections of the Kurmis are listed either under Other Backward Class (OBC) or Scheduled Caste (SC) categories.

“The accused have been charged under several non-bailable sections of the Indian Penal Code (IPC) including 307 (attempt to murder),” a district police officer said on condition of anonymity.

The arrests were made after chief minister Mamata Banerjee alleged at a Nabo Jowar (new tide) rally of the TMC at Salboni on Saturday afternoon that the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) had engineered the attack to recreate a Manipur-like ethnic violence by turning Bengal’s Kurmis and tribals against each other.

The vehicle of minister Birbaha Hansda, a member of the tribal community, was damaged and her driver was injured alongside several policemen when the Kurmis were holding an agitation on the road through which the convoy was passing on Friday.

Mamata Banerjee said: “I don’t believe my Kurmi brothers did it. The BJP carried out the attack using their flags. The ethnic violence the BJP engineered in Manipur has claimed so many lives. They want to do the same thing in Bengal, turn Kurmis and tribals into enemies. The BJP has given a lot of money to some local leaders to create an ethnic strife. They attacked Birbaha, an adivasi (tribal) woman. Our administration will take action.”

“It was an attempt to murder us. Kurmi leaders leading the agitation cannot escape responsibility,” Hansda said immediately after the incident.

The United Adivasi Forum, an umbrella body of Santhal, Lodha and other tribal organisations, announced on Sunday that a state-wide bandh will be observed on June 8 in protest against the attack on Hansda.

“The tribal communities will not tolerate the attack on their minister,” Tapan Sardar, a leader of the forum, told the media.

Although Kurmi leaders claimed after Friday’s incident that their people were not involved in it, the government started to act.

Within hours of the attack, Rajesh Mahato, who is a Bengali language teacher at a state-run school in West Midnapore district’s Kharagpur town, was transferred to a school at Cooch Behar in north Bengal and asked to report for duty in three days.

Although state BJP leaders, such as Rahul Sinha, claimed their party had nothing to do with the Kurmi agitation, leader of the Opposition in the state Assembly, Suvendu Adhikari, offered to help Mahato to stop his transfer.

“Rajesh Mahato should launch a legal battle against the state. I can help him if he asks for it,” Adhikari said.

The Kurmis have been raising the demand for inclusion in ST list for a long time and several blockades were held in recent years. Road and rail movements were affected in August and September last year as well.

The community has also demanded inclusion of the Kurmali language in the Eighth Schedule of the Constitution and recognition of Sarna as a separate religion.

Followers of Sarna worship nature instead of idols. In 2020, the Jharkhand assembly passed a special resolution and sent it to the Centre, seeking a separate religion code for the tribal population.