T HE COWARDS OF RANVIR SENA have struck again. Having failed to stop the rural poor’s relentless forward march through repeated massacres, the killers have now started targeting individual leaders of the masses. On 10 November afternoon Comrade Manju became their first victim in Bihar’s Arwal-Jahanabad belt.
The killers had chosen their target carefully. Comrade Manju was one of the most courageous and assertive leaders of the masses. Like the people’s poet Virendra Vidrohi who had blackened the face of the Congress Chief Minister Bhagwat Jha Azad’s face after a Jehanabad massacre in the late 1980s, she too symbolised the indomitable courage and tenacity of the fighting people of Jahanabad in the face of brutal feudal violence and state repression.
No less significant was the choice of the moment. In August, fourteen comrades had been sentenced to life imprisonment under the draconian TADA. The killing of a bold leader of the masses like Manju at this hour, they thought, would thoroughly demoralise the masses and rattle the Party organisation. And they must have also hoped to dampen the spirit of the impending all-India agricultural labour conference in neighbouring Bhojpur.
They could not be more mistaken. Far from demoralising the masses, Manju’s assassination has only infuriated them. It has produced unprecedented mass anger in every nook and corner of Arwal and Jahanabad. From her village to the Party office to the cremation ground, thousands of people thronged all along the way to say adieu to this fearless fighter. As for the Party, its resolve has been steeled further and the founding conference of the All India Agricultural Labour Association two days later went on to become a huge historic success.
Comrade Manju’s martyrdom has served as a new mirror for the people of the region. It has armed them with a clearer understanding of the raging class war in Bihar, and helped them decide their own location in this epic battle between the decadent feudal society and the emerging new democratic society of the people. The contrast between the matchless courage of ordinary toiling men and women and the monumental cowardice of the heavily armed forces of feudal reaction has seldom been as stark.
Manju was a typical representative of the brave new women who have come up in the course of the last three decades of battle for a new democracy, a new Bihar. Born in an agricultural labour family, she joined the movement while still in school, and grew up challenging and rejecting the definitions and dictates of the old feudal society and discovering herself and her dreams in the midst of the movement. She went in for an inter-caste marriage of her own choice, was a caring mother for her three children, but never allowed domesticity to become fetters for her political life.
Her politics was full of anger against every oppression and discrimination that women have to suffer in our present society as women. But more importantly, her politics pulsated with the courage and commitment of a communist who knew that women could only breathe free in a new society and hence the fight for women’s liberation was inseparable from the battle for revolutionary social transformation. She was therefore on the forefront of every struggle against feudal violence and state terror, she fought as vigorously with students against police brutality, as within the panchayati system against corruption and anti-poor discrimination. If she was known for her outspokenness and militancy in the society, she was equally forthright in putting forward her views inside the Party.
Since its inception, the Ranvir Sena has time and again exposed itself as an abominable instrument of feudal, patriarchal and communal violence. From Bathantitola to Bathe and Shankarbigha to Miyanpur, the Sena has killed hundreds of women, and perpetrated the same kind of unimaginably barbaric violence on pregnant women as one later came to see in the course of the anti-Muslim genocide in Modi’s Gujarat. But till date no serious effort has been made by any state institution to stop this barbaric outfit. Even the national and state women’s commissions do not have a single word to say about the Sena’s anti-women violence. In fact, the Bihar Women’s Commission has sought to justify its silence on the plea that Manju’s killing is a ‘political murder’!
But piercing the sinister silence of the state and the protagonists of ‘civil society’, the resolve of the democratic people, especially the toiling masses and the brave new women of Bihar has started rending the air. Let Comrade Manju’s martyrdom prove to be the last nail on the Ranvir Sena’s coffin.