March of mourners

PRONAB MONDAL AND SIMI KAMBOJ

The bodies being brought to Sonachura. Picture by Amit Datta Nandigram, March 16: Soumya Kanti Jana, 18 years old, is a strong young man. But today, he struggled to pull a cycle-van down the road from Tamluk to Sonachura — it carried his dead mother. The polythene sheet in which the body of Supriya Jana was wrapped could not cover the stench emanating from it. “My mother was in the front when the police fired on the crowd,” Soumya sobbed. “I wish I had died instead of her.” About 10,000 people from over 20 villages, armed with wooden stumps, rods and sticks, joined the funeral procession of two victims of the Nandigram bloodbath. Around 10 this morning, when the mourners approached Sonachura bazaar, some 30 policemen lined the two sides of the road. One officer, Probhat Maiti, urged the crowd to maintain peace, but this seemed to fire them up. “Go back. These two people have fallen to your bullets and you have no right to be present at their funeral,” screamed Nirmal Giri, a relative of Supriya. Realising they were heavily outnumbered, the policemen quietly returned to their outpost. Once the bodies were handed over to their families, leaders of the Save Farmland Committee accompanied them to the crematorium near Gangra, 1 km away, around 4.30 pm. Two bodies — of Gobinda Das and Imadul Khan — had been handed over to their families yesterday, while three were released by the Tamluk hospital this evening. Ten more bodies are awaiting post-mortem, seven of which are yet to be identified. Daiyan Khan, Imadul’s father, buried his son this morning. Hundreds had gathered at the spot, a stone’s throw from Imadul’s two-bigha agricultural land in Sonachura. “I didn’t even know my son had been killed. I recognised him by his clothes as the police were transporting his body in a motorcycle,” Imadul said, adding that his wife Ayesha had become unconscious after hearing the news. Pronab Kumar Samanta didn’t have the courage to tell his family that his 24-year-old son is no more. “My daughter-in-law, Sumati, had a son only a month back and is at her parents’ place. How can I tell her that she has become a widow?” he wailed. http://www.telegraphindia.com/1070317/asp/bengal/story_7529475.asp