It was one of the main battlegrounds in her assault on the Lefts Bengal citadel,and within hours of Mamata Banerjee winning,Singur celebrated the only way it could. Late on Friday night,around 4,000 villagers who had been unwilling to hand over their land to the Tata Motors factory pulled down a small portion of the boundary wall surrounding the site and entered it. They offered puja at a Kali temple and planted TMC flags inside the Tata compound. On receiving news of villagers gathering in front of the boundary wall at Khaser Bheri area in Singur,a huge police contingent was sent. But realising the mood of the crowd,they thought better than to intervene. Becharam Manna,the leader of the Singur mass movement and the winning Trinamool candidate from nearby Haripal,said: People were so excited that we could not stop them from entering the Tata factory premises. The entire land belongs to the farmers of Singur,so they have a legitimate right to it. While most of the machinery at the plant was shifted to Sanand in Gujarat after the Tata pullout in October 2008,the basic structure still stands,along with different tool shops. The Tatas have also continued to renew their lease on the 1,000 acres of land and maintain an office in which an officer of the rank of general manager sits. But no Tata official was available for comment on Fridays developments. While West Bengal was braced for largescale political violence after the results,most of the incidents reported have been sporadic. Police seized arms from CPM cadres in West Midnapore district,while a zonal committee member of the CPM in Goaltore,Jiten Mandi,was hacked to death on Saturday afternoon. There have also been reports of CPM offices being ransacked. Nirmal Samanta,a senior Trinamool leader,was attacked at Patashpur in East Midnapore and received serious head injuries.
