“However, we do not want, by any means to halt our onward march for the development of Bengal’s economy, and to create jobs for the millions of young men and women of the state,” Basu adds.

Referring to the Trinamul Congress, he says it is a great irony that the destructive forces that always remained with the landlords, big and small, and rich peasants in rural Bengal suddenly started shedding crocodile tears for the marginal farmers and other victims of feudalism. “If we draw the correct lessons from the history of industrialisation, we find that all battles in Europe had to be waged seriously against the feudal elements,” he says.

Nanavati’s eyewash

The issue also carries an article titled “Hunter better than Nanavati” by B.B. Sreekumar, Gujarat’s former additional DGP. He says the Nanavati Commission report is better described as a whitewashing document than the conclusion of an enquiry: “This is an immature, partisan and inconclusive report which has a political motive. It can only be seen as a predetermined script. ”

Sreekumar says he had filed four affidavits in his capacity as a senior intelligence officer, about the situation that led to the riots and the roles of the senior officers in them. “The Commission had the responsibility to verify the truth about them.. [It] should also have recommended punishment for me had the affidavits been false. Instead of this, [it] canonised the perpetrators of the riots,” he claims.

“ The Hunter Commission, which probed the Jallianwala Bagh mass murder, recommended punishment and demotion of the British officials responsible... in independent, democratic and secular India justice is not even as honest as the Hunter episode,” he says.

Conspiracy everywhere

Another article by Teesta Setalvad titled “What Nanavati did not see” says “by using torture, coercion and the draconian provisions of the POTA law, absurd confessions have been extracted whereby a person ends up confessing to have done something that it was impossible to do.. It was impossible to stop the train by rotating the alarm disc from outside because of the modifications in design,” she says. “Yet the investigators forced such a confession to support their claim that Salim Paanwala (one of the accused) had instigated Muslim hawkers to stop the train near the A cabin as part of the pre-planned conspiracy,” she says. According to Setalvad, the most glaring omission in the prosecutor’s tale is its silence about what the conspirators’ original plan was, had the train not been delayed by several hours.