Not that the attack itself is a singular incident of its type in Bengal. During the days of Siddhartha Shankar Ray as chief minister, the state saw the institutionalisation of personal attacks and Congressmen made it a habit to target residences of their political rivals and this became the rule of the game during the regime. Since then, barring stray incidents, this culture had died a natural death; it has now been left to Mamata Banerjee to revive the cult and beckon the demons of yesterday to come centrestage again as the ghosts of today.

It has now been proved beyond much of a doubt that the attack on the residence of Chandan Basu was premeditated and preplanned and the attackers were indeed Trinamool Congress workers, one of them even holding a party position of some stature in the area where he lives. It has also been proved that the 16 people who were arrested on that day after the attack were very much party to the crime and that the mission had the sanction of the powers that be in the party hierarchy though Ms Banerjee has tried to remove some of the stain by expelling two of the attackers from the party and issuing disclaimers that they had any party sanction for their activities. Significantly, the chieftain of the attackers, a woman herself, had some time back tried to gherao the chief minister’s house but had fled after seeing the police bandobust near the chief executive’s house. Chandan’s house had only private guards during the time of the attack; for any coward, it could have been a sitting target.

But mere apportioning blame and indulging in counter-charges does not help the cause, neither does it benefit any student of serious political history as to which course the waywardness of some parties, particularly the Trinamool Congress, is taking the state to. Chandan Basu has for long been the subject of some controversy in a section of the vernacular press here which has time and again tried to ride piggy-back on Ms Banerjee and her brand of politics to increase at least some of their circulation figures. While the intentions _honest or otherwise _ to increase circulation may be quite an excuse to indulge in name-calling and slander, physical attacks can never ever be condoned. It is perfectly in order and more in the nature of the pattern that it was the photographer of only that newspaper which has made Basu-baiting its passport to readership who was present during the attack on Chandan’s house which is on the eastern fringes of the city. The attack lasted only for some 20 minutes; how the photographer managed to reach the spot from his office in south-central Calcutta within that period even after a perfectly legitimate phone tip-off could be anybody’s guess, if any guesses are needed in the first place. The premeditation could not have been more apparent.