This unleashed the vendetta we see going on till today, in which the BJP-led combine at the centre and its allies have left no constitutional impropriety untried to destabilise the Rabri Devi government. The partisan use of the CBI, so inept in the hawala case, seems to be over reaching its brief in trying to book the Bihar chief minister on any count whatever. Article 356 was misused by BJP-supremo, Sunder Singh Bhandari, who found himself out by the ear as a result. This was followed by the parliamentary and assembly elections and an equally ill-advised invitation to the inept railway minister, Nitish Kumar, who proved just as inept at managing a majority as he had been at preventing accidents on trains, leading to the return of Rabri Devi, and a new round of harrassment by the CBI.

It is obvious that the BJP-led government at the centre has failed miserably to destabilise Bihar, but its message has not fallen on deaf ears. Landlords, criminals and casteist forces have happily joined this crusade and the measures they have resorted to would leave an Al Capone at a loss for words.

Take the case of Bhagalpur. Having left no stone unturned to rig a victory in what was sitting seat of the BJP during the parliamentary elections, they resorted to pressure by the security forces to stamp ballot papers on the lotus symbol, muslim women were molested and three lathicharges were resorted to -- and all failed in their objective, as the CPI(M) won the seat from the BJP by a margin of over 45000 votes.

Not being satisfied with that, with both Muharram and Ram Navami being close to each other, the temptation of playing the communal card was too much to resist.

In Bhagalpur a young bay around six years old, Sukumar, was found ritually murdered, with his genitals and nose cut off, and stomach slit open, obviously the work of so-called tantriks. But then to throw people off the scent another boy was kidnapped who is yet to be found. And the local RSS is attempting to blame it on a muslim, creating communal tension. Subodh Roy, CPI(M) MP and leaders of AIKS and AIAWU are camping in the area to ensure the arrest of the murderer and save innocents from the carnage being planned by the RSS.

Already, landlords, most of them belonging to the BJP, have begun launching savage attacks on activists of AIKS and AIAWU. In Darbhanga, Kunwar Kalyan Jha of AIKS and Ram Vrich Sada, Ram Sharn Chopal and Nachari Chopal have been killed recently. State secretary of CPI(M) has recently visited the area on 11th and 12th of April and addressed a demonstrations against these attacks.

In Samastipur, at Mangalgarh, I witnessed the anger of people against the attempted murder of Ram Nath Mahto, state secretary of AIAWU, when he was holding a workers’ meeting which was attacked by a known murderer, Sunil Yadav who was driving a tractor . He was unable to kill Ram Nath but he killed two others attending the meeting, Puneet Yadav and Subodh Bhandari. The police has failed to register an FIR declaring intent to murder, even though the spot is at such a place where no tractor driver would drive normally, with a well and a ditch on either side. And the murderer is still at the landlord’s house, under his protection. The landlord has reason to hate the AIAWU because it has created an enclave called Sundarayya Nagar on government land, over a hundred acres of which are still in the illegal possession of the landlord.

On April 12, a fact finding team consisting of Ram Nath Mahto, Sarangdhar Paswan, state secretary and president of AIAWU, Devendra Chaurasia, state committee member of AIAWU and I, went to Majhbe hill, Indira Nagar, a dalit settlement under Hisua police station in Nawada district, where eleven huts (with three to seven rooms in each), were wantonly burnt by a rampaging landlord gang led by Siya Singh, Umesh Prasad Singh and Baleshwar Singh that set the houses alight, brutally beat up men and women (all dalits), and destroyed everything they could lay their hands on. The reason for the attack was obvious. The dalits were living on Bhoodan land the landlords are eyeing as it is on the main Rajgir-Gaya route which is frequented by tourists. Also, the victims are almost exclusively agricultural labourers who had voted for Ganesh Shankar Vidyarthi, CPI(M) state secretary, who contested elections from there and lost narrowly. The landlords had voted BJP. All these tensions exploded in the form of a savage attack on the dalit colony.

The police predictably supported them by not only ensuring that no one was named in the FIR, but have slapped on murder charges on those whose houses were not burnt. The result is that some, like Dhanwa Devi, Samkalia Devi and Kapurwa Musamat, all widows, have lost their life’s savings and the damages to the homes of all three could be close to Rs. 1 lakh each, while others who were spared the destruction have had to run away because of police terror. This way the landlords can evict the dalits. The manner in which everything was systematically destroyed reflects the determination of the landlords to regain lands once given away to them. When we reached the spot, the colony was almost deserted, but people came round soon enough and evidence of who set fire to the houses came out openly but it will take considerable support to the victims to get them to testify against the criminals who attacked them.

About the same time, also on April 9 , an SFI activist of Patna university, Avinash Chauhan, was murdered by an ABVP activist who had been stalking him for sometime. This, and other incidents that have taken place in the first week of April, reflect definite plan of the BJP and its allies to create chaos in the state of Bihar and then use it to destabilise the government. They are not likely to succeed. But they will do considerable damage to the life and property of the poorest sections in the process.