(A CPI(ML) team comprising Polit Bureau member Comrade Kartick Pal, Burdwan district committee member comrade Paresh Banerjee, AIALA West Bengal President Sajal Pal, and West Bengal Kisan Sabha President Annada Prasad Bhatttacharya visited villages in Burdwan district on 3 September to investigate cases of peasant suicides. Below is a summary of their findings by Comrade Kartick Pal.)

Burdened with debt, three peasants committed suicide on August 21 and 23 and on September 1 at Basantapur, Karotia and Purbatati villages in Block–I of Ausgram, Burdwan district in West Bengal. The area falls under the parliamentary constituency of former MP Somnath Chatterjee and is dominated by CPI(M). Burdwan is one of the districts declared drought-affected this year.

This region being backward, it is a mono-crop area and cultivation is done only once in a year during the Kharif Season. The agriculture here depends mainly on loans advanced by money-lenders. Due to paucity of rain about 25% of land in this area remained uncultivated during the last year. This year many people had mortgage lands and sell off cattle to keep cultivation going. Help from the block and the panchayat authority remained elusive. Though the Village Panchayats and Panchayat Samiti have long been under CPI(M) control, people did not get more than 5-6 days' work under NREGA.

Eunus Seikh of Basantapur committed suicide on August 21. He had been taking a little land on lease, and for cultivation he had mortgaged his wife's ornaments and taken loan for an amount of Rs. 10000 at 3% interest per month. Apart from this, he had also taken loan to the tune of Rs. 44000 from different sources. With rain-gods failing, the paddy he had planted began to dry up, and with the spectre of ruin looming large, he committed suicide. His name was excluded from the BPL list, but it has been learnt that some wealthy farmers have got their names enlisted in the BPL list.

Jitu Bagdi, a share-cropper of village Karotia, committed suicide on August 23. He had taken 15 bighas on lease from three persons, and for cultivation he had taken a loan of Rs. 32000 from six persons. He would repay his loan not in money but in paddy produced and twice the quantity of paddy that the loaned amount would fetch. Jitu Bagdi has left behind a daughter and a son, and at present they are starving.

Gonsai Patra of Purbatati commmitted suicide on September 1. For cultivating his family share of 2½ bigha of land, he took a loan of Rs. 30000 from the money-lender. He had even sold off his cattle for doing the cultivation. His pregnant wife was in hospital requiring money for caesarean delivery. On the one hand, the paddy sown was drying up and the pressure of money-lender building up and on the other there was urgent need of money. Gonsai Patra chose to put an end to himself. The other three brothers of Gonsai also find themselves in situation not very different. All have taken loan form the money-lenders, and the spectre of drought haunts them. All the three have been excluded from the BPL list. Gonsai's elder brother Madhusudan Patra said: “We all have to commit suicide. Or, starve to death.”

Peasants told us that seven kilometres away from the village Purbatati, there is a canal existing since 1974. If the canal is cleaned up and extended, it will enable cultivation for peasants of about 70 neighbouring villages twice or thrice a year. But this has been neglected. There is also no effort to facilitate irrigation by setting up river pumps. In this bleak irrigation situation when the peasants do cultivation with the money-lenders' money and if rains fail, they find themselves in peril. Denying the role of debt burden, the CPI(M) and LF Government (through the panchayat authority or block officials) routinely blame the suicides on family quarrels.

The Left Front Government came to power on the slogan of land reform and strengthening the cooperative movement. They also promised bank loan to the recipients of vested land and share-croppers. Quite a few cooperatives came up in 1979 and 1980, and the rural poor got some loan from the cooperatives and the banks. But the share croppers and the patta-holders could not repay their loans due to poverty and were deprived of further loans. This is now a glaring fact that the rich peasants, the Kulak lobby and the traders hold sway over the cooperatives, and they have become almost the exclusive beneficiaries of the cooperative loans and other benefits. The poor peasants, patta-holders and the agrarian labourers are denied any assistance from the cooperatives in the form of fertiliser, seeds and loans. The Karanda massacre at Burdwan is well known to us. It was actually a saga of the agrarian labourers rising in revolt against cooperative corruption and challenging the local powerful CPI(M) leadership and paying the price with their lives.

Due to utter failure of 33 years of Left Front rule, 65-70% of the peasants have to depend on money from money-lenders. They have to repay the loan either in money or in crops at an exorbitant rate of interest. The rich peasants avail loans both from the banks and the cooperatives. And a section of them again lend the loaned money to the poor and small peasants. The president of the Burdwan Central Cooperative Bank, Sri Chittaranjan Bandopadhyay – a CPI(M) district committee member of Burdwan – claims that they provide 73% of the total amount of agrarian loan in the district. This is a pure and unalloyed falsehood. Abdur Rezzak Molla, Secretary of the CPI(M) Krishak Sabha, says that their aim is to make 68% of the small and marginal peasants members of the cooperatives. But the reality tells a totally different story. The benefits meant for the poor are being appropriated by the rich. As a result, earlier labourers from other districts used to come to Burdwan for work; now workers from Burdwan migrate to other places for their survival.

A CPI(ML) team led a deputation to the State Finance Minister Ashim Dasgupta on August 31. He pleaded that the Government was bound by the rules of the central government and the RBI, and therefore would not be able to help those drought-affected peasants who have borrowed money from money-lenders as such loans are not officially recorded. The CPI(ML) then called a state-wide protest, with an 8-point demand including acknowledgement by the Government of peasants' suicide due to drought and debt-burden at Ausgram; waiver of all government loans and an ordinance passed to relieve the peasants of loans by money-lenders; compensation of Rs. 6000 per bigha and free fertiliser-seeds-pesticides-electricity-diesel for the next round of cultivation to drought-affected peasants; job cards for all the rural poor including agrarian labourers; and without waiting for the rectified BPL list, supply of 50 kg foodgrains and other essentials to all poor households; compensation to peasants of Singur who lost their land to Tata.

The LF Government has denied the 3 peasant suicides at Ausgram; starvation deaths of tea-garden workers; and earlier the peasants' suicides of ten potato farmers in 2009. The Government follows this policy of denial because they know that to admit it would render hollow their tall claims about land-reforms and substantial increase in agricultural production.