Arup Patra,21,would have voted for the first time on Tuesday had he not been murdered in his remote,rural constituency last January. Arup was the youngest of the nine massacred by CPM cadres in Netai village,part of Jhargram constituency,after they had protested against the party for setting up a camp of armed cadres. Numerically,the January 7 killings left the village only nine voters less but it may have swung its entire 1,200 votes in one direction. Villagers say not one of them will vote for the CPM. Indeed,in the run-up to the polls,not a single CPM leader has visited the village. Arups parents Gayatri and Ranjit Patra,who is disabled,still keep the voters ID card their son never got to use. It was only to get the card made that he came home in December. He got it days before he was killed, says Gayatri Patra. The card keeps reminding us of his killing for no fault of his, says Ranjit Patra,who lodged the first FIR with Lalgarh police and who now is one of the prime witnesses in the case,being investigated by the CBI on a Calcutta High Court order. The family is so poor that Arup had to leave his studies after Class XI. He joined a labour contractors team. He and his group would travel to Maharashtra and Bihar; he would come back for brief breaks. Fulkumari Maity too would have voted the first time. She was 30 but it was only last winter that she had her voters card made. I am looking after my son and rearing my two grandchildren now, says Sandhya Maity,her mother-in-law. Dwarkanath Panda,a schoolteacher,says CPM leaders initially put pressure on villagers to sell a story that Maoists had set up a camp in Netai and that this led to the bloodshed. But we defied them and told the truth. There were no Maoist elements in the village, he says. Today,the village looks serene in the absence of the security men who crowded it after the massacre. A CRPF camp that has come up at Belatikri,2 km away,however,remains. It was once a panchayat office,then turned into an armed CPM camp which those killed had protested against before taking its present form as a CRPF base. In a constituency where the politics of blood appears set to dictate the outcome,the contest is ostensibly triangular,with sitting CPM MLA Amar Basu challenged by Sukumar Hansda of the Trinamool Congress and by Chhatradhar Mahato,leader of the erstwhile Peoples Committee Against Police Atrocities,who jumped into the fray at the last moment on a court verdict. Mahato was dumped by the Trinamool. Villagers say they have a promise to fulfil. Their doors are shut to both Maoists and Marxists,they say.
