Bengalis deserve to be poor, living besides garbage dumps and figuring only in negative lights in the news and media, feeling happy with aparna sens art films. God gives people what they deserve. Good! very good.

Amita

For instance, both you and I have fallen into a particularly similar trap, and hence the confusion. We both are using the off hand term ‘cops’ to account for home guards, constables, head constables, ASIs, SIs, Inspectors, SHO’s, DSP’s, SSP’s and IGs. The truth is, that I have never heard of any one above the rank of head constable talking about insaniyat, and even that is rare. Usually it is the constables.

On the issue about observation and opinion and slippage, I would argue that most of your opinions about cops right now are quite similar to vir sanghvis, because both of you have approached the problem as journalists, not field researchers. The cops knew that you were a journalist. Observation and gathering of data between journos, editors and someone who is doing a confidential report for the cops themselves is slightly different. However, and this merely reiterates a point i made two posts above, both of our accounts are necessarily innacurate.

http://www.hindustantimes.com/StoryPage/StoryPage.aspx?id=d5df7d4d-f044-4681-b526-ac955b8dfcee

Another thing i have noticed, and this is something the cop has pointed out above, is that they do consider themselves as ‘human’, and ‘insaniyat’ is a crucial piece of rhetroric used with striking regularity. They do agree that no one likes firing on innocent people UNLESS they have been given orders to do so.

The water cannon is indeed and unwiedly instrument and is best used to clean up station walls, rather than crowd control. Do not try washing you car with it. It will crack the windows.

Som, I do not think that the question blooindian is raising here is not about fake encounters and interrogation techniques, though you are absolutely right about them.  I think the blooindian is more concerned about orders that politicians give police in order to carry out their dirty deads. The police indeed needs to become free of political preassure of all kinds, not only from politicians but from ‘local leaders’ and pradhans. Will this lead to absurd ammounts of fascism and cruelty? I doubt it. There are many redressals mechanisms in place, and once political preassure is stopped then these can be exercised with more ease.
Being a good po-mo wanker, I must add that this is all utopian rhetoric and I should just go shoot myself.

centre will take no action as the central ministry depends on support of leftist mps.

we need industrilization in west bengal which is crushed by cpm in past. now itis not a fight of people against industriliazation but the fight against he dada giri of cpm. a lot of criminals leading prosporous life at the money of common man and they are branded as cpm cadre. and the total set up is for the benefit of the people unsocial, crininals only.
if the setup is communist why not follow the chinese line progress. why not embress the decipline and work ethics of chinese communist. itis not communists but criminals in disguise of cpm who are rulling he state

i am a power plant specialist and can suggest the state govt in ways to prosper but they are only interested in keeping the state poor as that will give them opportunity to misguide people and live like a leach on blood of common man

But I would be interested in finding out excactly what the media tried to do to avoid the blockades and how the authorities managed this. This is interesting because the classical mistake authoritarian governments usually make is to “restrict” information. The lesson of good propaganda and media management is that this usually has the opposite impact than intended: that is, it is better to supply disinformation than to control information.

So I suppose in this case the government and police goons haven’t learned the lessons of information (mis)management in which the best way to control the media is to provide them with glitzy footage, rub them on the back and “embed” them like Americans do. In fact, if there was an abundance of news coming in from Nandigram - in a strange way - would perhaps be much more frightening of a scenario.