For the past fortnight I have been trying to write about a genocide that just happened in Nandigram of West Bengal, India - not far away from my home. Anything I crank out looks like banal or lame. Though I’ve got over my initial shock, and have placed the event in its right perspective, and analyzed it, I continue to get the writer’s block. For sure, a genocide demands real, strong, pithy words for its narrative, which I can’t summon right now.

Let me line up some facts instead.

On March 14, Nandigram, an emerald country in Bengal, saw an unprecedented carnage when the leftist government, in power for thirty years at a stretch, killed 14 people, mostly women, to teach the innocent farmers a lesson. The farmers had been protesting, for some time, the acquisition of their land by the government for Special Economic Zones now being touted as the great Indian Hope for the people.

The carnage sparked off an instant and huge national outcry. Starting from the Governor of West Bengal (“The news has filled me with a sense of cold horror”) to politicos, academicians, students, advocates, doctors, you name any profession, everybody was outraged and vocal about the massacre. There were rallies, meetings, deputations, gheraos, attacks on police and government officials and party offices. But what was spectacular about this all that a large number of top-notch intellectuals – writers, poets, artists – who have been professed supporters of the left government, criticized the government in harsh terms and many of them returned awards, prizes that were awarded to them by the latter. Now, this was something unique, given that over last thirty years, Kolkata – traditionally a protest city - almost lost its dissenting character, cocooned as it was in a kind of smugness and illusion brought on by a feel-good government, and had been sliding down intellectually and culturally.

In a surprise move, Kolkata High Court ordered a suo moto CBI (Central Bureau of Intelligence) enquiry into the carnage. The investigation team comes up with several astounding findings, but the most serious one is that the firing on the poor peasants was done not by the police alone, but also by some hard-core criminals employed by the ruling party. In fact, the team arrested eight of them during their probe. More revealingly, the team found out many .315 bullets which the police force don’t use these days, confirming further that extra-police personnel had participated in the genocide. Bullets were fired mostly on chests and backs of the victims – a proof that the assailants meant to kill them.

There is more to it than the mass-murder. There were rampant rapes (A high police official, who was on duty during the genocide, now admits that two of their cops committed rape) and butchering of children.

Children were torn apart at their hips.

Women, female children included, were shot through their genitalia.

Do we need any further details to fill out the contour of this genocide?

If you think the death figure is too low, consider this: as part of the operation, the bodies were truck loaded, transported and systematically cremated or dumped in sea under the cover of the night.