Bihar Government Indicted

CPI-ML general secretary Dipankar Bhattacharya has said that the verdict of the additional district and sessions court of Patna sentencing 16 Ranvir Sena men to death and 10 to life imprisonment for the 1997 Laxmanpur Bathe massacre, though belated, is a slap in the face of the Nitish Kumar government of Bihar, which has been playing patron to feudal forces and protecting the same elements that unleashed the massacre.

The verdict was an indictment of the government that first disbanded the Amir Das Commission, which had been set up in 1998 after the Laxmanpur Bathe massacre, when it recommended action against the political patrons of Ranvir Sena, and then dumped the recommendations of the D Bandyopadhyay Commission on land reforms in order to appease the Ranvir Sena. (Brahmeshwar Singh, the chief of Ranvir Sena, has escaped the verdict and has not been brought to justice.)