Leading civil rights activists and Maoist sympathisers on Thursday condemned the Bihar government’s withdrawal of permission for a major rally in Muzaffarpur scheduled for Friday to protest against the crackdown by the police and paramilitaries on the tribal people across the country.
Eminent Telugu poet and Revolutionary Democratic Front (RDF) Varavara Rao and social activist B.D. Sharma, a former IAS officer who has worked as an interlocutor between the Maoists and the Chhattisgarh government, described the forestalling of the Muzaffarpur rally as “arrant stifling of democratic discussions on crucial national issues”. Both men had travelled from their homes in Hyderabad and Delhi respectively and reached Patna to speak in the rally organised by several people’s organisations in north Bihar.
“We were granted permission on December 10 for the rally at Khudiram Bose stadium in Muzaffarpur, but the district magistrate withdrew the permission at the last minute today without citing any reason. Thousands of people and eminent intellectuals who have reached for the event are very disappointed,” said Rajkishore Singh, general secretary of RDF. Efforts to have a response from the Muzaffarpur district administration for withdrawing permission were unsuccessful, but sources said officials, expecting “explicit, open glorification of the Maoist cause” at the rally, thought the event would have harmful impacts on the people. The police in Muzaffarpur had recently managed to get 27 Maoist leaders to surrender along with their weapons.
Some posters used for mobilising people for the rally are believed to have contributed to the authorities’ decision to revoke permission for the event. Photographs on posters, seeking to condemn Operation Green Hunt, depict top leaders, including PM Manmohan Singh, leading UPA ministers, Bihar CM Nitish Kumar and his deputy Sushil Kumar Modi as holding guns in their hands.