• Shri LK Advani, Leader of the Opposition
• Smt Sushma Swaraj, deputy leader of the Opposition, Rajya Sabha
• Shri Sharad Yadav, President JD(U) and MP (Rajya Sabha)
• Shri Braj Kishore Tripathy, Leader of the Biju Janata Dal (Lok Sabha)
• Shri Sukhbir Singh Badal, Leader Akali Dal, Lok Sabha
• Shri Surinder Singh Ahluwalia, Chief Whip of BJP (Rajya Sabha)
• Shri Anant Gude, MP Lok Sabha of Shiv Sena
• Shri Sharad Joshi, MP Rajya Sabha, Swatantra Bharat Paksha
• Shri Chandan Mitra, MP Rajya Sabha.

Shri Mukul Roy, Trinamool Congress MP (Rajya Sabha) joined the delegation from Kolkata airport.

Ours was not a fact-finding mission, because many gruesome facts of the CPI (M)’s reign of terror in that area are already known. Ours was a justice-seeking mission to press for justice for the victimized people of Nandigram and for those committed to peace and democracy in the State. We had earlier visited Nandigram following the massacre of innocents on March 14 this year. Shockingly not a single perpetrator of the violence 8 months ago has been punished so far. The situation has only worsened since then as we found today. A pall of terror hangs heavy on desolate villages. Many have been forced to flee their homes; many homes have been razed or gutted completely by armed hooligans sporting the CPM tag.

The CPM has declared war not only on the people of Nandigram, but also on the Indian state. Under the Dhritarashtra-like impotence of the Sonia-Manmohan dispensation, the CPM has declared Nandigram a no-go area and established a Red Republic accountable to none.

Since the massacre of March 14 this year, CPM cadre have systematically targeted all those opposed to their Stalinist autocracy, killing scores of innocent persons, driving them away from their ancestral homesteads.

They have now let loose a reign of terror with their private army comprising history-sheeters such as the mass murderers of a similar carnage in 2001 at Chhota Angaria, other hired killers and armed goons enjoying protection of the police and the State Government shooting their way into villages, raping women and behaving like an occupation force. We heard horrific reports of mothers being hacked to death before their children for the temerity to participate in a peace march.

Shockingly, the Congress-led Government at the Centre, which pathetically clings to power on the CPM’s life-support system, is helpless to even instruct the CRPF to enter CPM-held territory and restore rule of law. Even in insurgency-affected regions like the Kashmir Valley or the North-East, the CRPF has not been chased away by a private army. But this has happened in Nandigram.

Not only the CRPF, but also humanitarian agencies like the Red Cross that are not stopped even in wartime, have been prevented from attending to people injured and left to die on the roadside by brutal CPM goons.

Chief Minister Budhhadeb Bhattachajee’s pretences of being a reformer and modernist have been thoroughly exposed by his support for brutal cadre action in Nandigram and the assault on intellectuals in Kolkata peacefully protesting against his party’s atrocities.

Even the media was barred from going anywhere close to Nandigram; many of the entered the area for the first time in 12 days while accompanying us.. Trinamool Congress leader Mamata Banerjee’s car was gheraoed by CPM cadre. She was heckled, threatened and prevented from reaching areas where her supporters were being mercilessly killed or hounded.

CPM State leader Shyamal Chakrabarty has jubilantly proclaimed that peace has returned, “terror” is conquered and the homeless (that is CPM cadre) are returning to reclaim their land. Indeed, he is celebrating the peace of a burning ghat. And why not? Since the party chief Prakash Karat has brushed aside criticism of the State Government’s decision to give a free hand to the party’s goons, triumphalism marks the response down the line.

Instead of responding with dignity to Governor Gopal Krishna Gandhi’s expression of anguish and pent-up pain, the CPM reacted with frenzy, accusing him of “overstepping” his limits. It is a matter of time before they demand of their captive Government in Delhi that he should be recalled.

The people of West Bengal, including sections of the intelligentsia that the CPM took for granted as their bonded brains trust, have come out on the streets to protest against this brazen stifling of democratic rights. That scores of cultural icons were bundled into police vans and held in the lock-up at Lalbazar for hours last Sunday shows the real face beneath the veneer of bhadralok genteelness that CPM projected all these decades.

The NDA commits itself to stand by the traumatised residents of Nandigram and the people of West Bengal in their darkest hour of suffering. The NDA will not rest till the CPM’s conspiracy against democracy, freedom of speech and belief, and the Indian state is defeated. We are certain that the forces of evil represented by the CPM shall be driven out of West Bengal the same way as Communist dictatorships crumbled in the erstwhile Soviet Union and its East European colonies in the 1990s.

The NDA stands by all democratic organisations in West Bengal, which are fighting a brave battle to restore the rule of law and constitutional rights to the terrorised people of the State.The NDA pledges to raise this issue forcefully in the forthcoming session of Parliament and demand an explanation from the Union Government for its pathetic inaction.