Farmers angry over plans to build an industrial park on their land torched a government office Thursday in a second day of unrest in eastern India that has claimed 14 lives.
Police responded with baton-charges and tear gas, dispersing protesters who quickly regrouped elsewhere.
The clashes mirrored earlier violence in the Nandigram area, which in January prompted the federal government to suspend plans to establish scores of Special Economic Zones to attract overseas investors with generous tax breaks.
Most of the zones, including the one that was to be set up in Nandigram, would be built on farmland.
On Thursday, about 2,000 farmers gathered outside a hospital where those injured a day earlier were being treated. They chanted angry slogans, marched toward a local government office and set fire to the building, authorities and witnesses said.
Villager Abdus Samad said police fired tear gas when people assembled near the administrative office.
On Wednesday, police fired on thousands of farmers who attacked officers with rocks, machetes and pickaxes. At least 10 people were killed by gunfire, and four others died from other injuries suffered in the violence, said the home secretary of West Bengal state, Prasad Ranjan Roy. Nandigram is in West Bengal.
Earlier, police said that all 14 killed had been shot, with 11 dying immediately or soon after being hit and three others succumbing to their wounds overnight.
“We had intelligence reports that police would face resistance, but we had no idea that the resistance would be so organized,” Roy said, according to The Press Trust of India. He added that 950 police were now in the Nandigram area and trying to restore order.
The shootings prompted widespread outrage in India’s capital, New Delhi, and in West Bengal.
“The thought uppermost on my mind, and that of all sensitive people is, ‘Was this spilling of human blood not avoidable?’” said West Bengal state Governor Gopal Krishna Gandhi, a grandson of Indian independence leader Mohandas Gandhi. The governor’s role is largely ceremonial.
In New Delhi, lawmakers from the opposition Bharatiya Janata Party and the Shiv Sena, two right-wing Hindu nationalist groups, shouted, “Communists are murderers” - a reference to the communist politicians who have ruled West Bengal for more than three decades. The outbursts forced the house to adjourned for the day, before any business could be conducted.
Meanwhile, the High Court in Calcutta, West Bengal’s capital, ordered India’s Central Bureau of Investigation to investigate the shootings.
The trouble in Nandigram erupted on Jan. 7 after the leak of the government plan to acquire 22,000 acres of land in the area, and to build a petrochemical plant and shipyard.
The hastily formed Bhumi Ucched Pratirodh, meaning Land Acquisition Resistance Committee in the region’s Bengali language, organized protests that quickly degenerated into violent clashes.