Helicopter-dropped leaflets drift in the air over Lalgarh. Picture by Sanat Kumar Sinha

Pathardanga (Lalgarh), June 20: A steady drone and then the chop-chop overhead signals the arrival of a helicopter in the skies over this village beyond the Lalgarh police station about two hours after central forces have marched from Bhimpur.

Sure enough, it is an Indian Air Force Mi-17. The helicopter flies towards Lalgarh town, turns right and there is a shower from it. The Bengal government had said it would distribute leaflets using choppers.

Here in Pathardanga, where we have crossed into the area of the People’s Committee Against Police Atrocities, there is an assembly of about a couple of hundred villagers. Most look up to the sky.

“Oh there, it must be dropping the leaflets but they are too far away,” says a tribal youth holding a machete. “I want one,” he says wistfully.

In the event it is a perfect airdrop. By accident, probably, the air force had read the wind direction correctly. The leaflets float down towards Pathardanga, watched all the way by the villagers, eager to read them. Children run across to get the leaflets for their elders.

The leaflet is a white sheet of paper, printed in bold blue in Bengali and Olchiki (but in the Bengali script). “An Appeal”, it says,

The Bengal government is appealing to all the people in the forested areas not to fall prey to the Maoists’ evil designs. “All of you please return to your homes. Help the administration restore peace in your region,” it ends.

“Where was Buddhadeb all this while?” an elderly man in a community kitchen retorts when asked if he had read the leaflet. “What is the point of dropping handbills from the air when they are pointing guns at us on the ground?” he asks, not all that rhetorically.

The Lalgarh police station is barely a couple of kilometres away from here, where the forces are assembling.

A younger man — none of them wants to be identified, each knowing that the police is tracking all movement inside Lalgarh, says: “We always had the police here. It is only these past seven or eight months that the police were not here and our women could move around without fear. Do we have to go back to that time?” he asks.

Across Lalgarh, and even in the villages on its periphery, the tribal sense of dignity is intact. Official literature — such as the helicopter-dropped handbills — does not really acknowledge that. At least here in Pathardanga, where the resistance to the entry of the police forces is strong, the handbills dropped from the air are a mockery of that sense of pride. “We were hardly treated as human beings,” says the youth.

He cites examples of how his people were harassed by the police before the villagers decided to drive them away.

Lalmohan Tudu, the president of the People’s Committee, who is also here, says the organisation is yet to decide on its programme of resistance. “Our central committee was to meet yesterday but members could not come but we are chalking out a programme,” he says.

A little later, Chhatradhar Mahato, the committee spokesperson, whom DIG (western range) Praveen Kumar, said this afternoon would “be arrested on sight”, says the protests will continue because they are democratic.

For the elderly tribesman at the community kitchen, Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee’s handbills from the air do not even “give us credit for being able to think for ourselves”.