March 6: Around 450 Trinamul Congress leaders and activists, including most of those who had spearheaded the Nandigram land agitation, have fled their homes since yesterday in the face of an Election Commission-ordered drive to execute pending warrants.

The Trinamul leaders who have gone into hiding include Abu Taher and Sheikh Sufiyan, who had led the anti-land acquisition movement in 2007. There are 1,000 pending warrants in Nandigram.

After the police intensified raids in Nandigram in February, Trinamul and CPM leaders named in various cases connected to the 2007 flare-up rushed to Haldia subdivisional court to get bail. The court has already granted bail to 400.

Taher and 20 other party leaders who were going to the Haldia court yesterday to apply for bail in a rioting case turned back midway after being informed by their sources that the police were waiting in the court to arrest them. “While returning, our sources told us the police would raid our homes. So we decided against returning home,” Taher said.

A Trinamul leader said almost all prominent local leaders had gone into hiding and so there was “nobody to lead protests against the arrest drive”. He said the presence of the central forces in Nandigram was another reason why the party had refrained from organising protests.

The deployment of central forces has come as a boon for CPM leaders and workers who had fled their homes because of “Trinamul threats”. Around 100 such people returned today.