Outrage over India farmer killings
Protesters set a government office ablaze a day after 14 farmers are killed.
No deaths or injuries were reported on Thursday.
On Thursday, about 2,000 farmers gathered outside a hospital where those injured on Wednesday were being treated. They chanted angry slogans, marched towards a local government office and set fire to the building, witnesses said.
One witness, villager Abdus Samad, said police fired tear gas when people assembled near the administrative office.
Outrage
Wednesday’s shootings prompted widespread outrage across India.
“The thought uppermost on my mind, and that of all sensitive people is, ‘Was this spilling of human blood not avoidable?”‘ said Gopal Krishna Gandhi, West Bengal state governor and a grandson of Indian independence leader Mohandas Gandhi. The governor’s role is largely ceremonial.
In New Delhi, members of parliament 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 parties that have ruled West Bengal for more than three decades.
Meanwhile, the High Court in Calcutta, West Bengal’s capital, has ordered India‘s Central Bureau of Investigation to investigate the shootings.
The trouble in Nandigram first erupted on January 7 after the leak of the government plan to acquire 9,000 hectares of land in the area, and to build a petrochemical plant and shipyard.