RETURN OF VIOLENCE: Dong, a Korean engineer working in Bodhgaya, was shot dead by Maoists

A centuries-old Hindu monastery is destroyed, a block pramukh slain and a Korean Buddhist engineer gunned down. As these incidents shook Bodhgaya, all within 22 hours last week, they once again exposed the ironic vulnerability of the famed Buddhist capital to violence. That the Lord Buddha was being dolled up for the Dalai Lama's Kalchakra ritual didn't matter. For the Maoist guerrillas on the rampage, there was only one route to "justice": violence.

Having attacked the Khajwati Math, 6 km from the Mahabodhi Temple, and brutalised Mahant Laxmanand Giri and other residents, the Maoists left none in doubt that the decades-old class struggle of the landless in central Bihar had acquired the tones of a caste war. At its core lay the issue of who would succeed the mahant of the math. Also in dispute was the construction of a school for the poor at Dhungeshwari Hills which has displaced many villagers. Little wonder then that Korean engineer Seul Siyang Dong, who was part of the school construction project, and Tankupa block pramukh Ramji Yadav, were made to pay with their lives.

Not that such bloody assertions are anything new to Bodhgaya. Right from the organised movements of the CPI(M) to set up villages like Stalin Nagar and Muzzaffar Ahmad Nagar in the 1970s to the liberation of 9,000 acres of land from the clutches of the math by Jayaprakash Narayan's Chhatra Yuva Sangharsh Vahini, the landless classes have been making their point.

As writer Sanjay Sahay observes, the land's infertility helped aggravate matters. With the fields yielding little, the landlords paid their labour less but exercised a high degree of oppression, pushing them into embracing socialists, communists and ultra-leftist groups. Over time, the Maoists grew in strength, began to strike terror and even ran a parallel administration. In the past 10 years, the area has witnessed at least 15 major massacres involving the Maoist-led poor and the Ranvir Sena, the dreaded private army of the Bhumihar landlords.

During the past year, the police had managed to break the Maoist hold, arrest many "commanders" and weaken their organisation, says Gaya SP Raveendran Shankaran. With the heat turning on them, the activists began to flee Bodhgaya and shift focus to north Bihar and Jharkhand. Hence their return to the area now is cause for concern. A sad commentary on the Land of the Enlightened which activist Prabhat Kumar Shandilya calls the Violent Eye, given the course of events and its geographic positioning along the eye-shaped stretch between the south of the Ganga and the north of the Vindhyas.

-Farzand Ahmed