Crude bomb in West Bengal - BBC Documentary
Used by political parties for election violence, these homemade bombs have maimed and killed many children in West Bengal. Often, these bombs—thrown by political rivals at one another—do not explode and are later picked up by children playing cricket or other games.
Children of the Bombs, the BBC documentary directed by Ronny Sen, reviewed newspaper reports from Anandabazar Patrika and Bartaman Patrika to claim that 565 children have been killed, injured, or maimed between 1996 and 2024.
This means, on average, one child casualty every 18 days—and there is no end in sight to the menace.
In the documentary, Pankaj Dutta, the former Inspector General of West Bengal Police, said that it is rather easy to find the materials to make these crude bombs—and also people willing to make them.
Dutta also noted that this is not a new phenomenon in Bengal, as bombs were first made to target British officers during the armed revolution to free India from colonial rule.
It dates back to 30 April 1908, when revolutionaries Khudiram Bose and Prafulla Chaki threw a bomb at the carriage of the Chief Presidency Magistrate, Douglas Kingsford, of Calcutta in the Muzaffarpur district—then under Bengal Presidency. It killed two women.
the death of a nine-year-old during the 2024 Lok Sabha elections. As recently as the 2024 Lok Sabha election, nine‑year‑old Raju Biswas was killed by a crude bomb that he had mistaken for a ball.
Deba Pratim Ghatak, author of The Original Lynch Mob, a 2024 book documenting incidents of political violence during the 34 years of Left Front’s rule in West Bengal, told ThePrint that the victims of this crude bomb culture are essentially children of the poor.
The scale of crude bomb violence in West Bengal is considerably higher during the Panchayat elections. In a rural economy afflicted by a massive unemployment crisis, political patronage in the form of doles and benefits from government schemes disbursed through the panchayats has become a principal means of survival for a large section of the rural masses
