There is a chillingly sinister ring in the two successive “deaths by hanging” in West Bengal’s Purulia district in the aftermath of the panchayat elections. Seldom in the past, never in recent years, has political barbarism been so pronounced.

It was only to be expected that the back-to-back deaths would exacerbate the tension in rural Bengal and ignite another bout of inter-party kerfuffle. And so it has. One must give it to the state government that it has been unchacteristically swift in countering the attempt by the Superintendent of Police to airbrush the twin tragedies in a span of 72 hours.

He has been moved out to a relatively innocuous armed police battalion, for jumping to contrived conclusions quite obviously to please his political masters. While he has attributed the first death to what he calls a “family feud”, the second has been dismissed as a suicide. Absolute tosh, as it now transpires.

Anxious not to rock the political boat, Joy Biswas has been almost incredibly economical with the truth in his assessment of the two incidents. In the face of the public outcry, the Chief Minister appears to have seen through the bluff. This is reflected in the urgency with which the state government has entrusted the probe to the CID.

The government’s reaction ~ after the BJP president, Amit Shah’s condemnation of “another killing” ~ makes it plain that the deaths are political. Dulal Kumar (32), who died on Saturday, had joined the BJP from the Congress and was in charge of the party’s OBC Morcha in Balarampur, from where Trinamul was almost wiped out in last month’s panchayat polls. Suggestive, therefore, are the contours of the reprisal which the CID is now expected to proble.

The impressive performance of the BJP in Junglemahal ~ Purulia, Bankura and West Midnapore ~ has been quite the quirkiest feature of the panchayat election.

The BJP has won all the nine Gram Panchayats in the block besides capturing 17 of the 20 Panchayat Samiti seats and the two Zilla Parishad seats. If indeed Dulal was killed for his role in the party’s victories, as suspected, the malaise that has permeated the system shall not be easy to heal.

The government appears to be reasonably certain that neither Dulal, who was hanging from a transmission tower on Saturday, nor Trilochan Mahato, who was found hanging from a tree on Wednesday, had chosen the drastic option to end their lives.

The giveaway is the handwritten letter found near Trilochan’s body, stating that he had been killed for his association with the BJP. A not dissimilar Trinamul-BJP rivalry is suspected to have claimed the life of Dulal as well. Rural Bengal is poised on a powder-keg; the bonfire of sanity makes a mockery of the panchayat elections. The mayhem must stop.