'I played a very small part in their struggle. The badges that the women wore were badges of blood. Had one fact-finding team reached there the moment when the struggle was on, things would have been different,' Patkar said.

For Patkar, the enduring symbols of Nandigram where the activist was held by police and went on a hunger strike for two days in November 2007 in protest, 'will always be the raped housewife and crusader Radharani, a missing young activist Aditya Bera and some women from a village called Sonachura who have been abused for daring to protest'.

Radharani Ari, a housewife from Gokulnagar village in Nandigram, who was at the forefront of the struggle at Nandigram, was allegedly gangraped twice by goons backed by the Left Front in her own house. She was last attacked in April 2008.

Aditya Bera, a young activist who was beaten up and shot in Nandigram, is still missing. The women in Sonachura were allegedly raped and hospitalised.

'The battle for the Left Front started at Nandigram long before the elections. The recent Lok Sabha verdict shows just how it alienated itself from the people over Nandigram. I remember going to Bengal Minister Nirupam Sen with a report by Mahasweta Devi and Justice Moloy Sengupta, and he had retorted,'Do you think without the neo-liberal paradigm, development is possible in West Bengal?'

'Even now, more than 50 homes are still ravaged in the battle ground of Nandigram,' she said. The human tragedy, however, can never be gauged in terms of numbers, she said.

'The cases in the Supreme Court have not progressed. The rape victims have yet to be compensated. The psychological scars of women who have been raped can never heal. Their relationship with their husbands have been strained forever,' she said.

(Madhusree Chatterjee can be contacted at madhu.c@ians.in)