BLOOD ISLAND
An Oral History of the
Marichjhapi Massacre
Deep Halder
without you this book would not have been written.
Rebellions were begun by people who had not read Das Capital or the Red Book. It was their reality that had urged them into rebellion.
– Manoranjan Byapari
HOW THEY KILLED THE DREAMERS IN THE
SUNDARBANS
This book is about an island time forgot. It is also about my oldest memory; a memory that is both a fairytale and a bad dream. This book is about Marichjhapi.
Marichjhapi, as cold fact and sweet lullaby, comes to me at unexpected hours – when the TV ticker screams that India will deport Rohingyas or a new story on Syria brings out that old photograph of Alan Kurdi yet again to tug at heartstrings. Even almost forty years after I first heard the story of Marichjhapi, such references take me back to an unending farm with coconut and palm trees, ponds and paddy fields, and an abiding memory of a dark secret shared in whispers as a bedtime story. It’s amazing how the most horrific sits pretty with what is serene.
I become my child self again at times like this, playing inside a two-storeyed house sitting in the middle of the seven bighas of land that used to be my weekend getaway. My grandfather, a deputy magistrate in the British-ruled undivided India, had settled in the western half of Bengal after Partition, the part that had remained with India. In his travels across the newly formed state of West Bengal, he saw in the South 24 Parganas the charms of the land he’d left behind. That land is now Bangladesh.
Taldi is one hour away by local train from the southern tip of Kolkata. It is a place so postcard perfect that my parents would not feel like forcing me
back to the city when school reopened after weekends. Our Taldi house became the way it did through months of hard work. The salty soil was made cultivable by manuring it with wagons full of new earth. Fish breeding was my grandmother’s department and the three ponds on the property offered almost every variety a Bengali palate could pine for.
Twenty-five miles from Taldi – around the time my favourite weekend sport was chasing a spotless white calf into the paddy fields with my grandfather’s walking stick – thousands of men, women and children were trying to set up their own Neverland and being chased around by officials of the new Left Front government, who were saying the ecology would be destroyed if these refugees succeeded in their endeavour. That place was Marichjhapi; and it came to me as a story through Mana.
Mana herself came unannounced as a distant cousin to look after me and tell me stories. She had a strange tongue and stranger manners. It took me some time to warm up to her, but Mana Goldar had stories for me.
Stories from Marichjhapi.
I was too young to know what rape was or fathom the full import of the word ‘refugee’. Though it was spoken many times in the house with reference to Mana in the adult conversations held around me, no one explained to me who or what a refugee is. Looking at Mana, I thought a refugee was one who had no place to go. Mana said her first home had many refugees.
She was born into, and named after, Mana Camp in faraway Dandakaranya, where her parents had been sent after East Bengal became a country for Muslims. They travelled miles to cross the border, hoping that people who looked similar and spoke the same tongue would open their homes and hearts to them, only to be pushed into the hot, humid north. It was in this squatters’ colony that Mana was born, where refugees toiled day and night for meagre wages from sarkari babus. When they protested, their mothers, daughters, sisters and aunts were taken away by sinister men. That was rape, Mana said.
Mana was in her teens when she came to stay with us. She had spent her first twelve years in Dandakaranya and one in Marichjhapi. It was a hard
word for me to say, so Marichjhapi became ‘mud island’ in her stories, an island of wet soil. Her last home, she said, was always covered in mud and they wore no slippers.
There were no sarkari babus in Marichjhapi. Men sang and women danced as the sun sank into the sea. Hope was enough to hold on to during those difficult days they spent turning a barren island into a home.
‘But it all had to end. The resident deity, Bonbibi, didn’t hear our cries,’
Mana had said as she wiped her tears.
The darkness in her eyes as she told me her tale cemented a bond that stayed. Mana left us in eight months, but Marichjhapi kept coming back to me; in stray conversations and chance meetings, the gravity of the horror gradually unfolding.
As recently as 2017, Marichjhapi slithered into my consciousness in a Bhopal newsroom, of all places during a conversation with my colleague Mokapati Poornima. She is a deep diver into lost causes; a star reporter in the newspaper I edited at the time, she travelled the length and breadth of Madhya Pradesh to scoop out stories of despair and distress.
I asked her once why she risks life and limb for her job and she said her ever curious gene must have come from her mother, who travelled from Bangladesh to Calcutta, Calcutta to Dandakaranya, Dandakaranya to the Sundarbans and back to Dandakaranya again in search of hearth and home.
‘Sundarbans? Where in the Sundarbans?’ I enquired.
‘There is a place called Marichjhapi, sir. Bengali refugees had settled there once.’
‘Your mother is Bengali?’ was all I could ask. Poornima nodded.
I then dialled Jyotirmoy Mondal, a rights activist, an old source for stories and a family friend. Mondal knows of the horrors of Marichjhapi firsthand, having witnessed the growth of the cottage industry around the tragedy and the poverty many of its survivors still lived in, even as governments bluffed and fell.
‘Tell me again what happened,’ I said. There was an urgent need in me to hear it all again, revisit stories I’d half grasped as a boy and kept putting together piece by broken piece in later years.
Mondal never tires of retelling Marichjhapi. ‘Refugee settlement was never meant to be easy. How do you handle swarms crossing over from Bangladesh to West Bengal? The problem was, when they were in Opposition, Left leaders told the Bangladeshi Hindu refugees, who were being packed in hordes to squatter camps in Dandakaranya, that if they came to power they would bring them back to West Bengal. But once in power, they backtracked.
‘Feeling betrayed by bad politics and fed up with the miserable living conditions in the camps in Dandakaranya, some refugees came and settled in the tiny island of Marichjhapi in the Sundarbans. For eighteen months they toiled to turn “mud island” into a habitat. For eighteen months, the government tried many times to evict them.
‘When your father and a few other scholars, intellectuals and journalists went there, they found Marichjhapi to be one of the best developed islands in the Sundarbans. The refugees did not ask the government for money, nor did they squat on others’ property. They only wanted a marshy wasteland.
‘But between 14 and 16 May 1979, in one of the worst human rights violations in post-independent India, the West Bengal government forcibly evicted around 10,000 or more from the island. There was rape, murder and poisoning. Bodies were buried in sea. Countless were killed even as some escaped, too afraid to tell the tale. At least 7,000 men, women and children were killed.’
‘But what about those who escaped the carnage?’ I asked him.
‘You know some of them, don’t you?’ he replied.
‘Mana,’ I whispered, to which he said, ‘Not just her.’
And no, it isn’t just Mana Goldar. I have, over the years, collected Marichjhapi’s broken fragments and tried to make it whole again.
Researchers have taken Marichjhapi to Oxbridge lecture circuits.
Sociologists, historians and Dalit activists have put out theories on what happened and why. Amitav Ghosh has fictionalized Marichjhapi in his book, The Hungry Tide.
In one of the most definitive papers on the massacre, ‘Refugee Resettlement in Forest Reserves: West Bengal Policy Reversal and the
Marichjhapi Massacre’, Ross Mallick attempts to answer why the Left Front government did what it did in 1979. ‘The Marichjhapi massacre was not that different from the Bosnian massacres, but at least in Europe the politicians responsible got indicted and had to go into hiding … However, no criminal charges were laid against any of those involved [in the Marichjhapi massacre] nor was any investigation undertaken,’ Mallick writes.
In ‘Dwelling on Morichjhanpi: When Tigers Became “Citizens”, Refugees “Tiger-Food”’, published in the Economic and Political Weekly on 23 April 2005, Annu Jalais observes the incident from a Dalit perspective. ‘The government’s primacy on ecology and its use of force in Marichjhapi was seen by the islanders as a betrayal not only of refugees and of the poor and the marginalized in general, but also of Bengali backward caste identity,’ she writes.
Most of the Marichjhapi islanders belonged to lower castes and were given the short shrift by the Left Front government, which was predominantly upper caste even though it espoused a classless, casteless society, Jalais argues.
Unlike Mallick and Jalais, I have never put pen to paper to bring Marichjhapi back for newspaper readers. I have never sat down for a drink with my academic or media friends to deconstruct the events of 1978-79.
What I have set out to do, instead, is document its oral history, the tales of a few of those who lived through those dark days. Here, I have recorded Mana Goldar’s story, journalist Sukhoranjan Sengupta’s reports, refugee mother Phonibala’s nightmare, the memory of the man who swam a river to save fellow journeymen and several others who have not been able to bury their past in the bloodied ‘mud island’.
Their nightmare is mine too. This is how it all began. And ended.
Nobody knows, nobody can ever know, not even in memory, because there are moments in time that are not knowable.
– Amitav Ghosh, The Shadow Lines
Marichjhapi is an island in the Sundarbans, located about seventy-five kilometres east of Kolkata. In mid-1978, around 1.5 lakh Hindu refugees, mostly belonging to the lower castes, came to settle here from refugee camps in central India. Some were driven back to the camps they came from, while the remaining managed to slip through police cordons and reach Marichjhapi.
Source: Google Maps
In less than a year, they transformed this no man’s land into a bustling village. There were rows of huts, a fishing co-operative, a school, salt pans, a health centre, a boat manufacturing unit, a beedi-making factory and a bakery, with money pooled from their individual savings and some help
from writers, activists and public intellectuals sympathetic to their story.
The West Bengal government extended no help.
By May 1979, the island had been cleared of all refugees by the Left Front government. Most of them were sent back to the camps they came from. There were many deaths during that period as a result of diseases, malnutrition as well as violence unleashed by the police on the orders of the government. Some of the refugees who survived Marichjhapi say the number went as high as 10,000. Marichjhapi could have been a shining example of the entrepreneurial spirit of a band of Bengali Dalits. Instead, it has become a forgotten story of one of the worst pogroms of post-Independent India, bigger than the 1984 anti-Sikh riots in Delhi or the 2002
anti-Muslim riots in Gujarat for the sheer scale of the violence and the number of deaths and rapes.
Why such violence took place is what this book tries to find out through the voices of those who were part of the Marichjhapi tragedy. But before we come to Marichjhapi, let us go back to the beginning – the Partition of Bengal that caused Bengalis to move from various districts of East Pakistan to Calcutta, from where they were packed off to refugee camps in central India.
Bengal, Interrupted
Bengal was divided twice. On 16 October 1905, the eastern, predominantly Muslim areas were separated from the western, largely Hindu areas.
Though the then-Viceroy of colonial India, Lord Curzon, stressed that Bengal was being divided in order to secure administrative efficiency, it was inherently the colonizers’ divide-and-rule policy aimed at separating the people of Bengal on communal lines.
While the Hindus (who belonged mostly to business and landowning classes) complained that the partition would make them ‘minorities’ in a province that also comprised Bihar and Orissa, the Muslims generally supported the division as they felt used by and inferior to the Hindu businessmen and landlords in west Bengal. Moreover, most of the mills and
factories were established in and around Calcutta, though raw materials were sourced from east Bengal from lands mostly worked upon by Muslim labourers.
In 1906, the Muslim League was formed in Dhaka to give Indian Muslims a political voice. The Partition sparked a severe political crisis with the Indian National Congress beginning the Swadeshi movement, which saw the large-scale boycott of British products and institutions. Due to such political protests, the two parts of Bengal were reunited on 12
December 1911.
Then came another partition, not on religious but on linguistic lines.
Hindi, Odia and Assamese areas were separated to form different provinces, with Bihar and Orissa in the west, and Assam in the east. The administrative capital of British India was also shifted from Calcutta to New Delhi.
The scars from the first partition never quite healed and they were violently raked up during this second partition of 1947, creating wounds that festered.
In August 1947, when the British finally left India after nearly 300
years, the subcontinent was divided into two independent nations, again on the basis of religion: Hindu-majority India and Muslim-majority Pakistan.
Thus began one of the greatest migrations in human history as millions of Muslims moved (or were forcibly moved) to West and East Pakistan (now known as Bangladesh), while millions of Hindus and Sikhs headed in the opposite direction.
The first wave that arrived in West Bengal were the upper caste Hindus and not the Dalits; the latter, firmly attached to the soil of their homeland for livelihood, did not leave their homes as swiftly as the upper caste Hindus.
Another important premise is that Muslims and low caste Hindus had little animosity. This was primarily due to the fact that they faced the same economic exploitation under the ruling upper class Hindus. They not only shared the same occupation, but also had the same lifestyle, language and
cultural fabric. To upper caste Hindus, both Muslims and lower caste Hindus were equally untouchable.
The academic paper ‘On the Margins of Citizenship: Cooper’s Camp in Nadia’ by Ishita Dey says that the significant years of refugee influx in the east (from East Pakistan to West Bengal) were 1947, 1948, 1950, 1960, 1962, 1964, 1970, whereas in the western region (from West Pakistan to North India), it was over by 1949. She writes:
According to official estimates of the Government of West Bengal, in 1953, 25 lakhs have been forcibly displaced. In 1953-61 there was no major influx but the figure swelled to 31-32 lakhs up to April 1958 and later in 1962 around 55,000 persons migrated after killing of minorities in Pabna and Rajsahi.
Approximately 6 lakh people crossed border between 1964 and 1971 and following the disturbances after creation of Bangladesh there was a massive exodus of about 75 lakhs. It was reported by the Minister of Supply and Rehabilitation, Shri Ramniwas Mirdha in a Lok Sabha debate in 1976 that 52.31 lakh persons migrated from East Bengal to India from 1948-1971.
This massive influx virtually broke down the administrative machinery of the West Bengal government. Dr Bidhan Chandra Roy, the then-chief minister of West Bengal, in a statement in the Assembly on 28 September 1950, said that mere provision of shelter for refugees was not enough. What his government repeatedly emphasized was lack of space, lack of resources and lack of aptitude on part of the refugees to adapt themselves to new conditions.
On 14 October 1952, the passport system was introduced and its announcement sparked another flood of refugees.
According to official records, the number was 3,16,000 in West Bengal and, including Assam and Tripura, went up to 5,87,000 within three years.
This group of refugees was also ninety-nine per cent Namasudras and low caste Hindus.
The refugees who came to India between 31 March 1958 and December 1963 had to give an undertaking that they would not seek any help from the government and, in addition, a citizen of India had to give an undertaking of their maintenance before a migration certificate could be issued. However, these restrictions could not check the inflow completely.
As for illegal entries into Indian territory, the total number of infiltrators came up to about 3 lakhs, according to a conservative estimate from unofficial sources.
Another heavy influx was witnessed between December 1963 and February 1964, following the disturbance sparked by the loss of Hazrat Bal from the mosque of Srinagar in Kashmir. The indiscriminate killings, rapes and looting at Khulna, Dhaka, Jessore, Faridpur, Mymensingh, Noakhali and Chattogram drove out more than 2 lakh refugees from East Pakistan.
Out of these, 1 lakh came to West Bengal, 75 thousand to Assam and 25
thousand to Tripura ( Jugantar newspaper, 7 April 1964).
How painful this journey was, emotionally and otherwise, is documented in Chapter 1 of this book through a nostalgic retelling of the migration to India from East Pakistan by rights activist Jyotirmoy Mondal.
Destination Dandakaranya
The new contingent of refugees, mostly Namasudras, were sent from temporary camps in West Bengal to camps in Dandakaranya, comprising parts of what are today independent states of Odisha, Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh and Maharashtra. The Dandakaranya Development Authority (DDA) was set up by the central government to develop this mostly arid region by gainfully employing refugees in road construction work and for developing farmlands.
The region has been referenced in the Hindu epic Ramayana, when Rama, Lakshmana and Sita were exiled for fourteen long years. It was somewhere here, the ancient text tells us, that King Ravana’s sister
Surpanakha met Rama’s brother Lakshmana and fell in love. When he snubbed her and cut off her nose, a long battle followed that ended with Rama killing Ravana.
The lakhs of Bengali refugees who were sent here fought their own battles with sweltering summers and freezing winters, uncultivable land and natives who spoke a different language.
Some adapted to the conditions over time and made this region home; like sixty-four year old Kalachand Das who was sent to Mana Camp in Raipur and never left. Marichjhapi was a misadventure, he maintains (Chapter 6).
Others pined to return to West Bengal where there were fellow Bengalis who shared the same language and culture. Some recount the hostility of camp officers and natives, as well as the unfavourable living condition in
The Left Betrayal
When the refugees were being packed off to various camps in Dandakaranya, the Left parties who were in opposition in West Bengal demanded that they be absorbed within Bengal itself. In the course of my interviews with the survivors of Marichjhapi, many have told me that Jyoti Basu – who went on to become chief minister for twenty-three uninterrupted years (1977-2000) – himself had given speeches advocating the West Bengal government to do the same. Many Left leaders, most notably Ram Chatterjee, went to visit the refugees in Dandakaranya and assured them that they would be back in Bengal when the Left comes to power (Chapter 8). The refugees, naturally, thought the Left was their ally.
In June 1977, the Left Front came to power but, surprisingly, no one from the government seemed interested in following up on the promises made earlier to rehabilitate the refugees in West Bengal. Many desperate refugees, after waiting for some time, sent a memorandum to Radhika Banerjee, who was the relief and rehabilitation minister of the Left Front government at that time, on 12 July 1977. They said if the government
didn’t do anything to bring them back from Dandakaranya, they would be compelled to return on their own.
Marichjhapi and murders most foul
Out of despair, sometime in March 1978, more than 1.5 lakh refugees from different parts of Dandakaranya left for Hasnabad railway station in Bengal.
As soon as they reached Bengal, the police forced them down from trains and made arrangements for sending them back to Dandakaranya, though the attempt was not wholly successful.
Ignoring the hostility, thousands of men, women and children reached Marichjhapi island on 18 April 1978. More would join them in coming months.
So how did they come to know of an uninhabited island in the interiors of the Sundarbans? Some accounts say that Left leaders themselves had shown the island to the refugees when it was still in the opposition in Bengal and the refugees were in Dandakaranya. Others insist the refugee leaders discovered the island as they explored the Sundarbans for a place to make their own. A part of the Sundarbans lies in Bangladesh and this may
have drawn the refugees to the place (Chapter 6).
Nestled in the Gangetic delta, the Sundarbans happen to be the largest mangrove forest in the world, straddling India and Bangladesh. It is, in fact, a UNESCO-declared world biosphere reserve. What makes this unique ecosystem even more special is the fact that the delta is formed by the confluence of four mighty rivers – Brahmaputra, Ganga, Meghna and Padma.
With no help from the government, the refugees transformed the
nowhere land in the Sundarbans into a thriving village ecosystem (Chapter
6). But, by May 1979, they were driven out by the police who allegedly set
fire to 6,000 huts on the island. Nobody knows how many survived the carnage. In between, most notably during an economic blockade in the latter part of January 1979, refugees alleged that the police attacked the islanders repeatedly on instructions of the Left Front government.
When I spoke to Kanti Ganguly (Chapter 8) and read accounts, in the Statesman, of Amiya Kumar Samanta, Sundarbans Superintendent of Police, who oversaw the operation of cleaning Marichjhapi, I got to know that ‘less than ten’ people died on that island. However, all survivors I spoke to put the number of deaths to anywhere between 5,000 and 10,000; some said even more. Why such a wide gap? One reason is though the Bengali press sporadically covered the Marichjhapi story, the island is so far away from mainstream Calcutta and so difficult to access that what happened in Marichjhapi can only be reconstructed as oral history.
On 17 May 1979, Buddhadeb Bhattacharya, the then-minister of information, declared at Writer’s Building that Marichjhapi had been cleared of refugees.
Cause of carnage
Why did the Jyoti Basu government forcibly evict Marichjhapi settlers? The official reason is that Marichjhapi is a protected island and the refugees were destroying the ecology by cutting trees. There are, however, allegations against the government of caste bias as the refugees were mostly Dalits. Some say this is an example of how Bengal’s bhadralok Marxists, who talk about a classless, casteless society in seminar halls and political
speeches, display their inner caste prejudices (Manoranjan Byapari, Chapter
9). Others say the Left Front government thought these settlers would vote
against them as they had gone back on their word of bringing them back to West Bengal.
But nothing justifies the horrors unleashed on Marichjhapi’s settlers.
The real story of Marichjhapi is buried somewhere between manufactured lies and stifled cries. I revisited those I have known for years, met new people who still carry those old hurts in their hearts. Putting pen to my reporter’s notebook, I have written down fragmented memories of these women and men who got sucked into the Marichjhapi story.
Jyotirmoy Mondal saves witches. That’s a funny calling card for this nondescript seventy-something who has retired as a government bank clerk and has an actress for a daughter. But some lives will always be hard to decipher.
At eighty-four Gouranga Sarani, in a part of Kolkata not many would call genteel, Mondal puffs on his bidi as I prod him to tell me a story he has told me many times before. In my early days of journalism, when saving the world used to be a ‘thing’, Mondal was a source for many ‘human interest stories’. He travels into remote districts of Bengal to help widows who are branded witches by families and neighbours with an eye on usurping property. He doesn’t help them because he wants to sit on a dais, or for awards or to be on TV shows, but because he had promised himself after Marichjhapi that he would fight for those who do not have the means to fight off the ferocity of men. In my quest to document the oral history of the people of Marichjhapi, Mondal’s is the first stop.
There is hardly a more engaging narration of the trials of the refugees in Mana and other camps in the Dandakaranya region than Mondal’s accounts.
He takes me back to the beginning of things, when he was but a child and his father was fleeing from one country to another to save their family. It was 1956-57 and hundreds of thousands of masons and farmers, fisherfolk and potters, land owners and the landless, came to be referred to by a single word: ‘udbastu’, refugee. He tells me the story of a father and son, Sukhchand and Sachin, who lost everything in the process. He begins thus: A stranger offers a chillum to Sukhchand. Sachin, eyes heavy from the day’s exertions, takes in one of life’s most profound lessons – respect the
fellow traveller even when he looks as hopeless as you are – stranded behind the engine room of a steamer, going to a land he has never been to, to make a home that may never be.
It is an elaborate act, comical even, that Sachin watches as the small man holds out the earthen pipe with his right hand, with his left palm touching his right elbow and bending forward towards his father Sukhchand. In their part of Bengal, Kadambari village in Faridpur zilla, the part they are leaving behind and what is now another country, this is considered a gesture of respect, Sukhchand would tell Sachin later.
That night, in that dark, dank space where men snored and women sang lullabies to put babies to sleep, Sachin misses a man with a head full of unkempt white hair, an untrimmed snow white beard and dry skin on his arms and legs, like scales of a dead fish. His grandfather Gayali. He misses hearing Gayali call him ‘bhai’ in an attempt to wish away the two generations of gap between them and become friends. Sachin runs his eyes one last time from father to stranger and stranger to father as two men take solace in their deep drags. And then, in that borderland between sense and sleep, his mind traces the distance they have covered during the course of the day.
In his sleep, Sachin swims back to the shore, to their village that sits by the river Madhumati. There, under the shade of big trees, is Gayan’s house.
And Koitha’s and Dhalis’ houses. And the village wise man’s, the one who had warned against such a long journey. The madman’s house, where not everyone is mad. The Dhalis next door make battle shields that stop spears thrown from afar and break swords into two.
On the riverbank, on a relatively dry patch of land, is the local market.
Large round tin pots with fishes wriggling inside, the fresh catch of the day, are found here, sometimes the famed hilsa of the Padma river. And sugarcanes, jackfruits, mangoes, tortoises, all put out for sale. A bustling bazaar.
It is in this bazaar that Sachin had cried for the ripe green guavas that Gayali had refused him, saying something about the monsoons and stomach
problems and instead bought him Madan Kut Kutis, small jaggery lozenges that make ‘kut-kut’ sounds when bit into.
Sachin’s father Sukhchand, who travels often, gets him an anna’s worth of lozenges when he comes back from the village school where he teaches.
He couldn’t get a university degree as all universities are far away at Madaripur, Faridpur or Dhaka, the last of which is three days by boat.
Sukhchand married in the year of his matriculation examination. His neighbours had advised against it, saying that marriage could wait: ‘The boy needs an education first.’ But Gayali wouldn’t let go of the girl. Where would they find such a beauty for his long-faced son? So Sukhchand got married, took his exam and failed. The next year, however, he sailed through. ‘Our new bride Ranga-bou brings good luck,’ said Gayali. Sachin was born soon after. With two sons, two daughters-in-law and now a grandson, the widower Gayali could not have asked for more.
Sachin thus spends his days in the laps of loving parents and grandparents and the shade of the banyan tree that has outlived his forefathers and will live some more. But a shadow soon falls over Sachin’s idyllic world.
The riots are a rumour at first. But when the village headmaster, the man whose word is gospel across ten villages, falls to a traitor’s sword, Sukhchand wonders if this is the end of their peaceful days. The headmaster had gone to stop a riot in the next village and tell the Hindus and Muslims, many of whom had been his students, not to kill each other for the sake of religion. The killings stop but when the old man was on his way back, someone, who Sukhchand describes as a snake in the shape of a man, hacked him into two. As the headmaster and two of his young students fall,
‘Jai ma Kali’ and ‘Allahu Akbar’ war cries fill the night sky like venom spreading into arteries. Ram-dao, daggers, swords and tridents are out.
Sukhchand has been away for a long time. He comes back just before Durga puja, and Gayali asks him what had kept him away. His breathing gets
heavy. This is a question Sukhchand would rather not be asked, as it would prompt an answer Gayali would rather not hear. Sukhchand has decided to leave Kadambari; leave East Pakistan and cross over to that new country they call India. Just the name itself is a cuss word here, but this country is no longer safe for Hindus, for his wife and Sachin.
It would be their last Durga puja in the village of their forefathers.
Dark clouds hover over the village. There is a shadow of despair in Ranga-bou’s eyes. Gayali tries in vain to keep the storm inside in check, but little Sachin will not listen to reason. He runs into his grandfather’s arms, crying and pleading him not to let them go. The old man looks away.
Outside, it rains heavily.
Sachin watches as the boatman loosens the rope that ties the boat to the ferry and, with the precision of a village acrobat who has learnt how to walk on a rope without batting an eye, he jumps into the boat, steadies it and lets it sail.
The village has come to see them off. The two sisters-in-law wave goodbye to each other, eyes crimson with crying. Gayali, still fighting tears, cries out: ‘Sukhchand, it is a long journey, baba. Be safe, son. Take care of Ranga-bou. The little one has a bad stomach; take good care of his diet.
Take care, my son.’
Kadambari fades into a blur, then Kochuchushi bill and Chitalmari khal.
They reach the bank where steamers are lined, and it is in the crowded engine room of one such steamer ferrying passengers from one Bengal to the other that Sachin and his family find a place next to the small man smoking his chillum. As his father shares a smoke with the stranger, a blind man sings:
‘O Lord, why did you tear my land apart,
Why did you snatch my peace!’
Sachin sleeps.
The year is 1957. In front of Sachin is a sea of heads and hands carrying broken lives in bundles, getting off rusty steamers. Khulna jetty is a busy thoroughfare. Men from makeshift hotels come looking for customers.
Sellers sell knick-knacks. But Sukhchand has no time to waste; he tells his wife and son to hurry. It is a long journey from that point to their destination. Under the glare of a merciless sun, they walk to Khulna station.
On the way, Sachin sees a city for the first time. Giant tortoises without mouths, moving on paved roads. They call them cars here. Women in footwear look at men in the eye and share a laugh. Ranga-bou, not used to seeing women in fancy chappals, blushes and looks away.
Green-coloured trains are taking people to Calcutta. Barishal Express is transporting hilsa, hope, people and memories to stations unknown. The Madhumati hilsa is a big hit on the other side, someone says. They ride the train to Benapole, where they find policemen in droves, checking migration papers and keeping an eye on who is taking away more than they have declared. Many are without papers, praying they won’t be found out, but no one can escape these policemen. Men are being forced out of compartments. Some are allowed to remain inside after offering bribes but they are pushed around, their belongings rummaged, their gold and silver taken away, and their women eyed with greed. The law takes its course!
Cops in blue caps and khaki overalls approach Sachin’s father. Sachin has never seen cops before. ‘Why are grown men wearing school uniforms?’ he wonders.
‘How much luggage are you carrying?’
Mild-mannered Sukhchand fumbles for a reply to this as one of them dips his hand into the pitcher to check if there is money or jewellery hidden inside the rice. ‘Only grains, it seems.’ They laugh. ‘But you are carrying more luggage than you are entitled to,’ says one, eyeing Ranga-bou. These are not human eyes. Sachin has seen such eyes before; these are the eyes of an animal on prowl. Fear grips his child heart.
Sukhchand quickly fishes out thirty crumpled rupee notes which the men pocket, stamping their border slips and deboarding. The train leaves Benapole.
Lush green fields; lazy, grazing cattle; trees, named and unnamed; ponds, filled and dried up; sweaty farmers; and busy bazaars pass by.
Memories muddle up in Sachin’s mind. Gayali must be in the field now; it’s the season of harvest. Has he taken the day off, grieving their departure?
Sachin never saw his grandmother, but his grandfather showered him with all the love in the world. His big arms were Sachin’s nest during infancy.
There is a lump in Sachin’s throat as the train reaches Haridaspur. It is a long haul. An hour later, they cross an overbridge and a signboard next to it says ‘No Man’s Land’. The day gets hotter, and the men inside the compartment grow restless, as another sign flashes by, ‘Welcome to India!’
They are almost there. Sealdah station is now a wish away. They are in India.
Sukhchand comes out of his tent to face the fading sun. He has not been keeping well for some time. The vaccination injection at the Bongaon rail station has left him nauseated. He stays up coughing at night as the small bulb flickers over his head, hearing couples grunt and babies cry from other tents. Privacy is a foreign concept.
They have been here for a few days. Their names have been registered in fat files and temporary arrangements have been made outside Sealdah station for refugees waiting to be transported to relief camps near and elsewhere. Ranga-bou cooks their meals on the footpath, laying out bricks to make an oven and using twigs to start a fire. The pitcher of rice they have carried with them is emptying fast.
There is a two-rupee cash dole for every refugee daily. Sukhchand gets five rupees for the family. ‘It’s a beggar’s life here,’ he spits out. Who knew India would be such a depressing tract of fatigue and failure! He sees only despair and death all around him. Sukhchand looks at his wife – so full of life despite the travails – then looks out into the distance at the hope that is Calcutta. Is it a city or a mirage?
A week later, they are told to move again. The Jogeshwar Dihi transit camp is to be their new address. They board a train crowded with their kind; Hindu refugees in hundreds, trying to find a footing in a new land. There is not a single vacant seat inside. Ranga-bou and Sachin sit on the steel suitcase they are carrying, while Sukhchand stands guard. A baby wails from the seat in front of them. The mother looks around helplessly at the vacuous eyes of men around her and then, in a move practised to perfection from years of travelling amongst strangers, she uncovers a breast to feed the child.
‘Where are you from, sister?’ someone asks her.
‘Gopalgunj,’ she replies.
‘That’s where my parents stay!’ Ranga-bou exclaims. The woman’s name is Aaynamoti, and it turns out that she knows Ranga-bou’s family.
She tells Ranga-bou that her parents haven’t left the country. She is a chalice of youth; even such a long and trying journey has not broken her spirit or wiped her smile. Her husband, Akhil, keeps glancing at her as he chats with Sukhchand. The train chugs along.
Jogeshwar Dihi transit camp, Post Office Koichor, Burdwan zilla, West Bengal, is a small village with tents arranged around a big banyan tree.
Nearby there is a large pond filled with lotuses. Red earth is laid out like a dusty carpet for new visitors who have come here after a night’s journey by train, a halt by the riverside and finally a lorry ride.
Koichor bazaar is held on the other side of the lake twice a week in the mornings. Local vegetables and fish from nearby ponds – skinny and tasteless, unlike the ones from Padma – are sold in rotund pots. The only saving grace is the dheki shaak that Ranga-bou has found growing amongst the wild vegetation around the lake. That and boiled rice, on the first day at the camp, after several half-fed days is king’s meal for Sukhchand.
In a patch outside their tent, Ranga-bou plants the bottlegourd seeds she has carried all the way from their village. Turning a tent into a new home
takes up most of her time. Sukhchand is now the teacher of the camp.
Classes are held around the banyan tree. ‘Rabi Thakur took classes like this,’ he mutters to himself and smiles. No chairs or tables; only a stool for Sukhchand and a blackboard, propped up somehow. He teaches the alphabet, multiplication tables and some geography to the camp’s children.
To keep the flock together, he dilutes his lessons with tales from the lost land.
By teaching camp students, Sukhchand starts earning seventy rupees a month. His hope that there would be some relief at last is in vain as a strange illness comes to visit them. People begin to suffer and die of a peculiar fever. After much outcry, with two babies and an old man dead, a city doctor finally comes to examine the patients. Are lives so cheap around here?
The doctor seems to be a quack. His white pills and red tonic is unable to stop the deaths. Gloom has descended on the camp. Akhil has died, leaving Aaynamoti and their child at the mercy of uncertain fate.
A year passes by. Ranga-bou is with child again. The feeble sapling she had planted outside their tent is beginning to take the sturdy shape of a tree.
Other families have grown vegetables around their tents, pumpkins and chillies, onions and gourds, in an attempt to camouflage the barrenness of their refugee lives. It is time for the ten-armed goddess Durga’s arrival.
Sukhchand is now the camp headman. He makes arrangement for pujas and collects what little the families have to offer as chanda. He is also the solution giver. Jogeshwar Dihi transit camp is a mini sea of humanity –
people live and die here, couples mate, marriages break, widows find solace in the willing arms of married men … Sukhchand hears every gossip and is privy to every argument. Nothing is too personal or too sacred for this herd of homeless border-crossers.
Sukhchand’s class has swelled. Two new teachers have been appointed from the village adjacent to the camp. There is a chair and table now, a roof above their heads and a bell to announce the beginning and end of lessons.
A proper school!
One day a boy asks Sukhchand the meaning of ‘refugee’. He had wandered into a locality nearby and, thirsty after a long walk, knocked at a door. When a woman came to the door, the boy had asked for water. She had looked at him with scorn, before turning back to tell her mother-in-law that he looked like a normal boy, not a refugee. Both women had laughed out loud.
‘What is a refugee, sir?’ he asks Sukhchand again.
‘By legal definition that may be borrowed from the United Nation’s 1951 convention, a refugee is a person compelled to leave his country of nationality as he feels insecure and is afraid of persecution of his life, belief and opinions in his native land.’ Big words, but Sukhchand repeats them for his young student, eyes watering. His pupil repeats the words after him. ‘By legal definition that may be borrowed from the United Nation’s 1951
convention …’
Sukhchand gets up from his chair, trembling. Men and women have gathered around him, circling the school. A farman has come. They have been told to move again. Trains are ready, the government babus have announced, to take them to Dandakaranya. The Dandakaranya project area is 7,678 square kilometres of land stretching from the districts of Koraput and Kalahandi in Orissa to Bastar in Madhya Pradesh. It is the same place where Rama was banished for fourteen long years. Now, camps have been set up for these Bengali refuges from East Pakistan. If they don’t move, the cash dole will stop.
‘Who are we?’ Sukhchand asks.
‘We are humanity’s leftovers,’ the crowd shouts back.
The babus quietly make their exit, but come back at night with men in khakis. They enter tents without warning. The refugees put up a feeble fight, and policemen answer back with lathis and teargas.
Lorries are waiting outside, which Sukhchand and the others are forced to board. In the chaos, leaders from Leftist parties appear from nowhere.
Sukhchand cries for help. This is temporary, they say, Bengali refugees will be brought back to West Bengal. They speak with conviction. ‘Comrades, we will ensure this happens soon. Refugees will be settled in the islands of Sundarbans. But for now, you will have to go to Dandakaranya.’
The stench of unwashed bodies huddled like cows herded for slaughter houses fills the trucks. Children wail, men and women sit seething with rage or sob, raw wounds dripping blackened blood in their unending ride across unknown lands. The trucks stop thrice a day near eateries and barren spaces for food and defecation. ‘They are transporting animals from one stable to another,’ says Sukhchand.
Days give in to nights, and nights turn hollow, yellow in an endless cycle before they reach another refugee settlement.
Malkangiri.
According to Valmiki’s Ramayana, Rama spent thirteen long years in these forests with his wife Sita and brother Lakshmana. It is from here that Sita was abducted by the Lanka king Ravana, which led to the epic war.
Camp babus greet them as they make their way to the tents. Like bored shepherd boys counting flock, the babus do a quick roll call. Refugees become numbers again. They are told they would get a cash dole here as well, but they would have to work. And if anyone tries to flee, the dole money for all would be reduced. ‘That is it for the day,’ a babu barks. ‘Go home, now.’
‘Home,’ Sukhchand lets out a laugh. ‘Home, indeed!’
It is dark and dreary. The only sound is the gurgling of the Tamsa river flowing over a bed of pebbles. Behind the tents, a thick forest blocks out
everything that lies beyond. This is the land’s end. Their new home: village number six, Malkangiri.
Work days begin early here. Sal trees, mahua trees, big trees, small trees and trees without names – they all have to be felled, bidi leaves grinded. If you grind a thousand leaves a day, you get two rupees.
To fell trees, they have to go deep into the forest. Bears come without warning; wild monkeys swoop down from high branches. A week into their arrival, a man is left badly scarred by an enraged monkey. He had gone too deep into the forest. There are snakes on the ground and tigers behind bushes. The men move in packs, watching each other’s back. The women cook, clean and pray for the men’s return, planting saplings around tents like old times.
‘Why didn’t tigers attack Rama or Sita? They spent fourteen years inside the jungle,’ a child asks his grandmother one day. ‘Who would have killed Ravana if tigers had attacked Rama?’ she answers with logic no one refutes.
Bribes are a quick currency to buy peace in Malkangiri. Sukhchand knows this is not how it should be, but they have to grease palms to get their dole on time; to grow crops, they have to bribe; and they have to pay up again if they want a doctor to visit the camp. It is as if one has to bribe to stay alive here.
Nights fall early in the camp. Tired to their bones, hungry lovers feed on each other and whisper into the dark, fearful of being heard. Their muffled lovemaking brings life to the camp as one more night passes into the void.
There is some commotion outside Sukhchand’s tent. Nabakumar’s mother is scolding him, using harsh cuss words, while some watch the drama with glee. ‘Why can’t you marry that woman you fuck every day in the forest?
Mukhpora, you think I don’t know what you are up to? How long will you
make me cook and clean for you with my old hands? All my life I have slaved for your father. Now he is gone but I have to work for you.’
Nabakumar sits next to her, cheeks flushed.
The colony knows there is something cooking between Paunder’s sister (Paunder’s sister has become her only identity) and Nabakumar. Paunder’s mother has complained to Nabakumar’s mother about their affair, angering the old woman. How dare the girl’s mother have the temerity to broach this topic with her! After all, she has the upper hand, being the mother of the boy. She has already decided to marry off her son to some other girl from the camp. She tells Ranga-bou she would talk to Sukhchand about this.
Ranga-bou smiles. Roopchand, the bard, sings:
‘Who are you that saves me every time?
Why can I not see you, make you mine?’
Aaynamoti hides a blush. Ranga-bou sees a hint of happiness on her face after many, many days. Aaynamoti had become a portrait of grief since she lost her husband to the fever, and Roopchand’s music has brought back life to her eyes. ‘Is there something brewing between the two?’ Ranga-bou wonders.
Old habits. Sukhchand has taken up teaching again. His salary is seventy rupees a month like before. He has chosen the shade of a big tree near the camp as his classroom. From here, you can look afar – beyond the river, below the hills. The tribals have their hutments there; they live on good, cultivable land. The rocky, barren land is where the camp has been set up.
Even when it rains, the land is unmoved. The men dig deep, removing pebbles and rocks both small and large. They employ every trick known to farmers to grow rice and sesame. They tend to this land like a mother trying to bring an ailing child back to health.
The tribals come to talk to them, but it’s a tongue they cannot fathom.
Short, dark men with angry eyes speak at length without making sense.
They scream, make faces and stomp on the ground. It seems that they are not happy with the farming activities of the refugees.
The next morning, half their crops vanish. Someone has, in the dead of the night, taken away the produce. Months of hard work has been wasted.
There is unrest in the camp; the lads want revenge. They want to cross the river and teach the tribals a lesson, but Sukhchand will have none of it.
They will take turns to guard the fields at night, he orders. This is not going to be an easy task. There is fear of a tiger, so they make fire and speak in loud voices to keep the beast away.
Poush Mela. Back in their Bangla, it used to be a season of celebration.
Here, too, Bengali refugees from nearby camps have set up a tent in the distance. Kobi Gaan is being recited all day. At night, they arrange a bioscope: Sitar Banabas, the banishment of Sita.
Sometime that night, Paunder’s sister goes missing. She never came back after watching Sitar Banabas. Paunder, Nabakumar and others go looking for her. Someone goes to find Sukhchand, who has been working in the forest. They fan out into the forest in groups of two. Where could she be?
A loud scream is heard. At a corner of the forest, inside a thick bush, Paunder’s sister lies naked with horror frozen in her dead eyes. Her lips have been chewed out, her breasts mangled and legs scratched. Uneven red lines run across her fair skin. A black pool of blood has gathered around her thighs; red ants swimming in it.
Paunder’s mother reaches the spot; she screams, her face contorted, eyes bloodshot, seething with cold rage. It deafens the men around her and jolts them into a murderous fury.
Feeble-limbed Sukhchand lets out a war cry. He picks up a lathi, others pick up whatever they can lay their hands on, and they rush at the babus who are on their way to the camp in a jeep. They see murder in the men’s eyes and leap out of the jeep, running for their lives. The camp office is set
on fire, along with the abandoned jeep. The men take down everything that stands in their way.
They do not know who killed Paunder’s sister – the tribals or these babus – and they do not care. They will avenge her.
Sukhchand has spent a month in jail. News of the camp violence travels east. The press comes to see him from Calcutta, journalists jot down notes in tiny notebooks as he speaks. ‘You are a hero in Calcutta, sir. Your picture is on the front pages of many newspapers as the leader of Bengali-speaking refugees in Dandakaranya.’ Sukhchand smiles indulgently. It is a smile he reserves for children in the camp school who do not know what they are talking about.
Some Left leaders have made the long journey to Dandakaranya; some of whom Sukhchand has met before when they were forced out of Jogeshwar Dihi transit camp. You should join our party, they say. We need leaders like you with us. Sukhchand smiles again. With so many important visitors coming to see him, the pressure to release him mounts. He gets bail.
Sukhchand comes out of his hut, smiling. These are good days. He has a beard from the time he has spent in jail, his salary has gone up and he has become a father yet again. More babus have been assigned for the ‘welfare’
of refugees. There are more frequent inspections, and more roll calls to check if anyone has gone missing. Doctors come often and put their stethoscopes in their ears at the sound of the slightest discomfort.
Sukhchand knows why their behaviour has changed: elections are nearing.
No one wants unrest at a refugee camp.
But even good days are treacherous. A week after the elections, on a particularly dark and gloomy day, eagles circle the camp and tribals descend like acid rain. They have not forgiven the violence of these talkative strangers on their land. These are weather-hardened men; men without fear
or remorse, who fight bears, tigers and snakes, and eat roots and snails.
These are men not to be trifled with. Yet, the refugees fight them with all the strength in their hearts. The red earth gets a few shades darker.
One tribal tries to enter Aaynamoti’s tent and Roopchand attacks him with his dotara. Anything can be used as a weapon. Suckhchand picks up a stick. Dholakaka has picked up his spade; Ranga-bou her kitchen knife.
There is blood.
That night, under a starless sky, camp residents meet as a crowd of broken limbs and bandaged heads. ‘Let us go away from here, Sukhchand,’
Dholakaka, the camp elder, says. ‘Even Pakistan is better than here.’ They talk all night. ‘Let us go back to Bengal. Decades have passed here. That is where we belong.’
There is a new government in West Bengal: the Left Front government.
Their government. They have seen known faces in newspapers. Faces of new ministers. Faces that had given them hope in days of distress. They should go back to Bengal now. ‘Let us go, Sukhchand.’
Months pass as they plan the perfect escape, carrying whatever they can in the dead of night.
The central reserved police had taken away a girl from their camp. Unlike Paunder’s sister, she had lived to tell the story of that night. They had taken turns to rape her, then dropped her back in the morning. The camp residents had gone to protest, only to be lathi-charged back to the camp. The men talk of Marichjhapi in the Sundarban islands. Some from other camps have already gone and were starting new lives in the heart of the Sundarbans.
Dronopal, Matri, Kanker, Dhamtari, Paralkot railway stations pass. They ride back to where they belong, joined by refugees from Mana Camp.
1978. Howrah station. A band of unsung men and women squat on the platform. They will wait here till promises are met. They will wait for the
ministers to come. Instead, there are flashbulbs and a flurry of queries: Why have you come back? And why in such large numbers?
What should Sukhchand tell these reporters? Should he tell them about Paunder’s sister, or about Sachin, or of the men who lost life and limb fighting tribals, or recount their failed attempts to make home in the most hostile of places? Instead, he mutters: ‘If we have to die, we die here. We won’t go anywhere else.’
He remembers what that leader had told him when he was in jail: ‘When you return to Bengal, five crore people will raise ten crore hands to greet you.’
Where were those hands?
The sun sets every day with their hopes dashed. The government for the casteless and classless margins, the new Left Front government, extends no support. Rehabilitation is a distant dream, and the dole has also stopped.
They march to Rajpath; a big procession of shabby men and women, half-fed, fed up with their fate. Khakis come and lathi-charge: ‘Go back, beggars! Go back to your camps.’
They are back at the station, their belongings packed into tiny bundles.
They will go to Marichjhapi by themselves, they decide, with cold resolve in their hearts. They take a late-night train to Barasat. Marichjhapi is a few hours from there, they have been told. There are cops at Barasat station, armed and watching them with narrowed eyes. Walking next to Sukhchand is a sadhu from Mana Camp, a man with eyes red from cheap alcohol. ‘Jai ma Kali!’ he roars.
They have neither the strength to go further nor the money to buy train tickets. Women sit down on the platform, arrange bricks in the shape of ovens, put dry twigs inside and make fire; the little ones are hungry. Some boiled rice will do. A khaki tries to snatch away a woman’s belongings, but she resists with all her might. He kicks her hard. Half-boiled rice scatters on the platform, and the woman recoils in horror. The red-eyed sadhu roars and pierces the policeman’s thigh with his trident. Drops of blood fall on the rice.
Sukhchand rushes out of the platform with Ranga-bou and the boys as teargas and lathis rain down on refugees. Screams and gunshots fill the night sky. They hide inside a field, shivering at night. They must move again.
Hasnabad. Here, homeless wanderers smell good earth after more than a decade in dry land. Small mud islands are spread out against the sea at a distance. They think of the Padma-kissed land they used to call home. But the day’s harsh sun dries up their dreams. Dholakaka’s wife, Roopchand and Aaynamoti have gone missing during the night’s violence. Some have been arrested. Some have gone missing. But more people are coming in trains. People like them; Bengali refugees from various camps in Dandakaranya.
They get on a train without any tickets, and cross Bagna, Kumirmari, Kolagachiya river and the much smaller Punjali, before getting down at a station where land ends and sea begins. They breathe deeply, filling their lungs with the salty air. Marichjhapi is a boat ride away.
But how will they hire boats? What will they eat in Marichjhapi? How will they build homes, till land and grow crops? Where will the money come from? Sukhchand decides that they will find work at their current stop, save money and then make their trip.
They spread out into the villages like beggars.
Sukhchand takes work as a tiller. He evens earth, removes pebbles and makes land fit to grow crops. The money is good. The landowner, Enamul Haq, pays him five rupees a day, which is enough to buy a full meal for the family. At the end of the day, he bends in gratitude as Enamul counts his pennies – it is important to show gratitude and keep the employer in good humour. There are too many hungry hands ready to snatch work from you!
Ranga-bou finds work at the local bidi factory.
With the little ones at her side, she leaves early in the morning and works till evening. The family meets below a big tree outside the station as
the day ends. There is not even a tin shed for cover. This is not the time for luxury, however; they have to save every penny. There are other trees around them, and other families below those trees. All are refugees from East Pakistan, runaways from transit camps, waiting to relocate to Marichjhapi.
Like locusts, the press follows them here too. They are making it to the front pages of Calcutta newspapers every day: ‘Refugee mother gets down from train. Dead child in arms. Not a tear on her face.’
Another says: ‘A body has been found hanging from a tree in Hasnabad! Was she was raped before she was killed?’ It is Aaynamoti.
One of the refugees, Upen, has been caught trying to steal money from his employer. He is sent to jail. His young wife has sold herself to her employer. Their little one has disappeared after that violent night at the rail station; will she ever find him? Yet, Upen is happy. When Sukhchand goes to see him in jail, he says this is a proper room after all, this lock up, and there is food. What more can he wish for? ‘But dada,’ he says, ‘take our people to Marichjhapi. I will join you when they let me out of here.’
Sukhchand looks at the wide expanse of the Ichamati. From a distance, he looks like a bag of bones encased in blood and dirt. He had been crouching behind bushes, crawling on all fours like an animal evading its hunter.
‘Roopchand, Ranga-bou, Sachin, Paunder’s mother, Dholakaka,’ he whispers sharply. The bushes by the river bed move ever so slightly. A few heads suddenly appear from nowhere, more ghost than human.
Boats float on Ichamati. The sky wraps them up in its night blanket. Up above, a few stars – too few – darken the sea some more. Suddenly, there’s a flash of light. Someone speaks into a mike: ‘Go back. Turn your boats. Go back or we will open fire.’ It’s the river police! ‘Section 144 has been imposed on this island. Turn back!’
‘Turn back and go where?’ Sukhchand screams. ‘Tell me. Where do we go?’
‘This is no time for argument. Go back or we will open fire.’
‘Where shall we go?’ Sukhchand shouts again.
‘Go back to Dandakaranya,’ replies the inspector. The police launch has come close to their boats; so close that Sukhchand can almost smell the inspector’s naked rage.
‘No, we won’t go back. We will go to Marichjhapi!’ Sukhchand jumps into the river and starts swimming.
‘Sukhchand was your father, wasn’t he?’ I ask.
Mondal smiles.
‘So what happened after you reached Marichjhapi?’ I prod.
Mondal looks out of the window into the darkness that has gathered outside his old house. I have known him most of my adult life, and have travelled with him to pockets of darkness I never knew existed. We have grown close with time, but he has never answered my queries about what happened in Marichjhapi; only how the band of 10,000 determined people reached there. What life held in store for them once they reached their dream island, he refuses to tell. Tonight is no different. His story stops where Marichjhapi begins.
‘Let that question be. Let Marichjhapi remain buried in my heart.’
November 2017, Garfa Kata Pukur, Kolkata
Iask Gouranga Halder if his name became Safal (meaning ‘successful’) after he swam through the night to reach the shore and report the horrors of Marichjhapi to the clueless citizens of Calcutta. The newspapers had once hailed Halder as a hero of his people, undeterred by fate or fatigue.
Today, the frail, asthma-afflicted, sixty-four-year-old can barely manage a smile between bone-rattling coughs and takes a pause before he can answer me.
‘No, I had the name from before.’ My question has triggered violent spasms in Halder. He spits out a mouthful of bile out of the window, sits down, lowers his head and parts his thinning hair with bony fingers. Two old scars criss-cross his pate like disputed boundary lines of neighbouring nations.
‘Did you get these scars when the police attacked you in Marichjhapi?’
I ask.
‘No, these are older ones,’ he says.
‘Tell me how you got them then.’
Halder flares up. ‘How many times will I repeat my story? Nothing has happened for so many years. After the massacre at Marichjhapi, we hid from the Left Front government’s goons. We stayed right under their noses by learning to become invisible. All we dreamt of was this government to
go away and a new one, one that doesn’t murder innocents, to replace it.
But even the so-called people’s politician Mamata Banerjee has forgotten us. The Marichjhapi case has not been opened. Who will pay for all those deaths?’
Dusk has settled outside Halder’s one-storeyed house at Purbo Palli, Kalikapur. The road outside leads to the Eastern Metropolitan Bypass that connects Ultadanga in the north to Kamalgazi, Rajpur and Sonarpur in the south, running a distance of twenty-one kilometres along the eastern rim of the city, along which high-rise buildings in glass and concrete have come up, transforming Kolkata’s skyline.
But this is a lower-middle class locality in the south of the city with skinny allies and thinning slices of post-Partition history still trapped in the memories of residents who made a new country home after an arbitrary line was drawn up to create East Pakistan, now Bangladesh.
Someone switches on a dim bulb, and tea is served with greasy sweets. I offer cigarettes to my photographer friend and Jyotirmoy Mondal, who have accompanied me to Halder’s house. We smoke in silence as we wait for Halder to collect himself and take us back in time.
‘I am from Lakhikhai village in Bangladesh’s Khulna zilla. I grew up amidst the growing tension between Hindus and Muslims. There was a riot in 1964. Hundreds left from my village. I must have been fifteen or sixteen at that time. We didn’t have birth certificates those days. I had lost my parents early and was staying with ageing relatives. They told me to leave while I could and start from scratch in the new land. I was already married and feared for the safety of my new bride. There were headless bodies on the road and limbless men and women hiding their horror inside dark rooms. But my matriculation examination was due. I waited to clear it before I crossed over to India, as it would be easier to get a job.
‘I got these scars when my wife and I were crossing the border on foot.
A group of Muslim men attacked us with axes. I asked my wife to run as I tried to hold them back. I was staring death in the face but I wanted her to be safe. Two sharp blows fell on my head. I lost consciousness and dropped
to the ground. They must have thought I was dead because they did not hit me anymore. Later, the group of men and women with whom we were travelling came back in search of me, found me still breathing and took me with them. My wife was in that group. I lost a lot of blood, but survived.
‘On this side of the border, near Calcutta, the golden words those days for people like us, homeless refugees from East Pakistan, were: “Daak ashbe”. This meant we would be transported from the transit camps set up at various places in West Bengal to the permanent Mana Camp in Raipur, now in Chhattisgarh but then part of Madhya Pradesh.
‘Mana Camp was not a single camp. It was a cluster of 500 or more camps of varying sizes. I stayed in a camp called Kurud.
‘It would be wrong to say camp life was only hardship. There were good days and there were bad days. The government gave us dole. We worked on roads. We erected buildings. We got paid. Our temporary tents became pucca houses over time. Our people got married, had children and lived the remaining days of their lives dreaming of a lost home. But somewhere, in the midst of all this, we were losing our identity as Bengalis.
There was a gnawing fear that if not our children, then their children after them would not speak our beautiful language.
‘The All India Udbastu Unnayansil Committee set up by us for the welfare of our people had been working tirelessly through the years, demanding more rights and better working conditions. The camps were scattered. The committee wanted to get people to stay together, to fight as a collective whenever there was any wrongdoing by the government babus in charge of the camps or the tribals who were very different from us.
‘Meanwhile, leaders from Jyoti Basu’s party, the CPI(M), had come to visit us at the camp a number of times. They assured us that as soon as they came to power in West Bengal, they would free us from the hills and forests of Dandakaranya and take us to the fertile plains of Bengal and give us a better life. We were naïve; we believed them.
‘Our camp leaders told us the refugee vote is important for the Left Front, so they would never desert us. But with no help from official quarters
when the Leftists came to power in West Bengal, our people started fleeing Mana Camp in groups and headed towards Calcutta.
‘In 1978, around five to seven families hired lorries to Raipur station.
From there, we took the train to Howrah and then to Sealdah. I had saved a modest sum of money, around Rs 10,000, from the years I had lived and worked in Mana Camp, 1965-1978. From Sealdah, we went to Hasnabad.
At Hasnabad, our people took temporary residence in houses of relatives or found work in local fields. We stayed there aimlessly for two months, deciding our next course of action and waiting for All India Udbastu Unnayansil Committee leaders to guide us. Meanwhile, news broke of refugees from various other camps coming to Bengal in large numbers and facing hardship. I was lucky I had saved money to see me through in those two months.
‘We had misjudged the situation in West Bengal. We thought Left leaders would keep their promise and rehabilitate us in the state after they came to power. We thought there would be land for us to build homes and fertile fields to grow crops. We should have known these were empty promises. Our committee leaders went to Writer’s Building to remind the government of past promises, but nothing happened.
‘Around this time, committee leaders came to know of Marichjhapi, an uninhabited island in the heart of the Sundarbans. There was a rumor that some Leftist leaders had showed them the island as a possible habitat for the thousands of refugees deserting camps and reaching Bengal. Others say committee leaders themselves had discovered the island during their excursions to the Sundarbans. I don’t remember the exact day or month, but sometime in the middle of 1978, we hired boats and set off for Marichjhapi.
‘Our dream home was a mud island filled with shrubs. There was a thick forest of useless shrubs and, unlike the rest of the Sundarbans, there was no plantation in the island. So it was a bloody lie told by the Left Front government that we destroyed a reserve forest to set up home in Marichjhapi. There was nothing to destroy!
‘Around 200-300 boats had reached Marichjhapi that day. I was in the first lot that set foot on the island. I felt like an astronaut on a new planet
after an arduous travel through space and time. Hundreds of boats would arrive here in the next few months. We cleared shrubs, evened land and began town planning in all earnest. The more intelligent amongst us made a site map for a village housing society; we called it Netaji Nagar.
‘Those were magical days. We slept in open fields under a sky full of stars. We lit fire around us to keep insects and animals away. During the day, we built huts from logs that we got from neighbouring islands. Golpata leaves were used to make thatched roofs. Residents of neighbouring villages got us food and other essentials, and we pooled in money we had saved during our Dandakaranya years. We learnt that Ramakrishna Mission and Bharat Sevashram Sangha wanted to help us but the government did not allow them. By this time, outsiders were becoming aware of our existence. We toiled night and day with limited resources and the will to make Marichjhapi our home. Social workers and public intellectuals like your father, Dilip Halder, visited us and gave us money to sustain ourselves.
‘We had our work cut out for us. I was not good at construction work, so I was made a messenger between mainland Calcutta and Marichjhapi.
My job was to carry letters to our well-wishers in the big city with a list of things we needed for the island. I delivered those letters and brought back money and material. In the months that followed, we set up a school and appointed a teacher from amongst us. A refugee doctor set up a dispensary.
I carried back medicines from Calcutta to stock up the dispensary.
‘In Calcutta, I used to stay at 136, Jodhpur Park, in the house of Subrata Chatterjee, a renowned engineer. This London-returned engineer travelled with me to the island many times, helped us in planning Netaji Nagar and encouraged us. He, and several others including poet Sunil Ganguly, held citizens’ meetings across West Bengal to highlight our struggle for existence.
‘Chatterjee told us not to trust the communists in power. “I hate these bastards,” he would say. “I have seen the ugly face of communism in soviet Russia. You should not rely on the government and build an island community on your own.”
‘And we did. Over time, the population of Marichjhapi swelled to 40,000 from the initial 10,000. It had become a functional village with three lanes, a bazaar, a school, a dispensary, a library, a boat manufacturing unit, and a fisheries department even! Who could have imagined that so much was possible in so little time? Maybe all those wasted years in Dandakaranya had given us superhuman will.
‘Obtaining drinking water was a big issue. Marichjhapi water was salty, so we had to travel to Kumirmari, the next island, by boats and bring water back in big pots. We had to ration water. When I told Chatterjee this, he came to the island, gave us money and told us how to build a deep tube well that would get us drinkable water from below the ground. This is the same tube well in which policemen would later drop a bottle of poison, killing many of us!
‘We were attacked thrice. Memory fails me now, but I do remember that the most horrific of the police actions on the island was the economic blockade when supply lines were cut off and we were left to starve without food, medicines and other essentials. Anandabazar Patrika journalist Sukharanjan Sengupta came to visit us a few times and heard our story. It was through his articles in Anandabazar Patrika that a wider population became aware of us, though that did not really help our cause. The government made every effort to stop NGOs and missionaries from reaching us. Only sympathetic private citizens escaped police patrol and came to us with money and essentials. That, too, stopped during the blockade.
‘My leaders told me I’d have to tell people in Calcutta how Marichjhapi has been turned into a police state. Letters were written for Chatterjee and others, folded, put inside plastic bags and handed to me. At night, I took out a boat and decided to try my luck. It was a crazy thing to do as police launches had surrounded the island. The idea was to slip through the launches as the policemen snored, and reach the shore. We had gone a little distance into the river when we came under the searchlight. There were three other boys with me. “Should we turn back?” they asked; I told them
there was no turning back. Since the letters were in plastic bags tied to our waists, we deserted the boat, jumped into the river and started swimming.
‘I do not believe it myself when I think of what happened that night, but we actually swam the river and reached Kumirmari. However, we did not know there was police presence there as well. A policeman came and started questioning us. He slapped me hard and asked me if I was from Marichjhapi. I lied that I was from Kumirmari and had gone to Marichjhapi to see what was happening there. I also badmouthed the people of Marichjhapi, saying that they should be left to die. The policeman let us go.
‘We did not rest. Sleepless and tired from hours of swimming, we walked across Kumirmari and took a boat to Satjelia village. We stayed the rest of the night there, woke up early and walked all the way to Canning.
The currency note I was carrying in my pocket had become soiled and useless, so all day I walked without food or water, and finally reached Canning. There, I had some food at a dhaba for free and boarded a train for Jodhpur Park without a ticket. In the evening, I knocked on Subrata Chatterjee’s door. It was 31 January 1979.
‘Chatterjee telephoned a journalist. I had no idea who was on the other side but I told the journalist everything. I told him I had letters from committee leaders with me, and that I would hand them over to him if he would publish our story. The man on the other side asked me to read out the letters to him. I did. I could barely keep my eyes open after that. Chatterjee asked me to rest and I fell into deep sleep. When I woke up next morning, I was a hero.
‘Chatterjee told me my story had been carried in the papers and that everyone knew of me and my people now. There would be pressure on the government to call off the economic blockade. That day, I went to several newspaper offices and showed the letters I was carrying with me. I also met Shakya Sen, a junior lawyer, on Chatterjee’s instruction and showed them to him. We stayed the night at Chatterjee’s house. Sen would later fight for us against the government in court.
‘I set off early next morning as one of the boys had to go to Taldi village to meet a relative. We had taken a couple of steps and were outside Jodhpur
Park post office when we felt we were being followed. Four men surrounded us. We got into a police jeep parked on the other side of the road and were taken to Jadavpur thana. We were questioned all day, after which they let my companions go. They knew I was the one the newspapers had quoted. I was kept in police custody for four days. On Day 5, I was sent to Alipore Central Jail, where I spent twenty-seven more days. I came out and went straight to Marichjhapi to a hero’s welcome. The economic blockade was over, thanks to the letters I had carried with me to Calcutta and the newspaper articles that came out because of them.
‘The next few months were a blur. I mostly stayed outside the island at my relative’s house, away from Sundarbans, and tried to find myself a job. I went back to Marichjhapi whenever I got time, even as a case carried on in the Calcutta High Court with lawyer Shakya Sen fighting on our behalf.
‘The newspaper articles and the court case against the government halted the economic blockade but could not alter our fate. Time and again the government sent goons in khakis to attack us, arrest our men and torture our women. People started leaving Marichjhapi in large numbers; some went back to where they came from, to the refugee settlement in Dandakaranya, while others travelled far and wide in West Bengal looking for new home.
‘Non-stop police action had demoralized islanders. One night, someone came and dropped a bottle of poison into the tube well. Thirteen people died the next day. Babies were dying like rats from diseases, and women were afraid to venture out for fear of being raped by policemen. There were several incidents of our boats being hit by police launches and sunk mid-river.
‘On 14 June 1979, it was all over for us. The police came, set fire to our huts and forced the remaining ones out of the island. It was the end of the Marichjhapi dream. One year of dying by the dozens, yet carrying on with fire in our souls.’
‘What happened to you after that?’ I ask Halder, who has tears streaming down his face.
‘Luckily for me, I was not on the island that day. I had shifted to my relative’s place with my family as I knew the island was doomed. I feared for my wife’s safety as women were being taken away by the police. When I heard what happened, I sank into depression. For twelve months, we had strived to make a shrubby island into a home for the hopeless. Our lobster business had been turning into a big success. If only we could have waited for two more months, the time spent in cultivation would have borne fruit and we would have sold those lobsters at markets in Calcutta for big money.
But that was not to be. Everything was destroyed in the island, razed to the ground, burnt, made impure.
‘After a while, I shifted to Chatterjee’s house in Jodhpur Park. The mezzanine floor was empty. I stayed there with my wife and her parents.
Chatterjee taught me to be a draughtsman. I worked at his office for seven years. During my earlier excursions to Calcutta to take back money and supplies for Marichjhapi, I had met Shyamlal Mistri, the principal of Chittranjan College. Mistri was a good man. He had given me books for free to take back for the library in Marichjhapi. After working at Chatterjee’s office, I shifted to Chittranjan College as a peon and retired in July 2010.’
‘Does Marichjhapi still anger you?’
Halder avoids my question but says that after the dust settled, he did his bit to help some of the islanders who were in hiding. ‘Some of us got together, took donations and bought one bigha plot to rehabilitate a few Marichjhapi families. We set up a colony, Pather Sesh, near Calcutta. We even took Tata’s big boss Russi Mody there to meet the families. We couldn’t win against the government of the day, but we had to carry on with what remained of our lives.’
December 2017, Kalikapur, Kolkata
Forty years ago, Sukhoranjan Sengupta filed his last dispatch on Marichjhapi. He says he remembers every shriveled body, every pair of hollow eyes he saw that day. It took me some effort to track this septuagenarian in Kolkata and convince him to talk about Marichjhapi.
Sengupta has been mentor to some of my seniors and I hide my awe as I furiously jot down his story.
Sengupta is quite the Bengali bhadralok with his impeccable manners and neat kurta-pajama but, funnily, he reminds me of that infamous American gonzo journalist Hunter Thompson, who spent his life documenting sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll in Vegas’ dirty alleys and elsewhere. Thompson brought in an experiential style of journalism where reporters involve themselves in the action to such a degree that they become central figures of their stories. Sitting in the sparse drawing room of his two-bedroom government apartment as he goes back in time, this appears to be true for Sengupta as well.
‘Your news reports come back to haunt you. Old bylines become nightmares; photographs you took ages ago stay on as ugly scars. On the night of 16 May 1979, I got a tip-off that the Marichjhapi island would be freed of refugees. A few hundred lorries and trucks had been stationed at
Hasnabad jetty. And there was a large police presence to keep out curious onlookers and truth seekers like me.
‘I reached there before dawn. From a distance, my photographer and I could see refugees being forced into trucks. The policemen would not let us take any pictures, but my photographer managed to take a few. Being associated with West Bengal’s largest circulated media group, Anandabazar Patrika, helped. Even the cops didn’t want to mess with a journalist from such a powerful media house. From a boat that was tied to the jetty, we took pictures of refugees stepping out of launches and getting into trucks.
‘My report came out in Anandabazar Patrika on 18 May 1979. I wrote that with three sons and a missing husband, when Chatur Mandal’s wife [no one really knew her name or bothered to ask about it after she became Chatur Mandal’s wife] got off the launch, she cried out: “The breadwinner has not been seen for the past three days. How do I go to Dandakaranya without him?” But she has to, like the others who are being piled into the 150-odd trucks to be transported to Dandakaranya.
‘Meghdut, Shyamoli and Sumitra – one by one, three launches reached the shore, carrying men and material, women and wailing kids, waiting to be sent to Dandakaranya via Dudhkundi or Banpur. There was no drinking water or food. No medical facility either for the just-born or the mother who gave birth to it inside the launch. No facility for the little boy who had fractured a leg while getting inside the truck. The authorities had one mission: to fill trucks with refugees who had escaped from Dandakaranya and send them back.
‘I managed to speak to a refugee before he was forced into a lorry.
Bhabani Mandal said he had come to Marichjhapi from Malkangiri. ‘We did not know we would be forced out of the island like this. We had made arrangements to cook rice and curry for lunch when we heard thatched roofs being pulled down. The roofs fell on us and, before we could react, policemen set fire to our huts. Boiling rice remained on the pots. Somehow, we managed to take out some of our belongings and rushed outside. The police ordered us to stand in line to board the launch. We could do nothing.’
‘I heard the same story from Jagadish Mandal, also from Malkangiri, and then from Shibopodo Sana, Santosh Gayan, Rabindranath Sarkar, Haripada Debnath, all of whom were on their way out of the island.
‘At Hasnabad, where the trucks had been stationed, hotel employees and small shop owners told me that they had seen a small boy miss a step while getting into the truck. He fell, broke his head, hurt his back and maybe fractured a bone or two, but the police personnel standing in guard forced him into the truck. The men showed no remorse to the woman who had given birth inside the launch either. She and her newborn were thrown inside a truck and sent off without any medicine, treatment or rest.
‘The policemen boasted to me that only the armed forces could have cleared Marichjhapi the way they did. Before the trucks set off, some refugees told me they had hoped that, if nothing else, they could stay on the footpaths of West Bengal and work as daily wagers to make a living, but the authorities didn’t let them.
‘One of them, Haripada Debnath, said it would have been better if they had stayed back in East Pakistan than face such a fate in India. Soon after, West Bengal’s information minister, Buddhadeb Bhattacharya, told reporters that there were no refugees in Marichjhapi.
‘2,713 refugee families have left the island – the official statement read.
This number can be contested. Refugees said there were thousands more who were evicted and sent back to Dandakaranya.
‘Newspapers reported that around 3,000 refugees had been brought to Dudhkundi transit camps in West Bengal but were spending nights in the open. This was because the transit camps had rooms only for 500. The local administration of Dudhkundi had arranged for two primary schools to house refugees but even that wasn’t enough.
‘Special trains were being readied to take refugees back to Dandakaranya. Meanwhile, the local authorities were giving a dole of Rs 5
per week to every refugee, along with two and a half kilograms of wheat.
The children were getting half of that.
‘On the night of 18 May, my editor decided I would go to Dudhkundi to report on the condition of refugees with photographer Tapan Das. We took a
minibus from Howrah to Uluberia. From there, we boarded Hyderabad Express and reached Kharagpur. Dudhkundi is half an hour from Kharagpur. Das checked his lens against the fading light of the day and told me it would be difficult for him to take photographs. I had heard that some badly burnt refugees had been given shelter in Dudhkundi. They got burnt when the policemen set fire to their huts in Marichjhapi.
‘We went to the circuit house in Medinipur, thinking of spending the night there. Then it occurred to me that I would have to inform the District Magistrate to stay in the circuit house and he would perhaps not give us permission to meet the refugees.
‘So we hired a rickshaw and went to a hotel in the Lal Bazar area of Medinipur. Next morning, we took a bus to Dudhkundi where we found a few elderly refugees sitting under trees with blank faces. They thought we were government officers or a political cadre, and didn’t show any interest in talking to us. We were wondering what to do when two or three refugee boys recognized me as the reporter who they had seen in Marichjhapi.
‘I told them why we were there. The elderly refugees then took us to meet the burn victims. Tapan took their pictures. A boy told me about an old woman whose breasts were badly burnt. He asked me how I would take her picture. We made our way to a tin shed where the woman was lying on a cot, groaning in pain.
‘Flies were swooping down on her burnt breasts. Tapan told us to lift the cot and bring her outside the shed, but the sixty-five-year-old widow would not bare her breasts to us. I sat down at her feet and said, “You have fed your children by removing the clothing over your breasts. I am also like your son. Why would you feel shy before me?” She looked at me with wide eyes and touched my face with trembling hands. I removed the saree from her breasts, both of which were burnt badly by the fire.
‘Tapan took pictures against the light of a new day, wiping his tears as he did so. I looked away.
‘The report came out in Anandabazar Patrika, along with her photograph, on 21 May 1979. Her name was Phonibala Mandal.
‘In my report, I mentioned what Phonibala Mandal’s son, Suryakanta Mandal, had told me. He said that when their huts were set on fire, his mother was sleeping in a corner. They had tried to salvage as much as they could, taking away belongings and waking up the children from their sleep.
He had thought his mother had also come out, but later realized she hadn’t.
He rushed into the burning hut and carried her out to safety but a portion of her hand and a large portion of her breasts had already got burnt by then. In that condition, they were forced into the launch.
‘I went to meet other refugees too. In the Dudhkundi camp, Bashmoni Mandal told me that her husband Durgapada had gone missing, and so had their twelve-year-old daughter Bishakha. In the missing persons’ list, there were Makhan Halder, Pranay Halder, Dipak Sarkar, Subhash Mandal, Anil Bachar, Santosh Sarkar [who had been shot in the leg in the January firing in Marichjhapi and the leg had to be amputated], Ramkrishna Joardar, Kalipada Roy, Hajari Mandal, Sudhir Mandal, Basanti Mandal, Kalipada Mandal, Prabash Mirdha, Gyanendra Halder, his two sons Prasanto and Prakash, and many, many more.
‘The camp residents said if they were sent like this to Dandakaranya, they would face more hardship because only names of heads of families were noted in the Dandakaranya refugee camp registers. In cases where the heads of the families had gone missing, Dandakaranya authorities might not recognize other family members. What would they do then? Where would they go?
‘There were more refugees sitting under the trees than inside the Dudhkundi camp. That evening, trucks and buses came to take them to Kharagpur from where they would be sent to Dandakaranya by trains, but they were not ready to go. They threw stones at the trucks and buses, which went back, but police personnel and Left party workers forced around 500
refugees into trucks and buses late at night and sent them to Kharagpur. A party worker told me they had worked tirelessly to provide food and water to those ungrateful refugees at Dudhkundi.
‘The refugees told me they would come back and search for their missing relatives. They said around 3,000 refugees had escaped the police
and hid in various parts of Sundarbans. They would never go back.
‘This was my last report on Marichjhapi for Anandabazar Patrika.’
Sukhoranjan Sengupta takes a deep breath and goes inside his study.
Marichjhapi hangs heavy in the air as I wait for him to come back with a file of his old articles. I ask him what took him to Marichjhapi in the first place. He opens the file.
File Photo
‘I knew these areas. During Bangladesh’s emergence as an independent country in 1971, the river in Bagna was an important operational centre for the Indian Navy. I had been here to report on the goings-on in the naval base. I had not heard of Marichjhapi then, but knew the area as Bagna. No launches operated there. You could go till Sandeshkhali; Bagna was fifteen kilometres away from Sandeshkhali by water. It’s not an easy place to report from, with navigation becoming almost impossible during high tide.
‘I took it as a challenge when Anandabazar Patrika asked me to report on the influx of refugees on this unheard-of island called Marichjhapi. But how would I reach Bagna or Marichjhapi? Where would I spend the night?
Again, relationships established during my long years as a reporter came in handy. I had known the top officers of the Border Security Force [BSF]
since the birth of that organization; many of my college friends had joined it as top officers and their subordinates knew me well. During the Bangladesh War of Independence, our relationship had been cemented.
‘In Marichjhapi, I met my old friend Bikashkali Basu, who later became Calcutta’s police commissioner and West Bengal police’s director general thereafter. At that time, he was the deputy inspector general of police of BSF. After getting the go-ahead from my editor, I went to say hello to Bikashkali.
‘On 1 May 1978, I set off from Calcutta in a BSF jeep and reached the jawans’ camp in Hasnabad at day’s end. With me was my old comrade, photographer Tapan Das. We rested at the camp for the first half of the night and, in the wee hours, made our way to Hasnabad jetty, where Gangalhari steamer was waiting for us. This Gangalhari steamer had a history of its own; it had played an important part in helping the Indian army win Khulna during the 1971 Bangladesh War of Independence. I had written about the bravery of the jawans in fighting from this steamer. We boarded and fell into deep sleep. It had been a long day.
‘We woke early next morning and went to the deck to witness something that would be etched in my heart forever. I saw a river of small boats filled with women and children. There were many more people, hundreds in number, carrying luggage on bare backs and walking on the riverbed. At around 9 a.m., Gangalhari reached Bagna BSF jetty. We were told that there were orders from BSF superior officers not to go near Marichjhapi, but we hired a boat and reached the island. Das and I became the first journalists to touch base on the island that would make history in coming days.
‘It was 9.30 a.m. on 2 May 1978.
‘In the next day’s edition of Anandabazar Patrika, I wrote that around a hundred refugees on an average were entering Marichjhapi, which had become the new home of those who rejected Dandakaranya. The island, which had till now been out of bounds for humanity, was now filled with joyful cries of children and the sound of the cutting of golpata and garan trees to build huts; men and women gathered dry twigs as the old and the
infirm cried out in agony, “Oh God, how much more do we have to endure?”
‘There was a war-like effort amongst the refugees to make the island their home. A stall had been put up selling rice, dal, cooking oil, salt, spices, etc. The refugees had carried those items all the way from Hasnabad in bundles and were now selling them to their fellow travellers. There were customers from neighbouring islands as well because these refugee sellers were selling goods at prices cheaper than other shopkeepers in the 5-7 mile radius.
‘Some vegetable sellers had also come from nearby islands, selling the day’s yield to both refugees trying to set up base in the island as well as those from other islands who came to buy from the makeshift refugee shops. The refugees were catching fish mostly for their own consumption, but if they did manage to catch big ones, they carried them all the way to the Bagna fish market to sell them for anything between four and ten rupees. But I wondered how long they could carry on like this.
‘There is no shortage of water in the Sundarbans, but it is salty and undrinkable. Three to four miles away from the island, there is a tube well and a pond from where refugees were carrying drinking water in pots and pans and bringing it to Marichjhapi in boats. But how would almost 13,000
refugees survive on such short supply of drinkable water? The refugees were not asking for rice; all they wanted was water to drink.
‘West Bengal government’s chief secretary, Amiyo Kumar Sen, had been here and asked the refugees if they would consider going back if the problems – for which they left Dandakaranya and came all the way to Marichjhapi – were solved. The refugees shouted a clear “no”. He then suggested that maybe a team of refugees should accompany government officials to Dandakaranya to see the current living conditions. He got his reply from an old widow; she said that instead of sending them to Dandakaranya, why doesn’t he just drown them in the river. When Sen was returning to his launch, the refugees pleaded with him: Sir, it is okay if you give us no relief. But at least make arrangements for drinking water.
‘Some refugees told me that eventually they would have to leave Marichjhapi, as they had heard that the state government had spent a lot of money on coconut plantation in the island. They said they would not want to disturb the flora and fauna.
‘Next to Marichjhapi, in between Kapura khal and Sarsa river, there is fifty acres of forest land. Locals call it the Jhupi jungle. The jungle is dense but the trees and shrubs are small in height. The refugees started clearing this jungle to build huts. The leaders got a map of this place from Calcutta’s survey office. They were trying to determine the height of this place from the sea bed; they had plans to build a pond to harvest drinkable and sweet rain water.
‘At night, they slept around fires and spoke loudly to keep wild animals away. They took turns to guard their fellow men and women. Their leaders were strong in body and spirit. They told me that while they had made the island their home, they would not harm the coconut plantation; they hadn’t cut even a single coconut tree. Even the forest officials praised the discipline of these men.
‘When my dispatch from Marichjhapi was published in the Anandabazar Patrika, people of West Bengal got to know that a new habitation had been set up in a remote land. The government’s Home Department, Intelligence Bureau, the police, and even journalists from other newspapers asked me how I reached Marichjhapi.
‘The fact that I did not make up the story was proven not just by the pictures that were published with the report but that on 22 May 1978, when I was at Marichjhapi, Amiyo Kumar Sen saw me there. He had reached the island in an ESTHAR launch and asked me how I got there.
‘I told him that the refugees had no drinking water, and that he should make arrangements. Along with Sen was the commissioner of presidency division, Pen Antony, and an engineer. Sen asked me to go back with them in the government launch, but I stayed back with the BSF men.
‘By the month of June, almost 45,000 refugees had left Dandakaranya for West Bengal. But, by July, the West Bengal government had made plans to not let any more refugees enter the state. The state police held back
thousands of refugees at the Howrah station. They were taken to a place called Kashipur near Burdwan.
‘On 22 July, these refugees fought with the police. That particular area was under Congress leader Bhola Sen. Sen himself called up the Anandabazar Patrika office to say that the police had opened fire in the Kashipur camp, where refugees who had been detained on their way to Marichjhapi were. However, the government did not issue a press note. So, Anandabazar Patrika sent a reporter to Burdwan to find out what had happened.
‘On 23 July, Anandabazar Patrika published a news item, saying that on 22 July nine had been killed in a clash between the police and refugees from Dandakaranya. One of them was a thirty-eight-year-old police constable, Kushodwaj Mandal, who had been slain by a tangi; the others were all refugees. But till the time of going to press, there was no official confirmation on the number of the dead. The police had fired fifteen rounds and arrested five. Section 144 had been imposed on the area. The clash had started when the refugees were asked to board trucks that would take them back to Dandakaranya. Refugees said they were being forced into trucks and the police claimed that while most of the refugees were going on their own, a group of them attacked the police and set a van on fire. The superintendent of police, Amiya Kumar Samanta, said they had opened fifteen rounds but had no idea if anybody had died in the firing.
‘The refugees said eight people died from their side but could only identify four, namely Jagadish Halder [from Mulchora, Maharashtra camp], Pabitra Sarkar [Chandaghop, Maharashtra camp], Ankur Mandal [Sur Ghoja, Ambikapur, Madhya Pradesh] and Amulya Gharapi.
‘They could not identify the remaining four, who they claimed had also died in the firing. They also said they had not handed over their dead to the police but buried the bodies behind the camp. Later, Samanta gave a statement that maybe three refugees had died in the firing.
‘In August 1978, and also later in September that year, West Bengal was flooded by heavy rain. Marichjhapi receded to the background in the city’s collective memory. Till October, there was no news or even much interest in
the brave refugees of Marichjhapi, busy as we were covering the floods across the state. We later heard that leaders of the Revolutionary Socialist Party [RSP], a constituent of the Left Front government in West Bengal, helped the refugees during the floods.
‘Politically, this was a time of much subterfuge and significance.
Minister Ram Chatterjee, who had visited Dandakaranya and told the refugees to come to West Bengal, had not gone to Marichjhapi even once after they arrived. However, Suhrid Mullick from his party, the Forward Block, visited the island a few times and met refugee leader Satish Mandal.
Opposition leader Kashikanta Maitra had meanwhile raised a storm about Marichjhapi in the State Assembly. Also, the fact that RSP workers had helped the refugees at Marichjhapi during the floods did not go down well with the CPI(M).
‘To disarm Kashikanta Maitra in the State Assembly, Jyoti Basu decided to approach Prime Minister Morarji Desai. Desai, in turn, asked West Bengal Janata Patry President Prafulla Chandra Sen to look into the matter.
Sen advised Jyoti Basu to talk directly to Kashikanta Maitra. Instead, Jyoti Basu met Janata Party leader Fajlur Rehman. Rehman also asked Basu to take up the matter with Kashikanta Maitra. Adamant, Basu told him they had already discussed the matter in the Assembly.
‘I had cordial relations with Fajlur Rehman. I asked him if Jyoti Basu was trying to make him speak against the Hindu refugees because he himself was a Muslim. There’s an interesting backstory here. On 5 March 1966, some Hindu refugees had set Rehman’s three-storeyed house in Krishna Nagar on fire. On hearing my question, Rehman held me in a tight hug and said, “I have forgotten that day. And you had seen my house burn as a reporter. I was not there. It is true that Jyoti Basu was trying to make me speak up against the Hindu refugees in Marichjhapi, but I advised him instead to visit Dandakaranya with the prime minister and see for himself the plight of the refugees.”
‘It was not my intention to bring up Rehman’s Muslim identity or the fact that Jyoti Basu was trying to play the religion card. But it is true that after 1977, the CPI(M) had built up a powerful Muslim lobby in various
pockets of West Bengal, especially in the Basirhat-Hasnabad region where Muslims, for historical and economic reasons, were not favourably disposed towards the Hindu refugees of Marichjhapi.
‘During November–December 1978, West Bengal police infiltrated the areas around the Marichjhapi island, specially the neighbouring Kumirmari.
They got local boatmen to spy on the refugees. I got to know that the West Bengal government was looking at ways to stop every kind of economic activity in the island. It was time for another visit!
‘In the last week of December 1978, I got on a BSF steamer and reached their outpost in Bagna village, opposite Marichjhapi. But I did not enter the island in the light of day. As dusk fell, I took a boat to the island.
Some refugees who were guarding the island recognized me and took me to a school building they had built. I met Satish Mandal and warned him that the government was planning something sinister. Mandal told me he’d had a hunch. On my way back, I saw that the refugees were trying to build a port. They were also building boats; ten to twelve boats had already been made. My photographer, Devi Prasad Sinha, wanted to take a few photographs, so a few hazak lanterns were bought so that those pictures could be taken. Those were published with my report in the Anandabazar Patrika. I was amazed to see how this motley bunch of nowhere men and women had transformed the island.
‘My fears came true. There was a law to protect forests, and the West Bengal government imposed that law on Marichjhapi. So, on 26 January 1979, an order was passed that no one could take food items, drinkable water and medicines to the island. A hundred-odd police launches and boats surrounded Marichjhapi. Thus began government action on the island, which would culminate into the forceful clearing of the entire place in May 1979, the death of many and the burning of Phonibala’s breasts. I have witnessed many horrors in my reporting life but all these years later, when I close my eyes at night, I still see her scars and the horror in her dying eyes.’
December 2017, Belgachia, Kolkata
Niranjan Haldar’s apartment at Bose Pukur in Kolkata’s southern fringes reminds me of the CPI(M) party office in the northern end of the city.
Books and documents are piled on the divan where Haldar manages to make a little space for himself, offering me one of the few colourless plastic chairs he’s surrounded by.
These are not books and documents you will find at the party office.
Most of Haldar’s study material is critical of the Left Front rule in West Bengal and a few of them document arguably their worst misdeed –
Marichjhapi.
Refusing to remain shut on Marichjhapi has stunted Haldar’s career.
The veteran newsman has been a friend of the family and one of the most prolific writers on Marichjhapi. The communist government in West Bengal retaliated by arm-twisting the management of newspapers he worked with to put him on ‘desk jobs’. The bylines dried up, but Haldar never stopped digging into the whys and hows of Marichjhapi. This eighty-six-year-old is considered a living Wikipedia on Marichjhapi in Kolkata’s research circles.
Sidelined by a communist government’s ‘dirty tricks department’, Haldar, interestingly, was a communist once. ‘I came to India in 1949 from East Pakistan. I was running away from the police after they got a warrant out in my name for being involved in students’ movements. Communism
lands you in all kinds of trouble. You should remember your college days,’
he laughs.
I am embarrassed at this unexpected reference to a chapter from the early days of my life wasted in futile sloganeering and little else, and offer Haldar a sheepish smile.
‘So, tell me, how far has your Marichjhapi research taken you?’
I tell Haldar of my travels to Madhya Pradesh’s belly and to Mana Camp in Raipur, Chhattisgarh. I tell him how I met Manoj Kharati, a BJP
Yuva Morcha leader in Betul district’s Chopna village in Madhya Pradesh, which is one amongst the thirty-six villages where there are only Bengali refugees. These are men and women who were sent to Dandakaranya after they landed in West Bengal from East Pakistan. The camps are gone but these people have stayed on, their next generations dimly aware of Marichjhapi. Many have not even heard of the place.
But there are some, like Kharati’s father, fifty-eight-year-old Khitij Chandra Kharati, BJP worker, farmer and shopkeeper, who had made the journey to Marichjhapi but had returned before disaster struck.
‘Do they remember Marichjhapi?’ Haldar is curious.
I tell him they do. Khitij Chandra Kharati had broken down before me during the interview, recalling how mothers put dead babies in the river, babies who died due to disease, malnutrition or both. He was in the first lot that had reached Marichjhapi from the Dandakaranya camps, cut goran trees to make huts, stayed up nights to guard shelterless companions from wild beasts and taken boats to neighbouring islands to bring back essentials.
But he had given up on fellowmen and the Marichjhapi dream in the end.
Today, he blames not just the CPM government, but also the refugee leaders for the tragedy. They had become arrogant, he told me. Refugee leader Raiharan Barui had welcomed a CPM leader on the island with a garland of shoes! The government of the day was bound to hit back.
Haldar sighs. ‘There has been no end to suffering for this luckless lot,’
he tells me. ‘As a student in Bangabasi College, I was a part of the Saranarthi Seva Dal [Refugee Relief Group]. We used to go to Howrah station and fill out forms with information of refugees that would help the
government allocate them to various camps in and around Calcutta. The refugees got dole and were not allowed to work elsewhere; however, the financial aid they got wasn’t sufficient for a decent livelihood. They started to take matters in their own hands and began jami dokhol [land occupancy]
wherever there was empty or unoccupied land. My sympathy was for the refugees; I was involved with their movement. So you see Marichjhapi was not the only instance where refugees tried to settle somewhere of their own volition.
‘That there was movement from Dandakaranya refugee camps to Bengal was known to us; that their destination was Marichjhapi was unknown. As was their resolve to fight with the government.
‘My mejda [older brother] was staying in Hasnabad, where many refugees sought shelter before they moved on to their final destination in Marichjhapi, and he wrote to me about their plight. It was through his letters that I came to know that children were dying of hunger by the dozens, exactly like Kharati told you.
‘To be honest, I was opposed to their coming to West Bengal in hordes.
That the conditions in those camps were beyond deplorable was unknown
to me. I got a reality check through Saibal Gupta, ICS, who had visited the Dandakaranya camps on the instructions of the West Bengal government.
After seeing the conditions there and the central government’s apathy, he quit his job. He also held lectures on the disastrous Dandakaranya Refugee Rehabilitation Programme. I happened to attend two such lectures and realized what a fool I had been in thinking they should turn back.
‘I spoke to Gour Kishore Ghosh, the then editor of Anadabazar Patrika, and Saibal Gupta’s writings on Marichjhapi were published. Through those articles, readers got an inkling of what the living conditions were like in Dandakaranya camps.
‘Few know this, but the refugees had once tried to come in groups from Dandakaranya in 1975 and the West Bengal government [then under Siddhartha Shankar Ray] had sent them back from the Jhargram border.
Ironically, there was a meeting held against this decision at the Communist Party office [the same Communist party that would later order the Marichjhapi carnage], but the Emergency was on and nothing much could be known about refugees and their predicament at that time.
‘The activists involved with the refugee movement at Dandakaranya were all locked up in keeping with the Maintenance of Internal Security Act during Emergency. I re-established connection with the refugee movement via Sakti Sarkar, a Janta Party MP from the Sundarbans, who was a close friend. Most of the refugees were from the socially and economically backward Namasudra caste, Bengal’s largest Dalit caste. Sarkar himself was from a backward caste and was sympathetic to them and wanted their resettlement, unlike most of the top tier Left leaders who were well-settled, educated and upper caste East Bengalis. When he couldn’t convince his own comrades about the refugees’ fight for building homes in Bengal
[despite earlier promises by the CPM], Sarkar took a few intellectuals and reporters with him to Marichjhapi in a launch. I wasn’t there with them at that time. My visit to the island came later, under worse circumstances.’
I ask Haldar what the stand of the Left Front government towards these refugees immediately after they came to power was.
‘“Mere tarao” [drive them away by force]. That’s how the government regarded the homeless. See, there were refugees settled elsewhere, too, in West Bengal. Jadavpur in south Kolkata is a refugee resettlement colony.
But these people were CPI(M) supporters; they were part of the Left’s voter base, and hence the government had no trouble with them.
‘I was involved with the organization Citizens for Democracy; Saibal Gupta was the president for West Bengal, Jayaprakash Narayan was the All-India president and V.M. Tarkunde was its secretary. I used to attend meetings organized by Sakti Sarkar held for the Marichjhapi refugees and I was aghast at the atrocities committed against them by the government.
‘After economic restrictions on Marichjhapi settlers in January 1979, many of them died of starvation. Those who wanted to extend relief to these refugees were asked to leave by the government; they were prevented from carrying out relief work. Children were the worst affected. Their bodies were thrown in the river. Fishermen caught bodies in nets, instead of fish!
‘Mejda [Haldar’s brother] was the secretary of Matsayajibi Samiti
[Fishermen’s Committee],so he was aware of these goings-on. He used to write to me regularly about Marichjhapi. Noted writer Sunil Ganguly also wrote about the atrocities against islanders in various magazines. Their very will to fight was broken by depriving them of food; at times they remained without food for as many as four days at a stretch.
‘A report by renowned Gandhian social activist Pannalal Dasgupta created a stir. He was asked to accompany the refugees who had been forcefully evicted from Marichjhapi back to Dandakaranya. He wrote that when kids died during travel, their bodies were just thrown off trains with no compunction for the bereaved mothers. This report came out in the paper Jugantar. Pramod Dasgupta, a top Left leader, threatened to cancel all advertisements in the newspaper if they continued to publish Pannalal Dasgupta’s reports on Marichjhapi; all reportage stopped. I got sidelined myself. Apart from The Statesman, no one published any article on Marichjhapi anymore. When national publications tried to delve into the issue, their owners were approached by the West Bengal government
officials who asked them not to publish anything, saying all this was a conspiracy against the Left in West Bengal.’
I ask him how he interprets the Left’s volte-face after coming to power.
Haldar says the reason was politics, not ecology.
‘There was a meeting in Bhilai, where Jyoti Basu himself had made a promise to refugees that they would be welcomed back with open arms once the Left came to power in West Bengal. What led to the conflict was the fact that the refugees were operating under the Udbastu Unnayansil Samity, and the Left wanted the Samity to function as its branch. If it did that, the outfit could no longer carry out independent movements. But it refused to do so; it snubbed offers to attach itself to any political party. And that’s where the trouble began.
‘In Tripura, for example, all adivasis were communists, while the Bengali refugees were affiliated to the Congress. However, in 1977, the refugees voted for the Left Front and the CPI(M) came to power in that state. So, the Left leaders felt that if the refugees stayed where they were, outside Bengal, the Left’s power would proliferate across India. In fact, in Bastar, erstwhile Madhya Pradesh, a CPI candidate had won the local elections. The Left leaders didn’t want the refugees to come to Bengal.
‘I had written about this strategy of the Left’s in Anandabazar Patrika, when I was asked to analyze the reason behind its stiff resistance to refugee resettlement in Marichjhapi. I had also translated and published two letters
– one by Jyoti Basu himself and the other by Samar Mukherjee, written in 1961, to the then relief and rehabilitation minister Prafulla Sen against the resettlement of the refugees in Dandakaranya. Who would imagine that these very people would not only refuse them land, but kill them mercilessly when they refused to follow the state’s arbitrary orders?
‘What’s worse is the government didn’t stop its efforts to evict these refugees even during the devastating floods of 1978. To help them, Jyotirmoy Dutta, noted poet and journalist, arranged a cultural function where celebrity singers such as Suchitra Mitra, Debabrata Biswas, Nirmalendu Chowdhury, Hemanta Mukherjee [incidentally, most of them were Left sympathizers] performed to raise money.’
‘What about the government’s claim that refugees were felling trees on the island?’ I ask next.
‘That’s a lie. These refugees were from East Pakistan, which has an abundance of water bodies. Fish breeding was in their blood. Even in Dandakaranya, a mainly arid land, whenever they had access to ponds, they would cultivate fish and send them to Calcutta. At Marichjhapi, they cultivated galda chingri[lobsters], which were high priced and in demand.
They also worked in fields, built a school and a hospital, where two doctors from outside the island came to work for the islanders. They never cut trees.
‘The police mixed poison in the water source of the hospital inside the island. Children died, doctors sent the water for examination and the truth was out. During the Marichjhapi operations, one of the doctors who would come to the island regularly fled to Bangladesh. Every time he tried to come back, there would be raids on him. His home was in Maslandapur in North 24 Parganas. He shifted base to Helencha in Bagda, but they raided him there too. Then he had to flee to Uttarakhand, which had a sizeable population of Bengali refugees. He was later discovered to be in Indore.
The Left government was ruthless in its pursuit of islanders, both before and after it crushed them in Marichjhapi.
‘We newspapermen could have done more, but reports were too few and far between. The media proprietors were worried about the state government stopping advertisements,’ Haldar says.
‘What about legal help?’
‘There was a man called Debabrata from the island. When the economic blockade started, he went to barrister Niharendu Dutta Majumdar and his junior Sakya Sen. The government flouted the court’s order against economic restrictions. When the island was torched in May 1979, Majumdar and Sen filed another case, after their inspection of the burnt-down island, as instructed by the court. When they came back and submitted the report, the Bench had changed, it was headed by Justice B.C.
Basak, known to be close to Jyoti Basu. The court dismissed the case, saying it was a reserved area and the Marichjhapi dwellers were encroachers. Thus ended any hope of legal deliverance.
‘The fact is that these refugees were a self-sufficient, independent lot –
they used to manufacture bidis and sell them. They used to make bread and sell that, the flour for which was also grown by them, along with fish cultivation, boat-making … This self-sufficiency was a threat to CPI(M)’s core policy – help the needy, the downtrodden, in exchange for their support, vis-à-vis votes. But the Marichjhapi people didn’t want anything from the government; all they wanted was a place to stay.
‘The government’s dirty tricks department stooped very low to break the backbone of the refugees. In Kumirmari, I met a boy from Marichjhapi who had tried to set the island on fire. He couldn’t. It was later discovered that the government, via the block development officer, had enticed him with the promise of a livelihood as a road construction worker.
‘During the economic restrictions on the island, there was no food as all aid was prevented from reaching islanders. People had resorted to killing crows to feed themselves. It was that bad.’
‘If it was a different government, would you say things could have been different?’ I ask him.
Weariness creeps in like a quiet thief on the chronicler’s face.
‘Thejananetri [peoples’ leader], Mamata Banerjee, who came to power in 2011 with chants of “Maa Mati Manush” [Mother, Homeland and People], had promised a judicial probe into the Marichjhapi massacre. After coming to power, she called a few survivors scattered here and there, and gave them rice at Rs 2 per kilo and a special ration card. That is the price that was fixed for the lives lost, and the indignities heaped on thousands.
‘It is the nature of power. The strange thing is, even today, if you try to go to Marichjhapi, you will see policemen keeping a close watch on the island. What or who is being guarded is a mystery. Humanity died on that island in 1979.’
January 2018, Bose Pukur, Kolkata
Palm Avenue. One of south Kolkata’s most upscale colonies is, ironically, where the last communist chief minister of West Bengal currently stays. You can’t, of course, grudge Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee a fancy address when the party he has spent a lifetime in has been guilty of worse crimes.
Around me are swish apartments, no more than a few decades old, some even younger. But the house I walk into is a lone wolf from a bygone era, proudly standing apart from its showy, younger peers, with a smirk of having seen it all.
14/1/B, Palm Avenue houses advocate Sakya Sen, now in his seventies, who, at thirty, had fought for the hunted of Marichjhapi and tried to give them justice. This city lawyer stood up for those whose backs were broken, homes burnt, near ones snatched away at night’s end.
He had lost.
The chamber I am taken to is full of fat books and yellowing stacks of legal papers. As I take my seat opposite him, Sen sounds out a cautionary note, ‘If you want precise dates of events, I may end up disappointing you.’
I assure him I am not looking at a chronological re-telling of Marichjhapi; rather, how and why he got involved in a losing fight. Why would a young man, at the dawn of his career, take up a case like this?
What was the motivation?
‘Those were different times; you practised law to serve people. I started my law practice around 1973 under the guidance of Niharendu Dutta Majumdar, a barrister in the Calcutta High Court. I heard about Marichjhapi in 1978, when I was around thirty years old. An association named Amra Bangali [We, the Bengalis] that was fighting the cause of refugees seeking rehabilitation approached us for legal help. They introduced us to the tragedy of Marichjhapi.
‘As they were fighting for homeless Bengali refugees who, after being uprooted from their homeland, were facing displacement yet again, that too unfairly; my senior and I felt we should help Amra Bangali.’
Amra Bangali, Sen tells me, played a big role in the legal battle that took place against the state, since the association, as a singular unit, was the second petitioner in the case of the People of Marichjhapi against the State of West Bengal, the first petitioner being Debabrata Biswas, a resident of the island.
‘You must have heard this? Even before they came to power in 1977, Left leaders, including Jyoti Basu, had extended invitation to refugees –
then in Dandakaranya camps – to come to Bengal?’ Sen asks me.
‘I have heard this from many quarters. Is that, documented?’
‘There was no written document, but I know that on more than one occasion, prominent Left leaders had promised them rehabilitation in West Bengal once they came to power, that too in public speeches. They were even allowed to come in for five to six years, before 1978. The Left government or its predecessor didn’t stop them from settling in Marichjhapi.
‘Before 1978, I wasn’t even aware of Marichjhapi. When the state began the economic blockade against the inhabitants of the island, and when members of Amra Bangali informed us that this is happening, we made an appeal to the Calcutta High Court. For me, it was a matter of fighting for the homeless. These people had come all the way from Bangladesh, why should they be arrested if they had not committed any crime? Why would there be economic blockade against those who were trying to earn a livelihood without disrupting anyone else’s life?
‘I can recollect an incident, which is not in any way related to the case, but might help you understand why Marichjhapi affected me so deeply. On my way to court once, I saw a man lying on the street near the All India Radio building in Kolkata. There was a big crowd inside the court, and I had to attend to a case, but I couldn’t get the man out of my mind. I went back, fetched him food, gave him my address and some money; whatever little I could afford in those days.’
Sen tells me that this is almost a family tradition, fighting the good fight for people who can’t. His paternal grandfather had helped revolutionaries during days of the Raj.
‘My thakurda [paternal grandfather], a barrister, was part of freedom fighter Deshbandhu Chittaranjan Das’s core team. Other members were Deshapriya Jatindra Mohan Sengupta and Deshapran Bimal Sasmal – all tall men from the history books.
‘During the freedom movement, he helped revolutionaries, financially and otherwise. When Das was sent to jail, he had said about my granddad and another accomplice: “My right hand and left hand are here. They will carry on my work.” When my grandfather died, I was just four or five years old, but his stories remained with me. They moulded me.
‘I remember the famous revolutionary Ananta Singh, who was involved in the Chittagong Armoury Raid. He used to come to my grandfather for financial support, and Thakurda used to help him along with others. After my grandfather’s death, Baba [my father] took up the cause.
‘Later, I remember Singh lamenting, “Amra desher janye lorlam, kintu ekhon amra khete pachhi naa” [We fought for the nation, but now we don’t even get two square meals]. He stopped visiting us also. Those memories have stayed. And wherever I have seen injustice, I have tried to fight it.’
I ask him about his feelings for Marichjhapi.
‘It was a damning violation of human rights. What strengthened my resolve to see justice being served to those sufferers, both as a legal professional and as a human being, was the government’s blatant disregard of fundamental legal and human principles.
‘The court had given an injunction order against the economic barricade by the government. But, instead of giving a legal reply to our application, or get the case heard at the first instance, as is the legal norm, they sent in their goons and burnt down the entire island. We came to know of this through the newspapers and via some of the people who used to report the happenings at Marichjhapi to us. Initially, around forty to fifty people from Marichjhapi used to come to us, sometimes in batches of ten, sometimes more, to seek legal assistance after the economic blockade by the Left government.
‘Mind you, the media wasn’t the powerful platform for information dissemination the way you have it today, and the two or three papers that were there were suppressed by the government. However, Anandabazar Patrika did publish one or two articles about the entire island being torched.
Immediately, we made an application to the High Court, bringing the
incident to the court’s notice. It was unbelievable that such a thing could have happened, that too in a pending case that was sub judice.
‘The court took a strong stand and the lawyers concerned, both for the petitioners as well as those who stood for the state, were asked to visit the island as special observers and submit their reports. The Advocate General of West Bengal, Snehangshu Acharya, was appointed by the government to fight its case.
‘Some people said the government had enlisted the help of Bihar Police to burn down the island. Bodies were said to have been thrown into the river, hutments razed to ground.
‘As mentioned, the legal parties involved on both sides were directed by the court to go for an inspection to Marichjhapi and file their report. My senior, Dutt Majumdar, and I, representing the people of Marichjhapi, went for the inspection as asked by the Court, but there was no one from the legal team on behalf of the government accompanying us. They didn’t go for obvious reasons, primarily fear; they thought they would be assaulted by the survivors who had fled to nearby islands such as Kumirmari or to the mainland.
‘We put up at a local panchayat office in Kumirmari. Next morning, we were taken to Marichjhapi in boats. Debabrata Biswas, petitioner number one in the case, took the lead. Apart from the oarsman, only two people could fit into those narrow boats.
‘I remember that boat ride, the stillness in the air, the fear of being greeted by the horrors of what took place once we reached the accursed island, the expansive Raimangal and Matla rivers and the salty air due to proximity to the sea.
‘As we touched Marichjhapi’s shores, a few men in uniform appeared from nowhere. Maybe they were from the Port Commission, or maybe not; their uniform didn’t reveal their official identity. There were two senior officials and their assistants who told us that no inspection would be allowed. We asked them who they were. One of them turned rather aggressive, saying they had instructions from the government that no photographs should be clicked and that no one was allowed to inspect the
island. Accompanying us, mind you, were no media persons. There were five to seven people who used to be inhabitants of Marichjhapi and a social service worker, Subrata Chatterjee, who was not directly involved in the legal case but knew the refugees well and was an active social worker himself.
‘Though we didn’t have cameras with us, I was taking notes, based on which I would file my report later. During the confrontation, we spotted a launch stationed at a distance, which made it clear that these men had been following us, most definitely under instructions from the government. One of the officers lost his temper and started shouting at us, asking us to leave.
‘We had the court order with us and asked him again who he was. We said we would not leave without completing our task and, if he wanted, he could arrest us. We also told him we would file a contempt application in court, saying he was forcing us to disobey the court’s order, and he may even lose his job.’
‘Didn’t you, even for a moment, fear standing up to an officer who claimed to be carrying out the government’s order, knowing what the latter was capable of doing to those who opposed it?’ I ask Sen.
‘No, the craving to see justice being served doubled after we met with resistance. We threatened him with a contempt case, and the fellow got unnerved. We asked him if he had any shame, whether he felt anything at all after seeing what had happened on the island. As we looked out, all you could see were burnt huts. The smell of burnt flesh hung in the air.
‘The officer told us, “The government has ordered us to come here.
Kindly give it to us in writing that we came here and asked you to leave the premises.” My senior asked me to write a few lines on a notebook and I did so, saying that the said officer had come and raised objection to our visit, and that he had done his duty. I mentioned this in my report, too, which was filed in court.’
As a young lawyer of thirty, what did Sen feel when he first saw a ghost island where there was once a thriving community?
‘First, there was disbelief,’ he answers. ‘How could something like this happen in the first place? This was a people’s government, a communist
government, and it has wiped out thousands of people so easily? They have done so with utter disregard not only for justice, but going against the very tenets of humanity.
‘What happened after the mindless massacre of May 1979 was that the forty to fifty people who used to visit us regarding the issue disappeared.
Some had lost their fathers, some husbands or wives, children or siblings.
No one knew where they were, whether they were scorched in the fire, or whether their bodies were flung in the river. Debabrata used to come intermittently, but that too eventually stopped.
‘We spent the day at Marichjhapi. There were broken utensils lying around, burnt books and destroyed furniture. The school building had been razed; the hospital had become a blackened building. I remember collecting shattered pieces of a sankha [ the white conch bangle worn by married Bengali women] that must have adorned the arm of someone lost to inhumanity.
‘I deposited all of these to Amra Bangali. I never got them back! The organization doesn’t exist today. I must mention here that, while at Kumirmari, I had talked to some people from Marichjhapi who fled the island before it was burnt down. The people I talked to told me that on that fateful night in May, they had been able to see with their naked eyes a huge ball of fire at a distance engulfing their homes, their people – everything they had built and nurtured. They told me the night sky had turned blood red.
‘I had recorded their statements with a tape recorder. I gave that, too, to Amra Bangali. But as with the specimen collected from the island, so with this, I never did manage to get them back. I kept asking for them, but they would give some excuse or the other.’
‘Isn’t it strange that an organization committed to the cause of fighting for refugees could have been so callous about preserving evidence?’ I ask.
Sen frowns in disappointment. ‘As an organization, I felt it never had any formal structure.
‘The case wasn’t pursued any more because there was no one left to pursue it. The final order from the court baffled us. We had tried to bring
the case to its legitimate end, from the initial forty to fifty refugees, five to ten still used to come to us with the hope of seeing justice done. But the case was dismissed.
‘Justice B.C. Basak dismissed the case on the grounds that Marichjhapi was part of a reserved forest and the refugees didn’t have the right to settle there. On the basis of an oral statement of the government, the case was dismissed. Later, much later, we came to know that it wasn’t a reserved forest area at all.
‘But Justice Basak had written a line in the order, “It is expected that the government will deal with these people compassionately”, which didn’t have any meaningful impact whatsoever, because the case had already been dismissed – that too without verification of facts.
‘We felt demoralized after this order. I was emotionally affected. But the reason we couldn’t proceed further was that the people we were fighting for had gone away. Most had gone missing, many were presumed dead, others too numbed by their losses, both of near-and-dear ones and of everything else they held dear, to carry on the fight anymore. Many had been forcibly sent back to their camps in Dandakaranya.’
It’s been almost four decades since the massacre. Does Marichjhapi continue to haunt him?
‘I used to fall short of words when I spoke to people about Marichjhapi.
My government killed my people, and I could do nothing legally. It doesn’t haunt me anymore. Failure has left me numb.’
Why did the Left Front government do what it did in Marichjhapi?
‘Why the government suddenly became desperate to send refugees back to Dandakaranya remains a mystery. Jyoti Basu was like a dictator. He probably couldn’t digest the fact that they were disobeying his orders. It was his hurt ego, nothing else.’
The interview is almost over, yet I can’t help but ask Sen one last question. ‘In recent past, West Bengal has seen violence in Singur and then in Nandigram, the latter bringing Left rule to an end. Do you think the Jyoti Basu government could have done what it did in Marichjhapi in the new millennium?’
‘No, it couldn’t have. The media is powerful now and, more importantly, people are stronger. The aam aadmi will not tolerate this.
‘Although I have to admit that even when the issue came to light, there wasn’t an outpouring of support from the general public. Some people fought for the refugees, but they were too few in number. It was a failure, not only of the legal system but of a generation – my generation – then in their twenties and thirties. We lacked collective conscience. We destroyed Marichjhapi – all of us.’
January 2018, Palm Avenue, Kolkata
Summer’s here. Village kids are swimming in shallow ponds with lazy buffaloes, as ducks quickly move out of the way. Unruly cows are causing cars to come to a halt in narrow lanes as nostalgia comes blaring with a Govinda song from a cranky loudspeaker outside a tiny sweet shop.
Urban gives way to rurban as our car leaves Kamalgachi post office behind on our way to Pather Sesh. Kamalgachi is a stone’s throw away from the southern tip of Kolkata. Pather Sesh is two hours’ drive on a traffic-less day like this Sunday, 28 February 2018.
The person I have come to visit is someone I had last seen as a child.
She had come to our house as a distant cousin and only much later did I know from my father that she was no relation of ours. She was hiding from the police as her father, Rangalal Goldar, was a top leader of the Udbastu Unnayanshil Samiti (Refugee Welfare Committee) that oversaw the migration to Marichjhapi from Dandakaranya. He looked over the building of a township and then fought with the police to stay back in the island.
Since my own father was sympathetic to the refugee cause, had been to the island to see them clear forests and develop a functioning village economy and had donated money to the cause, Goldar trusted our family with his daughter for a few months as he himself searched for a more permanent settlement after the refugees were forced out of Marichjhapi.
The woman I meet is not the Mana I remember. The years have not been kind to her, but Mana’s face lights up as she is told who I am. I have come back for her stories, I tell her.
‘Tell me all those stories you told me then.’
‘Tea first.’ She won’t have it otherwise.
Even though Mana’s father took her away eight months after she came to stay with us, Mana had never left my mind. She had brought Marichjhapi to me and I had never been able to put those images out of my head. Stories of struggle to make a mud island habitable, police raids that followed soon after, the arson, the rapes and the killings had left a deep mark in my child mind, forcing me to explore Marichjhapi in the years ahead. Marichjhapi remains the reason I took to journalism – to tell stories the powerful want hidden. Marichjhapi is why I decided, early on in my own career, that being critical of power should be a journalist’s default setting. If it wasn’t for Mana and her stories, who knows what life would have been for me.
Oily omelettes are served with steaming cups of chai for me and my father, who has accompanied me to this tiny hut in Pather Sesh. Father has been in touch with Mana’s family and had visited them often in these intervening years after she left our home.
As I look around the hut, a life lived less than ordinarily unfolds before me. Mana’s home has baked mud on one side, tin on three sides and a whirring ceiling fan that fails to keep summer at bay. There’s a large bed we sit on and Mana takes a moda (cane stool) for herself. On one side is a dressing table where a small mirror framed in pink plastic is supported by Dale Carnegie’s translated essays; next to it, there’s a puja stand with a framed painting of Lakshmi.
Mana watches me take in her tiny room. She holds my hand. ‘I have been all right, babu,’ she smiles, trying to reassure me.
I remember father telling me how my family had wanted to help Mana financially after she went away and how every time her father and then she herself had refused any monetary help, saying what we did for them after the Marichjhapi operation was enough.
I fight back tears, search for something to say. She begins her story to break the awkwardness that has filled the room.
‘Remember I had told you why I was named Mana? My father named me after Mana Camp in Raipur, in what is today Chhattisgarh. I was born there in 1965 and lived there for twelve years. The Mana Camp had thousands of refugees who crossed over to India from East Pakistan. I miss that place sometimes, babu. Wonder how it is now.’
I tell Mana I had been there a month ago. Her eyes light up. ‘Are refugees like me still there, babu?’
I tell her there are. There is an area right in front of Raipur airport which is still called ‘Mana Camp’. I had stayed a day there in my colleague Kalyan Das’s home, whose parents had come there as refugees. There are pucca houses now, which former refugees now occupy, and the office and residential quarters of VIP Suraksha Vahini.
I tell Mana how I met a retired school teacher, N.C. Mulick, who had crossed over to India during the riots of 1970 in Bangladesh’s Faridpur district and was packed off to Mana Camp. He remembers Mana’s father along with the other refugee leaders, Raiharan Barui and Satish Mondal. He remembers those difficult days in Mana Camp, of living like pigs in a pen, standing in queue for a whole night for one bucket of water.
I tell Mana of Kalyan’s dad, Kalachand, who still remembers the riots that broke out in the camps as groups clashed over bare necessities.
‘It was so long ago, but I remember that life, babu. Widowed mothers and their kids were kept in a separate enclosure that had a barricade, so that they wouldn’t face unwanted male attention. When the children grew up, they were given permanent settlements in places such as Malkangiri [in Odisha] and Koraput [also in Odisha]. But the lands were infertile and farming was the mainstay of us refugees from East Pakistan. Whatever cultivation took place was mostly done by the adivasis. There was nothing for us except odd jobs.
‘The government had sanctioned ration for us but the quantity could sustain nuclear families, not extended ones. And most of us had large families those days and we had to survive on very little.’
As a child, Mana would hear the refugees talk about the rain-fed, lush greens of ‘Opar Bangla’, the joy of speaking in the mother tongue and not
having to learn the coarse Hindi of central India and gorging on fresh fish from the river with steaming hot rice. Her father, Satish Mondal and Raiharan Barui, the top three leaders of the Udbastu Unnayanshil Samiti, decided to spearhead a movement after a few years as people were unhappy with camp life. They thought the people of Bengal would help them.
‘My father Rangalal, Satish Mondal, Raiharan Baroi and a few others were on an eighteen-day fast to protest against the rice doled out to them in the camps, which was of very poor quality. They demanded we be given more and better quality rice.’
I ask Mana if she had seen Jyoti Basu at the camp and if indeed he had made a promise to take refugees back to Bengal.
Mana remembers what Jyoti Basu had told them when he visited Mana Camp as the leader of opposition in West Bengal Assembly. ‘This was sometime in the mid-seventies, just before the Left came to power in West Bengal. “Tomra banglar manush, amra banglay tomader basati debo” [You are the people of Bengal, we will give you homes in Bengal].’
Ram Chatterjee [of the Marxist Forward Block, another party that was part of the Left Front], who later became minister of state for civil defence, also visited the camp and told the refugees that Bengal was waiting to welcome them.
‘Ram Chatterjee was my father’s friend; when Baba used to visit Calcutta, he would put up at Chatterjee’s house,’ Mana tells me.
‘When the Left Front came to power in 1977, with Basu as chief minister, we zeroed in on the Sundarbans. The air, the water and the alluvial land would make us miss home in East Pakistan a little less. Some of us had made trips in between and discovered Marichjhapi, a place that could sustain us.’
‘So, did Basu, Ram Chatterjee or any other leader from the Left Front talk about Marichjhapi?’ I ask. I am curious to know this from Mana as some refugees maintain it was the Left leaders themselves who had suggested Marichjhapi to them.
‘No. It was Baba and the other leaders of the Udbastu Unnayanshil Samiti who discovered the island. Some refugees would keep travelling to
West Bengal to look for land to settle in. Also, a part of the Sundarbans is in Opar Bangla, now Bangladesh, so we knew the islands quite well,’ Mana says.
How did the exodus to Marichjhapi begin?
‘That was so many years ago, babu. I remember there was a big temple inside Mana Camp, a hari sabha near the market. I have faint recollection of an evening when people came there with their belongings and set off for Calcutta. Their final destination was Marichjhapi.
‘We did not go right away. We would get to know later that the Left government went back on its word and used force to send these refugees back. The plan was to take the train to Hasnabad railway station, and reach Marichjhapi by boat from there. But when news spread of police deporting people from Hasnabad, refugees got down at earlier stations and took circuitous routes to avoid the police.’
Mana doesn’t remember the year correctly, but this was a few years before 1978. ‘There were several attempts to reach Marichjhapi. A group of refugees would try to leave and fail as the cops would send them away; some would come back, others would spread out in various places within West Bengal.’
Mana and her family were preparing to leave in a few days when disaster struck at the camp. ‘Baba came home earlier than usual one evening. His friend, Satish Mondal, was with him. Baba said a warrant had been issued against them. Section 144 of the Code of Criminal Procedure (CrPC), that prohibits the assembly of five or more people, had been imposed in Dandakaranya. A police van arrived at around ten or eleven in the morning and they took Baba away along with Satish Mondal.
‘For six long months, we had no idea where he was kept and in what condition, or whether he was alive. We had a ration shop, given to us by the camp authorities, to operate. It was in father’s name but, without him, we could not even run the shop, the sole means of our livelihood.
‘Mother became a househelp to feed us. My elder brother was in eighth class and I was studying in third class – I was the second of five siblings.
My paternal cousin was in eleventh class. He, his mom and younger brother
used to stay with us. We were a joint family. He used to help us out, but authorities sent him and his family away to another camp. So, we were left to fend for ourselves; five kids with their mother. We saw a lot then, the worst of human nature. Camp babus taking advantage of women who had lost their husbands or whose husbands were sent to jail.
‘My elder brother took up work at a sweet shop. Because my father was involved in the peoples’ movement, some families gave us financial support on and off to see us through.
‘Six months later, we got to know our father’s case was up for trial in Jabalpur. A cousin sister who lived there sent us a telegram, saying that Baba will be produced in court. He was charged under Maintenance of Internal Security Act (MISA) and sent to Raipur Jail, along with Satish Mondal.
‘We were scrapping the bottom. The government didn’t want Baba out, as he was the most educated of the lot and they feared he would organize refugees and be successful in taking them to Marichjhapi. Baba was a schoolteacher in East Pakistan, in Khulna district. He was the spokesperson of these displaced people.’
Under MISA, no one was allowed to meet the prisoner. The government came up with a new law that meetings would be allowed once in three months. Mana would finally get to meet her father. On Day One, there was an application that had to be filed requesting the meet; the second day was also spent in formalities; on the third day, the family could finally meet Goldar.
Mana’s eyes water up as she remembers the reunion. There was a big room with four sets of sofas in four corners, a table at the end of the room for the collector sahib to oversee the meetings. Four families would get to spend time with their jailed family members every day.
After twenty-two months, refugees imprisoned under MISA were set free. ‘Baba came back to the camp. By then, most of the people there had been sent elsewhere to other camps in Dandakaranya in order to stop them from planning resettlement movements to Bengal. A few families like ours were left. Baba was again given an offer to run a store. He said no.’
Goldar would move to Katihar in Bihar. His determination to set foot on Marichjhapi, even after so many failed attempts over the years by other refugee groups, would not be deterred. ‘We had no idea about his plans. Ma asked him, “They are letting us stay here, why do we need to move?” But Baba would not listen.’
The Goldar family said goodbye to Mana Camp and moved to Katihar.
After a few months there, Rangalal left for Calcutta and stayed at Ram Chatterjee’s house. Mana says that Ram Chatterjee, unlike Jyoti Basu, had not forgotten his earlier promise and offered help to her father.
‘So Baba started mobilizing people scattered across various camps in Dandakaranya. He was arrested during a visit to Dandakaranya again, beaten up by the cops and forced to board a train to Bihar. He came home and fell ill. He was bedridden for six to seven months. Ma would stay up at nights, tending to him, trying to talk sense into this stubborn man who would not rest till he got his promised kingdom. On recovering, he went to another village in Bihar to fool the cops who were always spying on him.
From there, he went to Calcutta. When a batch of refugees from Dandakaranya arrived in Calcutta, he went with them to Marichjhapi.
‘We, the rest of the family apart from Baba, hadn’t seen Marichjhapi yet. We went there two or three months after him. When we were on the road, Baba’s name was not even scribbled on our bags. We did not give out our real identities when asked, as it could have led to trouble. We travelled to Hasnabad by train, thankfully with no further interruptions. We stayed at Hasnabad for a day or two. We took a launch and finally reached Marichjhapi.’
What was her first reaction when she reached the promised land?
‘I saw a sea of hopefuls.’ Mana is suddenly her twelve-year-old self, her eyes all dewy.
‘There were thousands and thousands of people. There were plantations on the island – of palm and coconut trees – by the government. If you go to the Sundarbans even now, you will see them. People had built shanties in the space between these trees.
‘They would fetch wood from trees in the forest, and sell timber to locals on the other side of the river, to places such as Molla Khali and Satjelia. They would sell fat trunks of the goran tree and earn their livelihood. Life, if not always comfortable, was peaceful.’
But some refugees said they didn’t fell trees?
‘No, they did. Not a lot. But they did.
‘We gradually built a settlement there. Things were looking up for those who had been homeless for so long. No one minded the toil, as they felt a sense of home, with the same flora and fauna they had left behind in Bangladesh. Outsiders came to help with money and material, sometimes ideas. Engineer Subrata Chatterjee helped us build a hand pump. It was at his house in Jodhpur Park that Baba took shelter after fleeing from Marichjhapi. Your father would give us Rs 15,000, a princely sum in those days.’
How was daily life on mud island?
‘We were content. A dispensary had been built, a school to teach students till eighth class. Small businesses were being carried out via fish rearing ponds, wood cutting and in the salt pans. With goran wood, we built boats. My father had a boat of his own. For a few months, there were smiles, before the State came down on us. The first hint of trouble appeared when our people were stopped from going to the other side of the river to get food, water, or to conduct business or collect necessities.
‘For eighteen long days, there was complete lockdown on such movements to the other side. There was no food to eat. Out of desperation, people started eating the soft upper portion of coconut plants, locally known as mathi. They would also eat a kind of local leafy vegetable, jadupalang, which was salty in taste. Lot of people died of food poisoning. Children died in large numbers, eating such things.
‘ Khub koshto [a lot of pain].’ Mana’s tears flow freely now.
‘When people tried to venture out, they were attacked by the river police with tear gas and bullets. Women were raped. Refugees only had changas [sharpened sticks] as weapons, their eyes burning due to the gas. I was only little, and I would see and hear of these battles between grossly
unequal sides. Santosh Sarkar, my neighbour, was shot in the leg. He lost that leg. You will meet him today,’ Mana says.
‘Then economic lockdown, the court case that stopped it, the starvation deaths in the meanwhile…’ Mana’s voice is a whisper.
‘We were one of the last families to be thrown out of Marichjhapi.
Baba, Satish Mondal – they were all absconding. I remember, it was evening when we were taken to Hasnabad by launch. From there, we were taken to Dudhkundi camp. Later, we were taken to a camp in Burnpur, where Baba joined us. He was in hiding in Subrata Chatterjee’s house in Maslandapur, after he was forced to flee from the Jodhpur Park house due to a police raid. Ma asked the authorities whether he could be brought to us, now that there was no Marichjhapi to go back to. They said yes. We were sent back to Kathihar and warned we should not step into Bengal again,’
Mana says.
‘But Baba could not stay away from Bengal. He brought us back there, where my sister stayed in Subrata Chatterjee’s house while I put up at your house. I found home again.’ Mana smiles at me.
In hindsight, was it a mistake to come to Marichjhapi? I tell Mana that both N.C. Mulick and Kalachand Das told me it was. After the initial years, the Dandakaranya Development Authority officials did what they could to rehabilitate the refugees with the mainstream. While Mulick completed his education and took up a teacher’s job, Kalachand Das did his ITI training and became a mechanic. Both had told me that they have led a largely satisfactory life far away from Bengal and are glad they did not venture to Marichjhapi.
‘What do I say, babu? You can’t change the past, can you?’ Mana sighs.
Pather Sesh
Mana and I sit in silence for a while. This is too personal a tale for me to pen down in my diary without feeling a lump in my throat.
I manage to hold back tears and ask her about Pather Sesh, her final destination, which literally translates to ‘Road’s End’. How did that little
girl from Mana Camp in Raipur, who witnessed one of the worst human massacres in the history of this country, end up in this green hamlet in the South 24 Parganas of Bengal?
‘As you know, Baba’s soul belonged here. He collected funds from journalists, intellectuals and authors – Amlan Datta, Gour Kishore Ghosh, Jyotirmoy Datta, Sunil Ganguly, your father and others – to build this village four to five years after the Marichjhapi incident.
‘Gradually, other people displaced from Marichjhapi and forced to go back to Dandakaranya flocked to here. This place reminded Baba of Marichjhapi. That’s why he came here.’
As we speak, a frail man in crutches appears at Mana’s door. ‘ Arre Satosh da! Asun asun. Come. Come. We were talking about you just now.
Who better than you to tell this journalist brother of mine about Pather Sesh! He is writing a book on us.’
As Santosh Sarkar walks in, Mana puts water to boil again for a fresh round of tea, asking us to stay back for lunch. Old wounds have been reopened and shut.
February 2018, Pather Sesh
It was a morning like any other in the past week. Yet, as Santosh Sarkar woke up, unfed and red-eyed from yet another sleepless night, he felt the day would change his life. In the past few nights, with the little sleep that he’d been able to manage, nightmares had been his constant companion.
Nightmares that did not leave him as the day broke, and hunger and death hung in the air. What Sarkar could not imagine, even in his worst nightmare, was that 31 January 1979 would leave him a paralytic for the rest of his life. Or that he would turn a folk hero of sorts at the tender age of eighteen for a homeless mass of women and men who were waging a war on the state.
‘I am no hero. But yes, I would never hesitate to jump into the fire for what I thought was right. You may find that hard to believe by looking at me today, but Mana has seen me in my elements,’ says Sarkar, turning to look at Mana, who vanishes into her kitchen for a second round of tea for us.
Outside Mana’s tiny hut in Pather Sesh, the day gets warmer and Sarkar takes us back to the economic blockade on Marichjhapi that lasted from 26
January 1979 till the Calcutta High Court, under Justice R.N. Pyne, passed an injunction on the seventh of the next month, ordering the West Bengal government to lift the blockade. But those thirteen or fourteen days left
countless children and the aged dead from hunger and sickness as they fed on wild grass and leaves of unknown trees. ‘Every household in the island fell victim to dysentery. Death knocked on our doors every day. Naked bodies of children were strewn around the bank of Karankhali river as their mothers wailed. We decided we had had enough,’ Sarkar says.
The economic blockade put in place by the state government had begun unannounced. Around thirty police launches and two B.S.F. steamers had circled Marichjhapi on 26 January, preventing islanders from taking boats out to fetch food, water and other essentials from neighbouring islands. Not that they did not try to break through the cordon, but the police launches were quick to attack the boats and drown them, forcing the men to swim back to the island. Some were picked up and taken away to police stations.
‘On the morning of 31 January, we decided on a new plan. Our leaders, Satish Mondal and Rangalal Goldar, said women would row boats to the next island to fetch clean during water and grains, as well as medicine for the sick. Surely, the police launches would not ram into boats carrying women.
‘At around 9 a.m., women volunteers from Marichjhapi set out on three boats. The men watched with bated breath from the shore. It was now up to these mothers, sisters and daughters to bring back essentials from Kumirmari for Marichjhapi’s hungry masses.
‘But we were proven wrong. Those bastards in police uniforms did not care for our women either. They rammed their launches into the boats and drowned all three boats.’
Sarkar had just sat down to have his lunch – a measly meal of boiled khud [small, broken bits of rice] prepared by his mother – when he heard the screams. He ran to the spot despite his mother’s pleas, leaving his meal untouched.
The first task at hand was to rescue those women. Ignoring the teargas shells lobbed by the police from the launches, the men decided to take out boats to save the drowning. Some they were able to rescue, others were lost in the waters, never to be found again. They would know later that a few women were picked up by the policemen themselves on the launches. They
were taken to the nearest police station, gangraped for days and then released.
‘Something snapped inside us. The policemen were in launches, armed and dangerous. We were on the shore. All we had were the thick branches of goran trees we had sharpened to use as spears. We threw them at the bastards who had drowned our women. They were taken aback by this sudden retaliation, which gave us the opportunity to take boats into the river.’
There were almost 400 of them, 400 boys and men, Sarkar among them, who took boats into the river to save the drowning women. The policemen opened fire. ‘Refugee Robin Joarder was hit by a bullet before he could get into a boat. But we were in no mood to stop,’ says Sarkar.
‘Few of us picked up the drowning women and rowed back to Marichjhapi. Others, me amongst them, rowed ahead to Kumirmari to finish the task that our women had set out to do. We reached Kumirmari and asked the villagers for food grains to take back to Marichjhapi. Most of the Kumirmari villagers were hiding inside their houses, fearing we would attack them for siding with Jyoti Basu’s police. They thought we would suspect them of passing on information about us to those criminals in khakis. They were hesitant to open their doors for us.’
But the men who had faced bullets would not be deterred by closed doors. ‘We assured them we hadn’t come with any harmful intentions. All we wanted were food items, medicines and drinking water for our people on the other side. They gave us rice and daal, and pots of drinkable water. The problem was how to travel back to Marichjhapi,’ says Sarkar.
The refugees devised a plan. One boat with rice, daal, water and medicines would have only four people and the boatman on board. This would help the boatman row the boat faster. This boat would be guarded from the police launches on both sides by other boats. Sarkar decided to be on one of the ‘other boats’ that would shield the boat ferrying essentials for the islanders.
‘We had those sharpened branches of goran tress, which we called chenga, to hurl at policemen firing bullets at us and lobbing teargas shells.
Some of us had carried small axes to throw at the policemen from our boats.
We knew if they opened fire, there was no chance of us surviving. But that day we were willing to die for our people back in Marichjhapi.’
Till 3.30 p.m., those brave 400 did this again and again. Their boats would carry essentials from Kumirmari to Marichjhapi, guarded by other boats. When the police launches came close, the refugees threw their battle spears and axes. The police launches in turn tried to ram their boats to drown them. The boats that drowned were the boats that were guarding the ones carrying essentials. Their plan was succeeding.
‘It was nothing short of khondo juddho [a full-fledged war]. They were lobbing teargas shells at us; we were hurling our sharpened chengas at them. Something prevented them from opening fire at us right away. I would have been tempted to call that humanity, but they would soon prove me wrong! Food was being transported amidst all this commotion, while they continued to drown our boats. The river was the battlefield for the day.
‘Robin Joardar had already been fired at and injured. Swami Samiran Ghosh, a swami from Belur Math who had come to stay with us in Marichjhapi, was also badly wounded in the leg when a police launch rammed into the boat he was in,’ Sarkar remembers.
Yet, they carried on.
At around 4 pm, they decided to take a lunch break, eat a few morsels and go to war again. But as they sat down to lunch, news flowed in that additional police forces had been dispatched to gherao these 400
bravehearts. ‘We did not have the luxury of finishing our chire and gur
[flattened rice and jaggery].’
If additional forces arrived, the men knew they stood no chance. The 400 were also not at one place. A few were in the river, rowing to Marichjhapi with essentials, while Sarkar and others were at Kumirmari, taking a break for lunch.
They spotted a huge battalion of almost 500 policemen, armed with rifles, coming towards them in launches.
It was thirty-nine years ago, but the day seems to flash before Sarkar as if it all happened yesterday. ‘How can I forget? The day took my right leg;
Sarkar has always been a Swami Vivekananda fanboy. He says the Swami’s spirit entered him that moment when he addressed his fellowmen,
‘Brothers, this is no time to run and hide. Even if you run, the police will open fire on you. They do not treat us refugees as humans. If they did, they would not have drowned our women. Ever since we, the Hindu refugees, have come to this country, the state has treated us like dogs. Whether in the refugee camps or outside, we have been shown no dignity. Today, let us fight back. If we have to die, let us die with dignity.’
The words acted like an instant drug and transformed the tired mass into a battle-ready mob.
They gathered bows and arrows, lathis, bricks and stones, whatever they could gather from their benefactors in Kumirmari and rushed to the shore.
The policemen opened fire, both at the men in boats and those gathered on the shore of Kumirmari. Bodies fell off boats as screams of the injured filled the air. One local woman from Kumirmari was hit by a bullet when she stepped out of her house while breastfeeding her child to see what the commotion was about. Sarkar saw her lifeless body slump down as her child fell to the ground, crying.
Sarkar picked up his bow. He had always been a good marksman. As teargas filled the air, he chose the safety of a date tree that was at a height to hide behind and aim at the policemen on launch decks. His men were throwing spears and bricks at the approaching launches. The cops lobbed more shells at them and fired in the air to scare them off.
But this was not a day for retreat. The brave refugees stood their ground. This time, the cops aimed straight at them. Sarkar had not seen a launch touch the shore, nor had he noticed cops getting down from it and come up behind him.
‘One of them fired at me from a distance of no more than twenty or thirty feet. A bullet hit my leg. I didn’t quite understand what had happened.
It felt as if a bone had turned to powder. I fell to the ground.’
There was so much smoke from the teargas that the pain in Sarkar’s eyes was more than that in his leg. He somehow crawled to a fenced area
and lay there as the enemy gheraoed him.
Several bayonets were up in the air, ready to be plunged into him.
Sarkar closed his eyes, believing it to be the end. But from nowhere, a man rushed to the spot. A policeman. ‘I dare you to kill him! No one will touch this wounded man!’
Those were the last words Sarkar remembered.
He would come to know later that the deputy superintendent of police, who was in charge that day, had rushed to the spot and stopped his men from killing an injured. The same man had taken an unconscious Sarkar and the other injured to Basirhat Hospital in a launch, even as policemen fired at refugees from other launches. At Basirhat, the doctor who examined his bullet wound had shaken his head and said that Sarkar should be taken to a better hospital in Calcutta.
An ambulance had rushed Sarkar to the R.G. Kar Hospital. A specialist doctor had examined him and decided it was too late to save the leg. It had to be amputated from the knee.
Sarkar would only gain consciousness after the leg was gone. He would spend a month and thirteen days recuperating, between pain and sleep, between depths of despair and yearning for Marichjhapi. He would know later that CPM cadres had landed in Marichjhapi that day, fired at, killed and raped islanders and looted their belongings. The mayhem continued for the whole day.
He would also hear later how the police did not even spare children.
Bayonets had been thrust into fifteen school kids – aged between five and twelve – who had taken shelter inside the thatched hut that was their school.
Their skulls were crushed. The kids had gathered there to make arrangements for Saraswati Puja, which was to be celebrated the next day.
The policemen had smashed Saraswati’s idol before they left.
Though the figures varied, Sarkar would be told later that no less than 1,700 were killed that day; the day he lost his leg: 31 January 1979.
What was on his mind during those forty-three days as he lay in the hospital, a paralytic now, so far away from his beloved Marichjhapi?
‘To lose a leg at eighteen is a difficult thing to cope with, but I decided I would not live on others’ pity. Nor would I let myself wallow in self-pity,’
says Sarkar.
Some of his fellow men had not returned to Marichjhapi after that day.
They had taken shelter in other islands in the Sundarbans to escape from the police. They would come to meet him at the hospital, posing as distant
relatives. From them, Sarkar came to know how lucky he and a few others had been.
Most of those who had been injured that day were picked up by the police, taken away in launches and killed in cold blood. The policemen had also carried away the dead bodies, fishing them out of the river and the shores. This was done to remove all proof of the killings by the state in case there were investigations.
After Sarkar was released from the hospital, he was taken to Dum Dum Central Jail where he did time with about 300-400 other islanders who had been arrested.
When he got out, the island had been cleared of refugees.
He would never go back to Marichjhapi.
‘How did you end up at Pather Sesh?’ I ask Sarkar.
‘While in jail, I resolved to bring together as many displaced families as I could; build one more Marichjhapi. I could not settle anywhere for more than two or three months, doing odd jobs to make ends meet. I came to know of Pather Sesh through Mana’s father, Rangalal Goldar, who had bought one bigha plot here in 1982. I helped him set up this village to rehabilitate Marichjhapi’s homeless.’
Sarkar has spent his years in Pather Sesh setting up Pather Sesh Sobuj Prithibi Unnayan Samiti (Pather Sesh Green Earth Development Society), an NGO to promote children’s education, deliver better health services to rural women and better living conditions not just in Pather Sesh but neighbouring villages like Gourdaho and Lakhinarayanpur.
It has been a fulfilling life, with awards from the state and recognition amongst the people, but Sarkar has a lifelong regret: ‘We could not save Marichjhapi.’
February 2018, Pather Sesh
In front of me is a large white table. Next to it is a fake bamboo plant.
Behind the table is a white wall. Between the table and the wall, on a white chair, is a largish man wearing a crisp white dhoti-kurta and a very bored look. A picture of his deceased wife looks down at him from the wall behind. The door to an anteroom with a bed is open.
This could have been a suite at a hotel that caters to dubious intent; except this room is on the ground floor of a building in south Kolkata’s Mukundapur, set aside by the West Bengal government for children with special needs. And the man in front of me is Kanti Ganguly. I don’t ask him why he has an office in this building. Instead, I talk to him about Marichjhapi. Ganguly was minister of Sundarbans affairs in the Jyoti Basu government when Marichjhapi was massacred.
Ganguly, seventy-five, is the only CPM leader or police official who has agreed to talk to me on the subject. Amiya Kumar Samanta, the superintendent of police who spearheaded Operation Marichjhapi that allegedly left thousands dead, flatly refused to even meet me, saying he knew ‘what people like you will write about me and the incident. I have read many biased, blatantly distorted narrations of the happenings.’ This was despite repeated assurances that all I wanted was his version of the events that took place on Marichjhapi between January and May 1979.
Samanta did slip in a line about the ‘massacre’ – that only one person, an adivasi woman, was killed when the police opened fire on 31 January 1979 at Kumirmari, after a police camp was attacked by refugees. ‘ Jene nin, matro ekjon mahila mara jan, tao misfiring-e, ei sotti ta likhben apni? ’
(Know this, only one woman died, that too due to misfiring. Will you write this truth?)
‘Why did you choose Marichjhapi as the topic of your book?’
Ganguly’s eyes are now wide open, drilling into me.
I tell him of my long association with the subject, the stories from childhood and my friendship with Mana.
‘So let me ask you, do you have the stomach to digest the truth?’
I smile my yes.
‘The first question that you should ask, then, is that these people who came to the island of Marichjhapi – why did they come? The second question is: were all of them, even 80 per cent of them, homeless refugees who were staying in camps in Dandakaranya or locals from neighbouring areas like Hasnabad and Howrah?’
‘You were Sundarbans’ minister at that time, Mr Ganguly. Why don’t you tell me?’
‘Well, many people from neighbouring villages took on the identity of
“refugees” and settled in Marichjhapi. They were not refugees, but squatters who wanted to occupy land illegally. See, I am a refugee, too, an “udbastu”.
When we came to India from what is today Bangladesh, we settled in areas in and around Calcutta. The Government of India also decided to rehabilitate many of us mainly in the states of Orissa, Madhya Pradesh and what is now Chhattisgarh.
‘Initially, there was some resistance to resettlement in the Andamans. I was there after the 2004 tsunami. Do you know those who did go there are now some of the richest persons on the islands? Do you know that?’
I tell Ganguly that I have been to Mana Camp in Raipur. I have seen how Udbastu Unnayanshil Samiti’s leader Satish Mondal’s son has a thriving business there.
Ganguly smiles. ‘What happened is that those refugees who were sent to Orissa were more or less okay with their lot in life. Coming from Bangladesh – with its fertile lands and abundant water bodies – where fishing and farming were two of their primary occupations, they found the landscape of Orissa – with the Bay of Bengal nearby – favourable for fishing as well as cultivation.
‘But in other areas, especially the huge, barren tracts of Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh, the infrastructure, the primary support that was needed for these refugees to rebuild their lives, was largely inadequate.
‘What’s more, the central government showed a partisan attitude as far as the two partitions were concerned – one in Punjab and the other in Bengal. The proactive role they played in the former was largely missing in the resettlement of the Bengali refugees.
‘Refugee rehabilitation should have been carried out in a planned manner, but wasn’t at all. But that happens with most things, to be fair. That happened initially in the Andamans as well. Later, we realized that Nehru’s decision to send the refugees there was absolutely correct.’
‘Let us come back to Marichjhapi, Mr Ganguly,’ I butt in.
Ganguly frowns at this sudden disruption of his history lesson, but acquiesces. ‘What do you want to know?’
‘What happened in Marichjhapi? Your government has been accused of killing thousands.’
‘Rubbish. Even if I put the death toll at eight or ten, it would be too high a number.’
‘Are you talking of police firing?’
‘No, I am talking of both refugees and the police; there were casualties on both sides. Stories of a blood bath taking place are bloody lies. Come with me to nearby villages and ask the people there. They will tell you the truth, bereft of any political colour or prejudice.’
I prod again. ‘Ten people died in Marichjhapi?’
‘Not even ten; less.’
I tell Ganguly I have spoken to survivors, not once, but many times over the years. I have spoken to journalists who had covered Marichjhapi. I have also been to nearby villages. They all had said thousands were killed on that island by the police on specific instructions from the West Bengal government; the same government of which he was a minister.
Ganguly makes a clucking sound with his tongue. ‘Were you there, Halder, when it happened? Why did they zero in on Marichjhapi? That island is located in the reserved area of the Sundarbans. As it is, human settlement in various areas of the archipelago, initiated by the British, was a wrong move, endangering the fragile ecosystem of the place.
‘All the islands in the Sundarbans are immature – do you know why I am saying this? Nowhere in this world have such islands of human settlement been created with artificial mud embankments. The British rehabilitated the Santhals here, constructing artificial embankments that would keep away the water during tides, which rise to a height of ten to eighteen feet.
‘But after Independence, once British rule was over, it was legally decided that no further human settlements would be allowed in the Sundarbans.
‘So, such human encroachment on Marichjhapi was not only illegal, as it would destroy the mangroves, but we also had to consider the fact that if we allowed human habitation in Marichjhapi, other islands in the
Sundarbans would get illegally occupied also. The situation would spiral out of control.’
Does that justify what was done to the islanders?
‘No, Halder, it doesn’t. But we tried our best to make them understand that we couldn’t possibly let them stay on that island. They weren’t defenceless people as it is often claimed – they also created armed battalions of their own.
‘Man’s love for land is primal. Those people from East Pakistan were used to lush green fields and ponds filled with fishes. The topography of the Sundarbans was like that back home. So, they were adamant on settling there.
‘What’s more, some refugees had also started exploring other unoccupied islands, looking to build settlements there. The government had no option but to act decisively. We decided that the biosphere reserved area of the Sundarbans had to be protected at any cost, not only for the present but also for the safety of the future generations.
‘There was conflict within the Left Front on this. Ram Chatterjee, who was a minister and a refugee sympathizer, was against eviction of the refugees and the issue had also been debated in the state legislative assembly. All political parties, irrespective of ideologies, took a unified call that this couldn’t be allowed to go on.
‘So, there was no option but to forcefully evict refugees from Marichjhapi when our requests were ignored. Moreover, they were attacking the police. Some bullets had to be fired.’
At this, I interrupt Ganguly. ‘Tell me something, Mr Ganguly. These people who crossed over from East Pakistan and were sent to camps in Dandakaranya, how did they identify Marichjhapi? People say leaders from your party—’
Ganguly stops me mid-sentence. ‘It wasn’t difficult at all. I am sure you know that two-thirds of the Sundarbans archipelago lies in Bangladesh. A kind of leaf – golpata – was used by the people of Opar Bangla to build roofs for their homes. Even when we used to stay in Bangladesh, we used to
cross over to this side in order to get leaves for our roofs. Hence, those people were pretty well-versed with the area.
‘And Marichjhapi is in such a place, located near the border –
Hingalganj and the Ichamati river – that it was easy to locate. How far was it from their former homes?’
‘But is it true that some Left leaders such as Ram Chatterjee went to the Dandak camps, asking refugees to come back to West Bengal? This was when the Left parties were in opposition.’
‘There is some controversy, yes. Chatterjee did support them. But firstly, who will address the conspiracy on who incited and aided these refugees to come back here? Second, one also needs to take into consideration the central government’s highly inadequate role in refugee rehabilitation. Third, and most importantly, tell me this – if we had allowed human settlement in Marichjhapi, would a single island in the Sundarbans biosphere reserve have survived today?’
It’s time for my third question. ‘I have read up on Marichjhapi. There’s an Oxford University research paper which says that since most of these refugees were low caste Namasudras, no mercy was shown to them.
Doesn’t that go against the very grain of Left and their Marxist philosophy?’
‘No, no, no, no!’ Ganguly shakes his head vehemently. ‘The Namasudra angle wasn’t a factor at all in our decision to clear that island. The Namasudras did bear a lot of anger and hatred towards higher castes, towards Brahminism, but our government had no bias against the lower caste refugees.
‘Jyoti babu wasn’t such a person at all. Neither was the Left Front government a caste prejudiced one.
‘You can call us Leftists anything you want to, but you can’t call us communal or casteist.
‘Those Namasudras carried a deep-rooted anger towards Brahmins. I am a Brahmin, and have seen this for myself. But we had no such caste angle in mind when we denied them settlement in Marichjhapi.
‘They thought that the Left Front was unfairly denying them settlement on that island. But how can you overlook the ecology? Can you strike a compromise with nature – can you become its enemy and hope for the human race to survive?
‘Plus, this was a practically unsealed border area. At one point of time, pirates used to make our lives unbearable there.’
‘Kanti babu,’ I interrupt him again, ‘do you agree that when the Left was in Opposition, it had called these refugees to Bengal, only to turn back on its promise once it came to power?’
This time, Ganguly doesn’t avoid the question.
‘Many have criticized the Left Front, and I myself feel it was wrong. It was not our proudest moment. We Leftists did not do the right thing. What we had promised – that all of them would be rehabilitated in West Bengal –
was wrong. Could the fragile economy of the state bear such a huge burden? And when we were in the opposition – and this is strictly my personal opinion – we Leftists engaged in some cheap politics and promised them the moon.
‘Once upon a time, Leftists in the state opposed computer education.
Does it make sense to resist technology? Even Jyoti Basu had participated in a dharna to stop computer education. I was against it. Similarly, I feel that the promise made to refugees to resettle them in Bengal was an absolutely wrong decision.’
Ganguly looks at his watch. Generally, this is a sign for conversations to end.
I push forth another question. ‘For a cadre-based party – and when you came to power – there was a lot in your control in the state. Couldn’t the collateral damage have been less? The carnage, where some say around 1,700 lives were lost, some say 4,000, some even say more than 10,000, could that not have been avoided?’
‘Again, those figures are fiction. You know what really happened? We surrounded the island from all sides and after a while, we left one side open, from where those willing to go back to Dandakaranya could leave.
Practically within fifteen days or so, 50 to 60 per cent of the people had
vacated the island. Locals from other islands, pretending to be refugees, had also run away.
‘I wasn’t present at the spot, so I can’t tell you how much more tolerant we could have been or how the loss of lives could have been lessened, but I can say this with certainty that Jyoti babu tried his best to reason with these people.
‘Basu had even told them that money from the state budget would be allocated for their favourable resettlement elsewhere, but they refused to listen.
‘And how can you blame Jyoti babu for not rehabilitating them in Bengal? Even Bidhan Roy couldn’t do so. Bengal is not a big state after all.
How would it accommodate such a large mass?
‘The number of Hindus – lower caste Namasudras as well as caste Hindus – who came to Bengal was way higher than the number of Muslims who went over to Bangladesh. The state was already bursting at the seams.
‘Was there any place in Bengal for further rehabilitation? Answer this question before blaming the erstwhile state government for refusing the refugees home here.’
I get up to leave. ‘So ten people were killed on that island?’ I ask Ganguly one last time.
‘Less!’ he said and picked up a magazine lying in front of him, signalling the end of the interview.
December 2017, Mukundapur, Kolkata
Manoranjan Byapari is mildly amused by the Bengali bhadraloks who watch world cinema, attend literary festivals, mourn the spread of communalism in the country’s polity and now swear by his books. These are the same people, Byapari tells me, who looked the other way when chotoloks (the classless and the casteless) were being butchered outside Calcutta in the island of Marichjhapi.
These are the very people who kept quiet when the refugees who came back from Dandakaranya in search of home died by the wayside in Calcutta and its outskirts from hunger and illness.
Byapari has seen a bit of life’s seamy side. He was a rickshaw puller who became a writer, a homeless refugee who was sodomised by a policeman and a Naxal who survived the bullet. As a self-confessed chotolok, he has also cleaned the bhadralok’s toilet and then written books that made him famous among the intelligentsia. Byapari’s autobiographical outpourings in the book Interrogating My Chandal Life: An Autobiography of a Dalit was the toast of the Jaipur Literature Festival in 2018.
Byapari’s writings would have remained hidden below the backseat of the cycle rickshaw he pulled had it not been for a chance encounter with activist-writer Mahasweta Devi. She helped his books get published,
opening the gates for protest literature in the genteel world of Kolkata’s culture keepers. In one of his poems, he writes:
My pen is not that which bows before the Brahmins Or prays for respite from those whose hands are still bloody from Marichjhapi deaths My pen is mine
Sharp like that arrow which knows no stopping till it finds its target.
It is voices like Byapari’s that help stories of massacres like Marichjhapi stay alive in public memory. Voices that can be appropriated neither by the State nor talk-circuit sophistry. During my visit to Alabama in June later in the year, Howard Robinson, history professor at Alabama State University, would tell me how oral history has kept the African-American struggle alive down the ages when mainstream press and even literary fiction would whitewash crimes against the community.
‘Where were these people when the police broke the bones of my father’s chest in Marichjhapi with a rifle’s butt? My father was no leader of men; he was an honest man in search of an honest life who could never recover from his injuries in Marichjhapi and died from chest problems.’
Byapari’s eyes glow in the dark. The evening crowd that has gathered at the tea stall next to the Shiv Mandir near Santoshpur lake in south Kolkata seems to have heard such statements before.
This open space is Byapari’s den and the motley crew of students, researchers, government clerks and nameless faces that surround him is his regular audience. Fame has robbed Byapari neither of his agitprop credentials nor his earthiness. When I called him for an interview on Marichjhapi, he readily agreed and gave me directions to his haunt.
Inhaling the exhaust fumes from minibuses and autorickshaws, and sipping on steaming lemon tea, Byapari lets loose his poison tongue.
‘Caste hatred led to Marichjhapi massacre.’
‘But,’ I feebly butt in, ‘the communists always advocated for a classless, casteless society.’
‘That is all gibberish. You know nothing! Even in the temporary refugee camps set up across Bengal for refugees crossing over from East Pakistan, there was caste discrimination. The upper castes didn’t want to stay at the same camps as the Namasudras. They demanded separate camps.
‘Later, there were colonies where refugees forcibly occupied land. The first such place is Bijoygarh in south Calcutta. Since it was with the military before, electricity and water lines were already there. That apart, there were banks, a post office, a university … No less than twenty refugee colonies
were allowed to be developed in the Jadavpur area where you stay. Find me a shudra family there and then talk! All are upper castes.
‘The government of the day, with Bidhan Chandra Roy as chief minister, didn’t evict them. In fact, they tried to facilitate such settlements.
Roy had clearly said he wouldn’t allow bastis, constituting lower class, lower caste refugees, to spring up in his Bengal. Upper castes were fine!
‘And what did the Communist government do? They didn’t question these illegal settlers either. So why did they adopt a separate set of rules for Marichjhapi settlers? Why were they beaten up, raped and killed for settling in a tract of land so far away from Calcutta, with no real estate value? If the settlers had been Brahmins, Kayasthas and Baidyas, there would have been no action.
‘Jyoti Basu couldn’t tolerate the fact that chotoloks could dare to dream without bending before him. Marichjhapi settlers had declared that they had no need of any government assistance. They were self-sufficient and had built their own township.
‘But this is not what the Communist government wanted. Their deal was: “We will give you rice, you join our rallies, vote for us.” If these people became independent, capable, which they were turning out to be, they wouldn’t depend on the government for food and clothes.
‘The very idea of communists – as friends of the poor, darlings of the downtrodden – would be tarnished. The world would see that the poor could very well take care of themselves and ensure their own welfare, if only they aren’t stopped from doing so.
‘This is why Jyoti babu and his team felt that the situation was going out of their control. The irony is: these people had worshipped Basu as their God. They were blind believers of the CPI(M). They had marched from Dandakaranya on the assurance of that Ram Chatterjee.
‘When Chatterjee visited Dandakaranya and asked them to come to Bengal, they believed he had the support of Basu. If they knew Basu didn’t want them there, these people simply wouldn’t have responded to Chatterjee’s call.’
So does he consider Jyoti Basu the villain of Marichjhapi?
Byapari looks me straight in the eye. ‘Jyoti Basu was a shuorer baccha, son of a pig. He was the number one villain, the chief architect of the massacre. I have said this a number of times, and written about it as well.’
‘My parents, brother and sister were all in Marichjhapi, but I never set foot on that island. I was in Jadavpur station at that time, driving a rickshaw, trying to make something of my own life. Marichjhapi stories came to me from my father, neighbours and friends who recounted those dark days.
‘I did try to visit Marichjhapi later, but the island was already barricaded by the police then. I didn’t witness the murders, rapes and arson, but I heard it all from my family and the people in the Sundarbans just after the massacre.’
‘Do you know how the tigers in the Sundarbans turned into man-eaters?
Some bodies would be drowned in the rivers by tying them to boulders; others would be dumped in deep forests. The tigers developed a taste for the human flesh from the dead of Marichjhapi. The massacre turned them into man-eaters, and Jyoti Basu a shuorer baccha!’
January 2018, Santoshpur, Kolkata
GROUND ZERO MARICHJHAPI
‘Remember Bantala?’ Sukumar Debnath’s sudden query jolts me from sleep. It’s 7 a.m. on a Sunday. I had woken an hour earlier to set off for the Sundarbans and, with Bon Bibi’s blessings, planned to set foot on Marichjhapi before the day ends. With me is Sukumar Debnath, a sixty-four-year-old fact-finder with a young reporter’s zest to uncover the next big story. Debnath has covered Bengal politics, Mamata and Marichjhapi for decades in print, television and digital media. The map of the Sundarbans is imprinted on his mind, he tells me, and Marichjhapi is his recurrent nightmare too.
He had readily agreed to travel with me to the island when a common acquaintance introduced us a month ago.
‘Yes, I remember Bantala,’ I tell Debnath, as my short nap is shortened and Bengal’s imperfect past flashes before me. Our cab has crossed Ma flyover, built along the Park Circus Connector, got out of the city’s limits and reached the area that made big headlines in 1990. On 30 May that year, three female health officers had been on their way back to Calcutta after an immunization programme in Gosaba. At dusk, when they reached Bantala, where we are now, their car was stopped by a group of young men. The driver of the car was killed and the women were taken to a nearby field and gangraped. One of them, a UNICEF officer named Anita Dewan, was killed.
A shocked Calcutta watched in horror as cops carried their naked bodies to the emergency department of Calcutta National Medical College later that night. Newspaper reports said a doctor who examined Dewan fainted when she found a torch in her vagina.
Conspiracy theorists spoke of Dewan’s role in trying to expose the dirty game of the CPM-run local bodies in Bengal, with respect to the allocation of UNICEF funds. Dewan paid the price for taking on the CPM party, they said. What was more shocking, though, was Chief Minister Jyoti Basu’s comment on the incident: ‘Such things happen.’
Such things, Debnath tells me, have happened many times in many places in this former Communist-ruled state, including in Marichjhapi.
‘Basu swore by Stalin. He had a complete intolerance of dissent. Rapes were rampant in Marichjhapi, too, almost like a weapon of war against dissenters. It’s true they were cutting trees in an ecologically-sensitive zone like Marichjhapi, but those wretched islanders made a graver mistake. They openly defied Basu. And they paid the price.’
The Marichjhapi story should have been picked by the national media and should have made headlines beyond borders, but even the local media did not give it the kind of play it deserved. Why? Debnath takes me back in time again. The most powerful newspaper group in West Bengal, the Anandabazar Patrika, had decided to go anti-CPM. The result? The group’s employees were beaten up outside their office as cops looked away. ‘That, and the threat of withdrawing government advertisement always works.’
Three hours pass with us barely noticing the air turning humid, the landscape changing – fewer pucca houses and more mud huts and village ponds giving way to tiny rivers.
The driver announces that we are in the Sundarbans.
This archipelago of islands that stretches from the Hoogly river in West Bengal to Meghna in Bangladesh is a mirage. It is difficult to guess where land ends and water begins, where river gives way to sea, where human habitation makes way for tiger territory.
The May sun tries to play the spoilsport but, with wet handkerchiefs between our shirt collars and the back of our necks, we get down at the
Dhamakhali ferry ghat. Dhamakhali is at the confluence of two rivers, Chhoto Kalagachhia and Rampur.
Across Dhamakhali, in between Bidyadhari and Raimangal rivers, lies Marichjhapi, a mangrove island. The Sundarbans has 104 islands in all, out of which fifty-four have human settlements. When there is tide at night, many islands are submerged, Debnath tells me.
‘Get ready,’ he warns me with a smile. ‘The road ahead is rough, and we have no time to rest as Marichjhapi is three rivers and four villages away.’
If the Indian edition of Survivors ever gets made, the next four hours could be featured there, or maybe I am getting too old for this sort of thing.
But from Dhamakhali ghat, we take the bhotbhoti (country boat fitted with a diesel motor that makes a constant bhot-bhot sound, hence the name) to Boro Tushkhali village, then the Laden (mechanized rickshaw; a Yamaha bike’s front fitted to a four-wheeled cart to carry six to seven passengers) to Bhutnikhali village. ‘Why Laden?’ I ask the driver in between the many bumps on the kaccha village road.
He looks back, gives me a toothy grin and says, ‘ Osama r naam rakha hoyeche. These are named after the dreaded Osama. Or moton egulo edik odik dhuke jay! Like him, these ones also go charging everywhere.’
We get down at Bhootnikhali to take the next Laden to Aamtoli. Then we walk to the Aamtoli Laden stand and take the next one to the bank of Puinjali, crossing it in a Bhotbhoti while the afternoon sun glares down at us, the sweat running free and making our shirts stick to us like wet towels, our throats parched and our eyes glazed. When we land on the other side, Debnath tells me we are in Kumirmari. ‘The village that saw it all. The next village is Marichjhapi. But we need to cross one more river.’
With a huge tattoo of a trident on his arm, Rajib Sarkar agrees to take us to the other end of Kumirmari where the village ends and a river begins.
From there, we have to take a boat to Marichjhapi. ‘ Marichjhapi jaben?
You want to visit Marichjhanpi? There is nothing to see there, except an office for the Tiger Reserve Department of the government. The rest of the island is a protected zone for tigers.’ Sarkar is a young man, in his twenties,
we tell him we need to set foot on the island, even for just a few minutes.
He scratches his head, perhaps wondering why we are making such an odd request in the middle of a blazing summer day, starts his Laden and says,
‘ Cholun tahole. Let’s go.’
A half-hour of bone-rattling Laden ride later, we reach the bank of Kumirmari. ‘ Oi, Marichjhapi. That is Marichjhapi.’ Sarkar points to the jungle of small trees on the other side of the river.
Mana’s Marichjhapi. Manoranjan’s Marichjhapi. Mine too. An island brought to me when I was a child. Brought back many times over the years by many more voices. Marichjhapi is finally before me.
I forget there is a sun above and a rather treacherous plank below my feet as we get down from Sarkar’s Laden to walk to the ferry where boats are tied to a wooden log. I ignore Debnath, who’s holding out a Bisleri bottle to soothe my parched throat. I fail to take in the river before me, flowing like time, waiting for nothing and no one. Before me, on the other side, time has turned. There are thousands of women and men, with small children and big bundles. They are gathering on the island, making small groups, cutting trees, clearing forests and building huts. There is sweat, tears and smiles in between. Someone is singing a song of hope…
‘Deep!’
Debnath nudges me to get down. I hadn’t even noticed when we got into a boat, crossed the river and reached Marichjhapi. Debnath and Sarkar help me get down as the boatman says he will wait for us to return.
The Tiger Reserve Department office is empty, save for a clueless office boy who has no answers to anything we ask except that it is in this part of the island that the refugees had settled. He also points to a Bon Bibi shrine right in front of us; the deity who saw it all.
Marichjhapi is a jungle of small trees, fenced to keep tree cutters away, and the tiger reserve office. There is nothing more to see, so we take the boat back to Kumirmari. My mind is a war zone as Debnath asks a passer-by if there are people here who remember 1978-79.
We are directed towards Baruipur Sitakundu Snehakunja, an ashram for Kumirmari and its neighbouring villages’ poor children. The kids are away
as it’s a Sunday, but Dinabandhu Biswas, a sixty-six-year-old teacher at the ashram, greets us with his hands folded and takes us to a shed. Yes, he remembers what happened in Marichjhapi. ‘We saw the huts being set on fire in the middle of the night. It was as if someone set fire to the whole island. We could hear the shrieks, and could only watch helplessly as our brothers and sisters were butchered.’
Did he make contact with the settlers in Marichjhapi?
‘Yes.’ Biswas’s eyes water up. ‘Yes, sir, we did. Kumirmari traders would take boats to Marichjhapi to sell their wares and the refugees would come this side to sell us fresh catch from the river. They were excellent fishermen, skilled workmen and many among them were educated. Satish Mondal and that Goldar fellow were leaders par excellence. The way a part of that island became a township in that short a period of time is unbelievable. It was as if they were possessed. Marichjhapi would have been the most developed island today had they been allowed to stay.’
‘Were the police’s cruelties as bad as they say?’ I ask.
Tears run freely down Biswas’s face; he makes no efforts to wipe them.
‘They took the islanders as prisoners, shot them in the head, put them in sacks, tied them to rocks and dropped them deep into the river so that the corpses don’t float. Mini Munda, a Kumirmari resident, had given shelter to a Marichjhapi family during the eviction drive. The police got to know, kicked her door open, took the family away and shot Munda in the head.
She is also Marichjhapi’s martyr, though she was from Kumirmari.’
Eighty-five-year-old Narayan Banerjee stays by a ditch with his seventy-two-year-old wife Ashalata. Biswas has led us to their mud hut, where their grandchildren now jostle for space. He and his wife were amongst those who had made the long journey from Mana Camp to Marichjhapi. They never left. ‘I had typhoid and so I had come to Kumirmari for treatment. When they evicted my Marichjhapi neighbours, Asha and I were right below their noses, but they had no clue.’
But he must have known what happened in those last few days?
The rickety journeyman gasps for air with his mouth wide open. Scared, I hold his arm. ‘ Aapni theek achen? Are you okay?’
‘Baba, do not take me to the past. It is too painful. Too painful.’
Banerjee reminds me of the futility of my search for answers to Marichjhapi. The whys and the hows and the whens are like fresh bullet wounds to the already dispossessed. Forty years have passed since the island was ‘cleansed’. What good could possibly come of my shuffling through the dog-eared pages of their collective memory? Yet, it remains one of the only ways left to document the ambitious journey of a band of women and men who dared to look the state in the eye and paid a heavy price. As nations grapple with refugee crisis, Marichjhapi should be retrieved from the dustbin of history.
The sun is dipping into the river. We say goodbye to the Banerjees. It is a long journey back to normalcy.
March 2018, Marichjhapi
Byapari, Manoranjan, Interrogating My Chandal Life: An Autobiography of a Dalit (translated from the Bengali by Sipra Mukherjee), New Delhi: Sage Publications, 2017
Chowdhury, Shibnath, Marichjhapir Kanna, Kolkata: Srijani Prakashak, 2004
Ghosh, Amitav, The Hungry Tide, New Delhi: HarperCollins Publishers, 2004
Halder, Dilip, Atrocities on Dalits since the Partition of Bengal, New Delhi: Mittal Publications, 2008
Pal, Madhumoy (edited by), Marichjhapi: Chinna Desh, Chinna Etihas, Kolkata: Gangchil Pub
Basu Roy Chaudhury, Anusuya and Dey, Ishita ‘Citizens, Non-Citizens and in the Camps Lives’, Mahanirban Calcutta Research Group, March 2009
Dey, Ishita, ‘On the Margins of Citizenship: Cooper’s Camp in Nadia’,
refugeewatchonline.blogspot.com, 24 November 2004
Jalais, Annu, ‘Dwelling on Morichjhanpi: When Tigers Became “Citizens”, Refugees “Tiger-Food”’, Economic and Political Weekly, 23 April 2005
Mallick, Ross, ‘Refugee Rehabilitation in Forest Reserves: West Bengal Policy Reversal and the Marichjhapi Massacre’, The Journal of Asia Studies, Vol. 58, No. 1, February 1999
Mazumdar, Jaideep, ‘The Forgotten Story of Marichjhapi Massacre by
Marxists’, swarajyamag.com, 30 January 2017
‘It is the nature of power. The strange thing is, even today, if you try to go to Marichjhapi, you will see policemen keeping a close watch on the island. What or who is being guarded is a mystery. Humanity died on that island in 1979.’
In 1978, around 1.5 lakh Hindu refugees from Bangladesh settled in Marichjhapi, an island in the Sundarbans, to start their lives anew. However, by May 1979, the island was said to have been cleared by the West Bengal government. An economic blockade and police violence allegedly followed, resulting in diseases, malnutrition and several deaths. Survivors say that the number of those who lost their lives in Marichjhapi could be as high as 10,000, while the government officials of the time maintain that there were less than ten victims.
How does one unearth the truth behind one of the most controversial atrocities in post-Independence India? Journalist Deep Halder reconstructs the buried history through his interviews with survivors, erstwhile reporters, government officials and activists with a rare combination of courage, conscientiousness and empathy.
DEEP HALDER has been a journalist for almost two decades, writing on issues of development at the intersection of religion, caste and politics.
Currently, he is executive editor at India Today Group.
TALK TO US
Join the conversation on Twitter
http://twitter.com/HarperCollinsIN
Like us on Facebook to find and share posts about our books with your friends
http://www.facebook.com/HarperCollinsIndia
Follow our photo stories on Instagram
http://instagram.com/harpercollinsindia/
Get fun pictures, quotes and more about our books on Tumblr
http://www.tumblr.com/blog/harpercollinsindia
HarperCollins Publishers in 2019
A-75, Sector 57, Noida, Uttar Pradesh 201301, India
2 4 6 8 10 9 7 5 3 1
Copyright © Deep Halder 2019
Photographs Copyright © Goutam Karmakar 2019
P-ISBN: 978-93-5302-587-8
Epub Edition © May 2019 ISBN: 978-93-5302-588-5
The views and opinions expressed in this book are the author’s own and the facts are as reported by him, and the publishers are not in any way liable for the same.
This book is based on actual events and details of the same, as narrated by different persons to the author.
It reflects the author’s present recollection of such narrations.
Deep Halder asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
All rights reserved under The Copyright Act, 1957. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on-screen.
No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins Publishers India.
Cover photograph : Kounteya Sinha
Cover design : © HarperCollins Publishers India
HarperCollins Publishers
A-75, Sector 57, Noida, Uttar Pradesh 201301, India 1 London Bridge Street, London, SE1 9GF, United Kingdom Hazelton Lanes, 55 Avenue Road, Suite 2900, Toronto, Ontario M5R 3L2
and 1995 Markham Road, Scarborough, Ontario M1B 5M8, Canada 25 Ryde Road, Pymble, Sydney, NSW 2073, Australia 195 Broadway, New York, NY 10007, USA
