Blood Island

by Deep Halder

  ‘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

  3

  Sukhoranjan Sengupta

  F

  orty 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 w
ork 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.