Blood Island

by Deep Halder

  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

  6

  Mana Goldar

  S

  ummer’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.