by Deep Halder
‘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
7
Santosh Sarkar
I
t 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; made me the man I am.’
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 anywher
e 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
8
Kanti Ganguly
I
n 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.