STATE-SPONSORED TERRORISM
When the Left came to power in 1977, there was joy in Dandakaranya. About 30,000 peasants migrated to Marichihapi and cleared the land for agriculture without any subsidy. What happened next is incredible.
Sandipan Deb (sandipan@ openmedianetwork.in) is an IIT-IIM graduate who wandered into journalism after reading a quote from filmmaker George Lucas “Everyone’s cage door is open” and has stayed there (in journalism, not a cage) for the past 19 years. He has written a book on the IITs and is the editor of Open.
WHO CREATED MAOISTS
Left out by the Left:
Source: http://www.openthemagazine.com/article/voices/left-out-by-the-left
How a barely remembered island in the Sunderbans delta links to the chain of events that has led to the Indian State’s woes with Maoists.
How a barely remembered island in the Sunderbans delta links to the chain of events that has led to the Indian State’s woes with Maoists.
How a barely remembered island in the Sunderbans delta links to the chain of events that has led to the Indian State’s woes with Maoists.
Most of us haven’t heard of a small island in the Sunderbans delta called Marichjhapi. Unless, that is, you were living in Bengal in 1978- 79. But Marichjhapi is one of the most important links in the chain of events that has led to the Indian State’s woes with Maoists.
One of the most poignant stories I’ve ever heard about the Partition is from an ex-colleague. His father and his newly-wed wife were fleeing East Pakistan, following the massacres. They reached one of the last boats to cross the river to India. But only the man could board; his wife was left behind in the riverside crush. He never saw her again.
COMMUNIST FALSE PROMISE
When he reached Calcutta, the Bengal Govt. was offering the refugees a choice of three locations for resettlement: the Andamans, the Terai (Uttarakhand), and the Dandakaranya forests of central India. The communist parties vigorously opposed resettlement anywhere other than in West Bengal. A gentleman I knew, who was an official in charge of resettlement in the Andamans, used to tell me how communist leaders, including Jyoti Basu, would stand at the Calcutta docks and convince refugees that they should not go, that the Left would make sure they would get land in West Bengal.
Those who went to the Andamans or Uttarakhand (like my ex-colleague’s father did, where he remarried and raised a family) have flourished. Those who stayed back in Bengal got no land and lived in poverty, the sudden leap in population almost ruining the state’s economy.
Interestingly, it was the resentment these lakhs of people bore about their fate that brought the Left to power for the first time in the state in 1977, on the explicit promise that the Left was ‘the friend of the Bengali Hindu refugee’.
When more than a lakh families reached Dandakaranya, a vast forested area that stretches across Chhattisgarh, AP, Orissa and Maharashtra, they discovered it was one of the most arid and disease- ridden regions in India. For all practical purposes, they had been condemned by the Indian state to generations of helpless penury. For years, the Left parties of Bengal asked the state and Union governments to give these people land in Bengal. But the migrants had effectively been erased from the pages of history.
STATE TERRORISM
When the Left came to power in 1977, there was joy in Dandakaranya. About 30,000 peasants migrated to Marichjhapi, and cleared the land for agriculture without any subsidy. What happened next is incredible, and can at best be called the first instance of state-sponsored terrorism in independent India.
Following Chief Minister Jyoti Basu’s orders, the police fired on the unarmed peasants, stopped NGO relief boats trying to reach the island, destroyed all the boats of villagers leaving them no escape route, cut off food supplies, starved to death men, women and children, and confiscated their property and destroyed their homes. Hundreds were arrested.
Then, the communist govt. forced as many of the refugees as it could find on special trains, locked the doors from outside, and sent them back to Raipur. Though the official figure for police-firing casualties is 13, independent estimates put it at above 100.
Thirty years have gone by. No one but the victims remember that pogrom of helpless people, people who had lived in hope that marxists would give them a chance to live human lives. But the victims will never forget, and their children remember. Dandakaranya remains a cursed region. There has been no development, and the people lead wretched lives. Is it any wonder maoists now have a stronghold here? Betrayed by every entity in our political system, what do these people have to lose? If you know of Marichjhapi, you can hardly feel any sympathy for the Indian Left.
COMMUNISTS KILLED DALITS
Nilesh Kumar, Ajay Hela and Anoop Kumar pursuing their masters in Social work, TISS, Bombay:
Source:http://blog.insightyv.com/?p=864
Exactly 30 years ago, Dalits, in West Bengal, came to realize the true nature of Indian state that is being dominated, in every sense, by a tiny section of population but at a great personal cost. It was in 1979, when thousands of Dalits, refugees from East Bengal (now Bangladesh) lost their lives at Marichjhapi, in Sunderbans, for their dream of resettling in the region which they considered part of their motherland.
Marichjhapi is just one incident in the tragic tale of one of the most powerful Dalit Community,- Namashudras of Bengal, who first became the victim of Hindu-Muslim communalism during the partition and later became the victims of their castes in “independent” India.
Moreover, the complete silence of Bengal’s civil society for almost 30 years and the fact that Dalits were killed by the communist govt. of West Bengal that came to power in the name of poor and dispossessed, raises some serious questions about representation of Dalits in every sphere, the constitution of civil society and the hegemony of a few privileged castes over the political power in “independent” India.
NAMASUDRA POWER
Namashudras (earlier called Chandalas), were largely an agrarian community well-known for its hardworking nature, agricultural and artisan skills. It was one of the biggest communities of Bengal, with majority of its population based in the eastern part of undivided Bengal (now Bangladesh) with a long tradition of resisting Hindu domination and fighting against practice of untouchability and other ignominies thrust on them by the caste system.
The Namashudra movement had been one of the most powerful Untouchable movements in colonial India that had rejected Congress leadership even before Dr. Ambedkar came on the scene. It continuously fought the total monopoly of rich Bengali Bhadralok consisting of three upper castes- Brahmins, Kayasths and Baidyas.
So successful they have been in their design that West Bengal is probably the only state in the country where upper caste hegemony went completely unchallenged in “independent” India till today.
The tiny tri-caste Bhadralok increased its cabinet composition from 78% under the Congress (1952-62) to 90% under the communist.
When Marichjhapi massacre started appearing in the media Chief Minister Jyoti Basu shamelessly termed it as CIA conspiracy against communist govt. He accused the Namashudra refugees as agents of foreign forces and using Marichjhapi as arms-training centre. Moreover, Jyoti Basu declared the whole area to be out of bound for media and thus effectively silenced any dissenting voices or reporting of the killings of Dalit refugees.
Bengali “scholars”, marxist or otherwise, rule the Indian academia and write, articulate on all the problems that plague this earth. But none of them broke their silence ever on the merciless killings and eviction of people.
BHADRALOK REVENGE
Perhaps this was the revenge of the Bengali Bhadralok, against Namashudra community that once successfully challenged upper caste hegemony in undivided Bengal. So successful is the revenge that the community now lives in complete oblivion and scattered across the country without anyone standing for their rights or speaking about what actually happened in Marichjhapi in 1979.
1. Mallick, Ross, Refugee Resettlement in Forest Reserves: West Bengal Policy Reversal and the Marichjhapi Massacre, The Journal of Asian Studies, Vol. 58, No. 1. (Feb., 1999), pp. 104-125.
2. Jalais, Annu, Dwelling on Morichjhanpi: When Tigers Became Citizens’, Refugees “Tiger-Food, Economic and Political Weekly, April 23, 2005
