Blood Island

by Deep Halder

  ‘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

  Afterword

  GROUND ZERO MARICHJHAPI

  ‘R

  emember 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 Debnat
h, 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

  Bibliography

  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

  About the Book

  ‘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.

  About the Author

  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.

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  First published in India by

  HarperCollins Publishers in 2019

  A-75, Sector 57, Noida, Uttar Pradesh 201301, India

  www.harpercollins.co.in

  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 perso
ns 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

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