Notes on Nandigram

http://www.telegraphindia.com/1071127/asp/opinion/story_8594536.asp and http://www.telegraphindia.com/1071129/asp/opinion/story_8603468.asp

NOTES ON NANDIGRAM

The orderly bustle of the relief camp at the school in Nandigram disguises a terrible disorder, writes Bhaswati Chakravorty

Lunch at the relief camp It was a day’s trip. On November 18, the Sunday before the last one, I travelled to Nandigram with a small group of people from different non-governmental organizations. We went first to the relief camp in Brajamohan Tewari Shikshaniketan, and then travelled down the road past Sonachura to Bhangaberia bridge. Some of the people who spoke to us were hesitant to be named or photographed, but many were willing that we should know their names. That seemed important to them, like a signature to all that they were saying. Just before we left Calcutta, I met a woman from Adhikaripara, who had escaped to Calcutta. She had been one of the victims of the March 14 violence when, while at the puja where women and children had gathered, she was hit with a lathi, then had fallen choking and dazed with tear gas fumes into a field, from where she was dragged away and possibly raped by three men. She does not remember very well, but she still bleeds heavily if she tries to do any physical work. But why was she in Calcutta? In the months after March, she and other women in the neighbouring villages, had built up small women’s groups of resistance. Now that “they”, the CPI(M), had “recaptured” the villages, she was on the run. I asked her if they had been told that the police might use force that day at the puja. She said no one expected it; they had been told the police might come, but they would go away when they saw so many women and children. This was my first personal encounter with the enigmatic meshing of agency, consciousness, memory, victimhood and political play in Nandigram, something that would wrap itself around me more confusingly through the day. As we approached Nandigram, we were overtaken by a heavyweight police convoy. The director-general of police, Anup Vohra, was entering Nandigram to hold a meeting in the police station. Later that evening, it was reported that the meeting had been about a change in the positions of CRPF camps; within another day, it was not so. We saw CRPF personnel and vehicles, usually clustered in the town and around junctions with bazaars and shops on the way, and occasionally standing by the almost empty road. It felt cold on a sunny day to see a soldier standing under the thatched roof of a mud hut by the roadside, gun poised. Green fields, shady groves and shimmering ponds stretched for miles around us, and behind him, as we passed. The vista of the enormous and beautiful school with its green grounds, familiar now to every newspaper reader and TV viewer in Bengal, opened like magic the moment our car passed through the gates in a narrow, crowded street. In spite of the twelve to thirteen hundred people who were there that morning — apart from the many men running the camp — the area looked tidy, orderly. The population there is a fluctuating one; reports say that almost half the people we may have seen there that day have gone back to their homes in the week that has followed. In the rough estimates we were given, there were around 2,400 people taking shelter there on November 7, although the school had to be thrown open to house the hundreds running for cover on the afternoon of November 6. That night the refugees had to live on dry food, such as puffed rice, and full-fledged cooking started the day after. The state government had provided a one-time relief of 25 quintals of rice. The first three days a religious organization had provided all foodstuff except rice. Since then, meals each day were dependent on the efforts of individuals and organizations bringing foodstuff and clothes, and on the untiring efforts at collecting relief and food by a Trinamul Congress panchayat pradhan. On November 8, around 3,200 to 3,500 people had eaten in the camp, the highest number the camp had seen. The cooking takes place in the yard behind the main building, in huge iron woks simmering on clay ovens. The cooks are men from close by, stirring, pouring and serving with almost professional steadiness the enormous amounts of food to be distributed on perfectly crafted sal plates sewn with white thread. There are tube-wells for water. In one wing of the main building is a temporary clinic, where doctors come and sit, because the health centre that had been kept going since trouble first broke is now under the control of the most recent captors. The people have taken shelter in the large classrooms, emptied of their benches, and carpeted with plastic sheets. A microphone is used to summon them to their meals. The relief material we had taken was collected by people delegated for this particular job, one of whom wrote out a receipt. A woman with pleading eyes asked me when she would get a second sari, she was still wearing the one she had on when she came away. “You have brought saris for us?” asked another little knot of women. “But when will we get them?” One of them said that she wished we had given the saris to the local leader of her village instead of donating them centrally. Within the appearance of order, disorder was intangible, but oppressive. Children ran about, playing, when they should have been at school. Girls of eight or ten, with babies on their hips and with adult faces, joined the women when they talked of misery, loss and fear. At the same time, the children of the school which housed the homeless could not come to class. The shelter was fragile. The Madhyamik test was due, and the principal wanted the school cleared. “We have requested him to conduct the test in the upstairs classrooms,” said one of the men. “Where will I go?” asked a terrified middle-aged woman. “My home has been broken down, it is empty. Everyone has gone I do not know where. My younger daughter’s in-laws live close by, they will not have me. And I will be killed if I go back. For 13 days I have been here and I still can’t go back.” What about school in the 11 months that they were in their villages, when “we had control”, as one of the men said? It was irregular, said almost all the children and women we spoke to. There were bouts of shooting and rumours of trouble almost constantly, and very often, parents kept children at home. And not everyone who had escaped was in the camp. Only those who had nowhere else to go had come there. The others had gone to relatives and friends, to Calcutta, to Burdwan and Birbhum, to Jamshedpur and Ranchi, to Punjab, to Haryana. The numbers in the camp fluctuated because many of those who went home came back, bringing with them accounts of devastation and looting, rape, fines and terror. The looting was done systematically, with van rickshaws being loaded with furniture, sometimes even with doors and windows taken off their hinges. Anyone who returned ran the risk of having his bike or bicycle taken away, if he had one, and if the looting of his home had not been completed satisfactorily. Houses had been smashed in with ‘dredgers’, we were told. “But how would you know that?” I asked. A man, who had come from Calcutta to check on his in-laws, said he had seen the machine. A woman from Satengabari joined in: “I saw one being brought over as I was running away.” One young woman from Gokulnagar had taken shelter with her parents in Nandigram. Men with pistols had come to that house too, gone into all the rooms to see if she had brought away any of her in-laws’ “good things” from her village. They had even checked the henhouses, she said. We found an unsettling echo later as we stood at Bhangaberia bridge talking to men who had taken shelter in Khejuri for 11 months. “Even if we have returned, what can we do?” said one. “Everything has been looted.”

TO BE CONTINUED

NOTES ON NANDIGRAM: THE END OF THE DAY

At the bridge in Bhangabera, the atmosphere was strikingly different from that of the relief camp in the school, writes Bhaswati Chakravorty

After the peace “Everything has been looted,” said the man I started speaking to first after he appeared out of nowhere when we stood at the foot of Bhangabera bridge, now festooned with CPI(M) flags. He said he had spent 11 months in one of the camps in Khejuri with 87 other families. His remark was almost an echo of the repeated complaint we had heard at the relief camp in Brajamohan Tewari Shikshaniketan earlier. Almost, because this complaint was not filled in with any detail. Not one of the many details of things and methods of looting that had been given us by different people in the school. This, instead, was a statement, one of many that were pronounced by him and others who joined us; there was no scope to ask questions. At the same time, there was no reason to disbelieve him. A large number of his Bhoomi Uchchhed Pratirodh Committee antagonists had once been CPI(M) workers. Why should their methods be different? What was strikingly different from the relief camp that afternoon on November 18 was the atmosphere at the foot of the bridge. Our little group, having left the relief camp in the school in Nandigram town, had travelled down the road past Sonachura along roads strangely empty even for a Sunday afternoon, stopped once at the red-flag-and-banner cloaked Sonachura bazaar, and had reached the bridge spanning Talpatti canal. It is good to think that now these roads and paths have more people, going back home, trying to go on with the business of their lives. At the bridge, my friend, who was the only other woman in the group, asked two women crossing it towards Khejuri how they were, how things were. “We do not know anything,” they said. The three or four men who appeared first were somehow different from the few who joined us later. The gentleman I spoke to could have been a member of the relief camp we had just left. But he started the conversation with a theme that would become more strident and accusing as time wore on, taken up with increasing aggressiveness by the others, silencing all questions, all efforts at reasoned exchange — “Where were you all these 11 months?” The originary moment for the women in the relief camp had been March 14. For the men at the bridge it was the hideous lynching and burning of Sankar Samanta in January. “Can you imagine how it hurt us, how we felt? And no one came to see how we passed these 11 months, and now you come with relief and sympathy for those who laid mines?” It would have been inhuman to mention that Samanta’s terrible death was not the first one that January: three deaths had preceded it, and one of the dead was a teenager. One of Samanta’s brothers was called; his eyes were red and he kept describing over and over exactly how his brother had died while he had to watch, and said he could not speak without feeling his heart would burst. Yet, none of them had got any sympathy. “They want us never to return,” they said, “They wanted to do a CPM nidhan yajna.” The last phrase was repeated like a burden to a song. I tried to ask, at three different times during the choric tirade, that even if “we”, unconcerned visitors from the city, had not come, surely their leaders had visited them during these months. The full question could be articulated only once. It was answered with another description of the pain they felt at Samanta’s murder and the rape and murder of Sumita Mondal. Twice more my incomplete query was drowned with accusations of partisan behaviour, with repeated questions as to whether “we” had ever thought what they were eating in their relief camps, how their wives and children were. Anindita Sarbadhicary was the only one who visited them, we were told. That was answer enough. While I kept trying to work out how it was our fault that we had come to visit them when we could, I managed to gather that 1,500 people had been in five relief camps, and that all of them had returned home after November 6. I was grateful, for the numbers taking shelter in Khejuri had always mystified me, changing from 400 to 900 to 3,000 and then to 5,000. But an important change had occurred about five minutes into our efforts at conversation. A youngish man appeared from the direction we had come, parked his bike and demanded to know exactly who we were. He was far better dressed than any of the others, and he announced his name like a readied weapon. There were suddenly a few more people around us, thirty-something or a bit younger, strongly built, aggressive in stance, expression and voice. The theme of where we were these 11 months took on a different edge with the leading man’s entry, and he immediately focussed his rage on my friend, who handed him her business card when he called for proof of identity. After he had asked us what we did and what the registration numbers of our NGOs were, my friend asked him, politely, what he did. “I am bekar (unemployed),” he announced, “I manage with farming.” “Oh, you’re a farmer, then you’re not unemployed,” my friend exclaimed. His hostility, which was showing itself in growing rudeness, seized on this response and instantly made it unrecognizable. “See, see,” he cried to his men (who had been passing round comments of “anti-CPM” and “Brought relief to that camp” within my hearing), “they want peasants’ sons to remain peasants. They don’t want us to have industry here. They don’t want us to have the money they have. Look at the clothes she is wearing. How much salary does she get? How dare you people come here? We don’t want your help. You can go help the Maoists.” Maoists had been there since January, they said, singing English songs and Nazrulgeeti, and helping villagers cut through the roads. Students from Calcutta University and Jadavpur University came and made friends with the simple women of the villages, then stayed on to make guns and lay mines. Medha Patkar had come four or five times — and he was not going to check up on the dates, why should he? — with twelve people in the car and always left with two. He knew our type, he said, it was no wonder that we should not want them to have the good things we had. I cannot reproduce the exact order and simultaneity of the non-conversation and series of insults that ensued. There was a tremendous noise of raised male voices, and each of the comments above was taken up by the other men at regular intervals and chanted. I remember one of our companions saying that they were mistaking the meaning of my friend’s response, but that did not make any difference. “She is rubbish,” the not so gentle man kept repeating, and his friends joined in hasty chorus. My friend’s quiet response to his insulting remarks and her simultaneous refusal to give any ground had infuriated him. But there was something practised in that fury, and in its rhythmic repetitions. He was persuaded away, it seemed, as if from the brink of the unsayable. While he talked, no one else was allowed to speak. “No side conversations,” I was told, “no one is to speak.” But, suddenly, the leading man decided to take me aside to give me names of Maoists. I first walked away, saying I would not speak to him if he kept insulting my friend. But the names of Maoists were important enough for him to stop yelling “She is rubbish” to prompt the others to keep up the refrain. He drove the others away and ordered me to write the names down. I started with the names of a father and son. “Did you, or anyone else here, see them, speak to them?” I asked. There was a moment of speechless rage. “Don’t you or your friends know how to talk?” he shouted. “Don’t you understand which questions are relevant? How could we see them? They ran away because we came.” “Since you have the names, I have to ask how you know.” “By looking at me you should know what questions to ask, what you are permitted to ask. Can’t you see who you are speaking to? You cannot ask any question you wish.” Irrelevant as judged, I worried about the women in his household. “Give the names,” someone prompted. So I wrote some more, one of a man who was supposed to have been a workman at the weapons factory at Golbari. “But someone must have seen them if they were here for so long,” I dared the impermissible. “Yes, yes, call the two boys,” said the prompter, mentioning two names. “These boys were staying here throughout,” he added. A young man, almost a boy, spoke to me about one Maoist, who, he said, had been there from the beginning. The young man looked as though a storm had blown over him; his eyes were sunken, dull, his voice so low I could barely hear it, his words expressionless. He spoke with much prompting. An older man with him spoke with greater certainty, and with politeness. By the time we were finished, I realized that the temperature around me had risen another notch, quite inexplicably. As we walked towards our car, there was a sudden tuning up of hostility, and a rush towards the car. A contact number one of the men had given to my friend had to be blotted out at the leading man’s direction, and he gave a quick shouted order to search the car. They had heard a bang in it. My friend did say they had no right to do that, but before things got worse the driver just opened the doors casually and said, “Go ahead.” While the others went through it and we sat inside, the leading man pointed to my friend’s bag and shouted, “How much does that bag cost?” “Oh,” said another, “and the car? Isn’t that industry? Doesn’t it need petro-chemicals?” Our driver moved swiftly, whirring the engine into life and shooting away over the first uneven stretch of road on the long way back to Calcutta. He said later that he had seen one of the men lift a piece of rubble. I am sorry I missed that last sight.

CONCLUDED

NOTES ON NANDIGRAM

http://www.telegraphindia.com/1071127/asp/opinion/story_8594546.asp

OVER THE FIELDS THEY OWN - If there is to be no SEZ, why is there so much violence and fear?

AREA OF DARKNESS

Going into Nandigram, there is a disorienting sense of wading into waves of fear, of getting out of depth in story after story, name after name, figure after figure, of losses, deaths, disappearances, guns, rapes. The women in the relief camp keep speaking of March 14 as if it happened yesterday, with a horror that seems strange when one remembers that they remained home then and were driven out after November 6. Their accounts merge one period with another. It is all one tale of violence and fear. Driving down to Sonachura later, it was painful to imagine the vast distances that people, old and young, must have run in fear in one direction or the other. Absences have become part of the story. Many have “disappeared”. The women insisted that people they know have been missing since January. Till they all come back, nothing would be “normal”. The Bhoomi Ucchhed Pratirodh Committee leaders have submitted to the police a list of 42 names of those missing since the peace procession was fired upon this month. The stories multiply from moment to moment. During the lunch to which the organizers of the camp had warmly invited us, saying that a few people more would not make a difference, we met a journalist from Kerala and her companion. Just back from the police station, they said that a woman who had left the camp to go home with her 14-year-old daughter the evening before, was back, weeping. Seven or eight men had surrounded them on the way to her village, beaten her up and disappeared with her daughter. The men in the camp said it was a lie that the bike army had left. They came out regularly after nightfall, when the Central forces went off the roads. They also timed their daylight forays between CRPF rounds, whizzing off on their bikes across the invisible border towards Khejuri just in time. The villagers, who stood around us while the “official” spokesmen talked, gave us names of six men who were walking around in broad daylight with “pistols”. What is the violence about? Almost everyone we spoke to had land of their own. A dominating fear is that their crop is being looted, or will be taken away from them by force as penalty for having resisted the CPI(M). A woman from No 7 Jalpai said that they had bought a bit of land after a long struggle. One bigha cost Rs 50,000, which meant saving for two to four years. All the rice would now be gone. But, for the men, there was another dimension. As they talked about the violence, a visitor said, puzzled, “But there will be no SEZ, the chief minister has said.” A man with patient, humorous eyes asked from behind me, “Then why is there so much conflict?” A younger villager, more impetuous, explained: “No one can go home, you see. The villages have been emptied, and those who go back are being forced to support the CPI(M). The government does not have to do anything at all.” When I asked the woman from No 7 Jalpai whether she thought there would be an SEZ she said, “How can we be sure? He says one thing one day, another the next, and again something else another day, how will we believe anything?” But it still hurts. “Do you think that the CPI(M) was not close to my heart?” she asked me. “All my life my family has believed in it, we have worked for it. Then they don’t talk to us, or anything, just send a notice that they will take away our land. We love our land, that is why we got together to save it. And now look at what has happened. People cannot say good things that girls have come out into the open and are speaking like this. But for our land, for our soil, for our birthplace, we women have come out. ‘Go home, nothing will happen,’ they say. Can anyone say what will happen? And when we do go home, what will happen to the families where the women have been raped, molested, touched?” She spoke unafraid, but saw nothing normal in the future.

B.C.

Sing along, or else - The CPI(M) knows when and how to use the police

http://www.telegraphindia.com/1071113/asp/opinion/story_8539072.asp

Sing along, or else - The CPI(M) knows when and how to use the police

Bhaswati Chakravorty

Sankha Ghosh: November 11, 2007 Does duplicity have a face? There is no need to guess three times. To match the face, the chief minister of West Bengal has a double role besides his chieftainship: he is police minister and culture minister. He uses the police to protect his brand of culture. The sanctity of the international film festival in Calcutta has to be protected from the artists, poets, actors and film directors of Bengal, singing in pain, awareness and protest against the CPI(M)’s second devastation of Nandigram. Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee’s lathi-wielding policemen went for artists and students because they had got too close to Nandan, where the festival is being held, beat up whomsoever their lathis found, be it a woman actor or student, loaded them in vans and shoved them into the lock-up at Lalbazar. That is all that policemen in Bengal need to do, when they can take time off from their duties of separating couples when any aggrieved father has clout enough to engage the police to break up his offspring’s marriage. But where armed groups fire on the unarmed, demolish homes, where gunfire rages and grenades explode among groves and fields, where alternately victorious groups take turns to drive out their opponents with women, children, the old and the sick from their dwellings in a home-made war over territory, the police are absent. Or almost. The chief secretary of the state, with the home secretary by his side, had promised a credulous Bengal that all those driven out, presumably irrespective of party affiliations, would be able to return home with police protection. So there were policemen, at two spots far away from the scene — perhaps to prove that bureaucrats don’t do out-and-out lies? The chief minister’s party knows how to use the police. They can be used as shields when members of the party cadre decide to shoot down villagers — with police help — as they did on March 14 this year. And they know how to use women and hostages as shields when they want to block the entry of CRPF vehicles — now that they are here — into the core area of the battle, so that their takeover of lost ground can be completed without interference from the law, as they did on Sunday. It is a small incongruity that a party cadre cannot order policemen about. Neither can they decide when Central forces are to be let in. The orders and decisions surely come from somewhere else? Facts are good enough story-tellers. They show that policemen in the city cannot wait to get their hands on poets and artists because they might disrupt the chief minister’s festivities with their singing, while forces waiting to implement law and order in Nandigram are turned back to sit and twiddle their thumbs as CPI(M) cadre make their fortress safe. Apparently, the administration has curled up and died there, just where it suits the chief minister’s party. He, being a man of more parts than can be named, knows exactly when to give his fief the look and feel of a police state, and when to ask the police to look the other way. For months at a time. When North Bengal exploded in the Prashant Tamang controversy, the army was there within hours. A senior spokesman of the CPI(M) said on Sunday that there is no more terror in Nandigram. By holy writ, obscure to all non-party creatures, partymen do not have to speak the truth, what they speak is the truth. So when CPI(M) leaders, within the government and without, keep promising a peace process in Nandigram for days before the region is overrun with party cadre, the rest of the world is duty-bound to believe them. If someone dares to suggest that they have a habit of being economical with the truth, or if someone believes them and is hideously disillusioned after the ‘action’ in Nandigram, they are damned for having failed the demands of objective truth. No protest is legitimate in the eyes of the government — as the arrests of artists show — because no one protested against the miseries of the homeless in Khejuri. That is where the CPI(M) supporters driven out of their homes had gone. Violence is unacceptable, say the protestors, and nowhere are the sufferings of the people to be condoned. Instead of vengefully throwing Khejuri into their faces, should not the CPI(M) leaders ask themselves why the miseries of the homeless in Khejuri did not figure in the popular protests? Can it have to do with the fact that the chief minister, together with other leaders in the government, constantly talks about “ours” and “theirs” as if they were not governing West Bengal but taking part in a street fight with party thugs? Or can it be that even the foolish citizens of Bengal suspect that the homeless in Khejuri have been carefully nurtured over the months so that the place could be used to build up an arms cache and the name could be used as ammunition to discredit all protest? Or can it just be that people do not believe a word that this government or its party says? Why ask the people a question the administration, “their” administration, should answer? Why Khejuri alone, what about “outsiders”? Those who protest are not only biased, they are blind too. Maoists have laid mines in Nandigram and two CPI(M) supporters have died. No death can go unmourned. But if ordinary people as well as intellectuals protesting on the streets find it difficult to believe in Maoists from Jharkhand, not one of whom has been identified, whose fault is that? They are as invisible as those policemen supposed to have been grievously wounded during the March 14 massacre. As for the mysterious outsiders on the “other” side, they certainly merge in well. Because the only outsiders identified so far are those in Janani Intbhanta after March 14 and Tapan Ghosh and Sukur Ali on November 11. All fighting for the CPI(M). It may be that CPI(M) leaders were never told the fable of the wolf and the shepherd boy by their grandmothers. They cannot imagine that people might actually dare to disbelieve them. The CPI(M) general secretary has said at a press conference that because of an ex- parte order of the Calcutta high court, they decided to restrain themselves from sending the police there for all these months. The people are supposed to have forgotten that the high court had first asked for an immediate investigation into the circumstances of the police firing on March 14 and directed the state to ensure “the safety and well-being of all general public in the area”, then had reiterated the instructions about restoring normalcy and law and order later. But the party is happy now. According to the general secretary, the administration can move in at last. That is, the West Bengal government has got the CPI(M)’s goons to clear the way. The government’s satisfaction is understandable: goons are good company. Better company than those intellectuals and artists, left-leaning or even party loyalists, who are taking to the streets or boycotting festivals in protest. Not only have many of them boycotted the Calcutta film festival, they have also decided not to participate in the Natyamela. While a quiet and far-from-politically-visible Shirshendu Mukhopadhyay refuses to attend a film festival seminar, an acutely ill Sumit Sarkar joins a protest rally in Delhi. Shame can be measured in many ways. It is good of Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee’s government to offer us such a wide range of images to choose from. An unarmed man with a gamchha round his shoulders, his legs curled up, his brains spilled by a bullet, lying on the spot he had stood minutes earlier shouting slogans against the guns that crackle across a smoky field. Or even just the once-green fields, groves, the spattering of tiled houses and occasionally running, secretive figures, blurred by shaking, uncertain cameras of people risking their lives to catch the total absence of policemen, of any shred of civilization, and the shifting colours of hatred and murder. But maybe we have grown used to those. But there is another. The face of a gentle-spoken poet, teacher and scholar, small in build and towering in stature, gazing in through the closed gates of Lalbazar police station. Somewhere within those gates are artists and students arrested for singing. It is enough to look at his eyes. Upon hearing that intellectuals were boycotting the film festival, the chief minister had said, “If you have the list, you can put it in a photo frame and hang it on the wall at home.” In return, he should be presented with this picture. He can look at the poet’s eyes and congratulate himself on what he has achieved.