Reportage from Nandigram

Notes on Nandigram
Bhaswati Chakravorty
The Telegraph, Kolkata Tuesday 27 November 2007


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.”

Ami ekhon gan gaibo, tomadero gaite hobe... ami jokhon bolbo tokhon gaite hobe... je na gaan gaibe, tar kintu gordan jabe... baajandaaar

Bhaswati Chakravorty's op-ed in The Telegraph captures very well the mood of the current protests against state-backed atrocities in Nandigram. The more I read and watch the news, the more stupefied I am. Is this Godhra revisited, or worse?

To read the article in The Telegraph's archives, click here.

From : The Telegraph, Calcutta, 13 November 2007
Sing along, or else- The CPI(M) knows when and how to use the police
Bhaswati Chakravorty

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.