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.”
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.”
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