'Marichjhanpi : Noishobder Antaraley' (the English version being 'Marichjhanpi : Beyond Silence') by Jagadishchandra Mondol chronicles and documents the events that led to the Marichjhanpi massacre in 1979. Marichjhanpi was erased from public memory till Amitav Ghosh rekindled it in 'The Hungry Tide' (2004). But what really happened in Marchjhanpi?
After the 1964 communal riots in East Pakistan nearly one million refugees came to West Bengal for security and shelter. Most of them belonged to the so-called 'lower' castes of the Hindu society. The Congress government in West Bengal refused to take their responsibility and they were directly sent to the Mana refugee camp in Dandakarannya in central India by the central government in Delhi.
Mana was an abandoned airstrip without any provision for housing or drinking water. The refugees were kept in small tents where the government provided them with very little food and inadequate and unhygienic water supply. Several hundreds died from malnutrition and diseases. They were promised agricultural land in Dandakarannya, but once they reached there most were sent to work in the local mines which suffered from a perennial scarcity of labour. The refugees protested, wanted to return to West Bengal, but were forced to stay back. They had been held as virtual prisoners of war and serfs under police officers. Many wanted to run away, but it wasn't easy. The nearest railway station was three hundred kilometres away. On September 8, 1974, three people died when the Central Reserve Police force opened fire on agitating unarmed refugees. Soon after, the opposition left party leaders from West Bengal visited the camps and held meetings with the refugees. On January 25, 1975, the senior CPI (M) leader Jyoti Basu met their representatives in Bhilai and assured them that a left government in West Bengal after the next elections would rehabilitate them in the Sunderbans.
After the assembly elections in 1977 a Left Front Government came to power in West Bengal. The Left Front Minister, Ram Chatterjee, visited the refugee camps and is widely reported to have encouraged them to settle in the Sundarbans, which had been a long-held Left opposition demand. However, Ram Chatterjee, who belonged a smaller party in the Left coalition, was speaking for current Left Front policies rather than the forthcoming policy reversal that the Front was about to implement now that it was in power. The dominant CPI (M), and not the smaller coalition partners, effectively decided all government policies. This made for some initially contradictory policy pronouncement on the issue as the parties moved from opposition to governance.
The refugees, however, had no reason to distrust the assurance given to them by the minister and an exodus now began from the refugee camps in Dandakaryana and Orissa towards West Bengal. Many old people and children died on the way and finally nearly one lakh reached Hasanabaad and on April 18, 1978, ten thousand families reached Marichjhanpi, one of the islands in Sunderbans, where they were promised rehabilitation by the left leaders. Jyoti Basu, now the Chief Minister, had meanwhile changed his mind and declared that this exodus was illegal and a conspiracy to destabilise the newly formed left government by the bourgeois forces and that the times had changed and the refugees couldn't be settled in the Sunderbans.
The Refugee Relief and Rehabilitation Department of the government West Bengal declared in 1979 that the refugees were 'in unauthorised occupation of Marichjhanpi which is a part of Sunderbans Government Reserve Forest violating thereby the Forest Act,' and that the settlement would be a threat to the fragile ecology of the area. Incidentally, there was no forest in Marichjhanpi, there were only shrubs, not higher than six feet. The same Left coalition, however, a few decades later, invited multi-nationals to establish a nuclear power plant in the area and to develop it as a tourist destination. What they really feared then was that this might be a precedent for an unmanageable refugee influx with consequent loss of political support. These refugees had earlier declined an invitation to join the CPI (M) since they thought that their interest would be best served if they didn't join any political party.
Meanwhile, the settlers started working in earnest to make the island inhabitable. They began to build roads, embankments, residential huts, schools and community kitchens, they also planted tubewells for safe drinking water. A bakery was set up, boat-builders set up workshops, a pottery had been founded as well as an ironsmith's shop; there were people who made boats while others fashioned nets and crablines; little marketplaces, where all kinds of goods were being sold, sprung up. Great planning was involved and nothing was laid out at random. The island had been divided into five zones and each family of settlers had been given five acres of land. It wasn't just what they had built but the care they had invested in creating organisations and institutions was truly amazing. They had set up their own government and taken a census - there were some thirty thousand people on the island already and there was space for many more. All this was achieved in the space of a few months and without any help from the government.
Next they realized that it was essential to mobilize public opinion to bring pressure on the government. Writers, intellectuals, journalist were invited from Kolkata. Among others, the writer Sunil Gangopadhyaya and the journalist Jyotirmoy Datta came. A great feast was organised for the guests, everyone contributed what they could. The guests were impressed, speeches were made extolling the achievements of the settlers. They acknowledged that the significance of Morichjhanpi extended far beyond the island itself. It provided a model where a self-sustaining community could live in true freedom.
The government, however, was unrelenting and accused the settlers of land grabbing and running a parallel government. Ironically, when the GJMM is running a virtually parallel government in Darjeeling today, the same State government chooses to ignore it. When persuasion and threats failed to make the refugees abandon their settlement, on January 24, 1979, the Left government, sent their police force to besiege the island and issued Section 144 to evict the settlers. From January 26, began an economic blockade of the settlement with thirty police launches. The community was tear-gassed, huts were razed, boats were sunk, and fisheries and tube wells were destroyed in an attempt to deprive them of food and water. The press in Kolkata soon took up the issue, but the government claimed that the print media (TV and Radio channels were then under government control) was indulging in sensationalism and contributing to the refugees' militancy by reporting on their activities. This was accompanied by attempts to censorship and accusations were made against the bourgeois press for colluding with the refugees and the opposition. In order to ensure press coverage after the blockade, on January 31, 1979, a refugee, Saphalananda Haldar, with a companion, evaded police patrols and swam to the mainland where he informed the Kolkata press of police atrocities. The story was published along with the name which eventually resulted in his arrest. They also filed a case in the Kolkata High Court challenging Section 144. On February 8, the High Court issued an order cancelling the promulgation of section 144 and directed the government to lift blockade of the island to ensure the supply of food and water. The government ignored the directive. On the day of the High Court judgement a citizens' meeting was held in Sraddhananda Park in Kolkata to protest against government policy. The writer Sunil Gangopadhaya presided over the meeting. Other than Jugantor, the news of this meeting was blacked out in the media. Finally, Marichjhanpi was declared out of bounds for reporters and NGOs like Ramkrishna Mission, Bharat Sevashram Sangha, Sisters of Charity and Lutheran World Service. Except for Jugantor and Statesman, mainstream newspapers, both in the vernacular and English, had already stopped publishing reports from Marichjhanpi. After all, they couldn't afford to alienate the government which was one of their main sources of advertisement revenue.
On January 31, police opened fire (the first instance of police firing in Left ruled West Bengal) upon the islanders and killed 36 people, including children and women, sank the boats of the settlers which killed 128. Forty three people died of starvation, 29 from disease and many went missing. The police entered the island again on February 5 and the State issued prohibitory orders under Indian Forest Act, 1928. From May 14 to 16, the police, in connivance with party cadres of the ruling CPI (M), looted and then burned the remaining cottages at dead of night. Most of the young men were arrested and the police raped helpless young women at random. At least several hundred men, women, and children were said to have been killed in the operation and their bodies dumped in the river. Thus the State, forcibly and illegally, cleared the settlers from the island before May 31, a deadline set before the operation began. On May 17, Buddhadev Bhattacharya, the then Minister for Information, announced at a press conference in Kolkata that Marichjhanpi had been completely evacuated. Photographs of police atrocities were published in the Ananda Bazaar Patrika, and the opposition members in the State Assembly staged a walk out in protest. However, no criminal charges were laid against any of those involved nor was any investigation undertaken.
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