The Kashmir Files moment: When communists killed thousands of untouchables in Bengal but no one talked about it
Forty-two years down the line, Marichjhapi is still seeking justice. Like the Pandits of Kashmir, these children of lesser gods have been shabbily treated and their history of genocide completely sanitised
The genocide of Kashmiri Pandits has been one of the darkest phases of post-Independence India. Hundreds of Pandits were selectively killed. Their women suffered even more; they were molested and gang-raped, often in front of their own family members, including kids, and in worst cases even made to cook and eat the food laced with husband’s blood. And if this were not heinous enough, some of them were cut into half with a wood-cutting saw while they were alive. It took a film — Vivek Agnihotri’s The Kashmir Files in this case — to make people realise the magnitude of the tragedy: What we saw in January 1990 wasn’t just an exodus, it was a genocide.
As this article was being written, Bangladeshi author Taslima Nasrin wrote in a tweet: “Watched The Kashmiri Files today. If the story was 100 percent true, no exaggeration, no half-truth — then it is really a sad story and Kashmiri Pandit must get back their right to live in Kashmir. I don’t understand why no film was made on the exodus of Bengali Hindus from Bangladesh.”
Two points emerge from her tweet: The first is: “If the story was 100 percent true…” It’s quite telling that even a well-known author who has chronicled the plight of Hindu minorities in Bangladesh isn’t sure about the veracity of the genocide in Kashmir. It exposes both political as well as the intellectual classes for their failure to put the dark episode in perspective. It places the Indian system in the dock for sanitising the Pandit genocide, putting it under the carpet in the name of Kashmiriyat.
The second point is equally pertinent: “I don’t understand why no film was made on the exodus of Bengali Hindus from Bangladesh” The reasons are similar: In post-Independence India, especially after the death of Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel in 1950, it became blatantly communal — and almost criminal — to raise the issues of Hindu interests. Nehruvianism unabashedly put in place a system and an ideology that went out of the way to accommodate minorities and minorityism; this got further vitiated in the 1970s and 1980s when this system got a hang of vote-bank politics.
A single death is a tragedy. A million deaths are just a statistic. My personal encounter with Partition’s tragic face came when a former journalist colleague recounted how her ailing grandfather, largely confined to bed, was left to die in East Pakistan when her parents decided to flee their village at night, following a series of anti-Hindu massacres. They thought they would return for the old man once the situation improved. That day couldn’t come and the grandfather died a few years later, lonely and alone. Decades later, her father would wake up in the middle of night, all drenched in sweat, grasping for breath. He could never forgive himself.
Several hundred thousand people died and millions were displaced in a hurriedly instituted Partition Plan to which our political leaders readily agreed in their desperation to get power. Such was chaos and confusion that, even on 15 August 1947, nobody knew where the borders would eventually lie. In Malda district, for instance, the Pakistani flag brazenly flew from the administrative headquarters until 14 August, but then the area fell to India. Activist and writer Urvashi Butalia showcases how rumour-mongers had a field day on whether a place would go to India or Pakistan. “Each time one of these rumours became rife, people of the other community would abandon their homes and run, leaving everything behind,” she writes in The Other Side of Silence.
But, the people of East Pakistan faced double whammy during Partition. While the people of Punjab encountered a jhatka-style operation in West Pakistan as the entire population got uprooted and shifted at one go, those in East Pakistan were doomed to suffer a halal-type persecution: They were roasted on low-flame Islamist burner with intermittent shifting to jhatka-style killings whenever tensions with India would rise, as was the case in 1971. The result was that the refugees from West Pakistan received due attention, while their counterparts from East Pakistan went ignored, mostly unnoticed.
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‘The Kashmir Files’ opens up wounds that never healed
Watch: Trailer of Vivek Agnihotri’s The Kashmir Files, starring Anupam Kher, Mithun Chakraborty
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The other reason for apathy towards the plight of East Pakistani/Bangladeshi Hindus was their low socioeconomic standing: They were mostly Namasudras, belonging to the outcaste category among Hindus. Namasudras were one of the most politically conscious communities among the backward castes, much like the Jatavs in today’s Uttar Pradesh. And they had a charismatic leader in Jogendranath Mandal, who was so influential at the time of Independence that he got Dr BR Ambedkar elected to the Constituent Assembly from Bengal when he failed to get into the august body from Bombay, thanks to the Congress’ intense opposition. But while Ambedkar saw the Dalit-Muslim alliance as a tactical one, Mandal was naïve enough to take it at the face value. And this one mistake cost the untouchables of East Pakistan, especially Namasudras, dearly.
The first wave of refugees from East Pakistan consisted of the traditional upper-caste elite. Till the time these upper castes were there in East Pakistan, the Muslim League saw an incredible ally in Mandal and his lower-caste followers. But once these upper caste men and women left for India, the buffer was gone. With the common enemy vanishing, Muslims and Namasudras found themselves facing each other. The rationale for the coalition collapsed. No wonder Mandal, who served as Pakistan’s first Minister of Law and Labour, put in his papers in October 1950 and decided to migrate to India. For his followers, the return wasn’t that easy, though.
Their entry into India saw no end to the nightmare. Soon they became the ‘Nowhere People’ whose lives in refugee camps would be prison-like, with the quality of food being substandard. Manoranjan Byapari recalls in his memoirs, Interrogating My Chandal Life: Autobiography of a Chandal, how he couldn’t forget, despite decades having passed by, the foul smell that would envelop the entire camp whenever the food, especially rice, was cooked.
In the mid-1950s, these refugees were packed off to Dandakaranya (parts of today’s Chhattisgarh, Odisha, Telangana and Andhra Pradesh), much against their wishes. The only people who had been supporting their cause since the 1950s were communists, who even opposed their relocation outside Bengal; they wanted them to be resettled in an uninhibited Sundarbans island of Marichjhapi. No wonder when Joyti Basu formed the first communist government in Bengal in 1977, these people got excited, packed their bags and left for Bengal. They were in for a rude shock, though: The communists had overnight changed their refugee policy. These people were once again persona non grata.
Most of them were arrested and sent back to their respective camps. The remaining managed to slip through police cordons and reach Marichjhapi in April 1978. These people demanded no assistance from the state. All they sought was a small portion of land in an island where the very human existence remained a challenge, where every time the menfolk went out fishing, their wives would invariably change into the “garments of widowhood”, as Amitava Ghosh writes in The Hungry Tide.
The uninhabited island soon turned into a bustling little town. “Over time, the population of Marichjhapi swelled to 40,000 from the initial 10,000. It had become a functional village with three lanes, a bazaar, a school, a dispensary, a library, a boat manufacturing unit, and a fisheries department even! Who could have imagined that so much was possible in so little time? Maybe all those wasted years in Dandakaranya had given us superhuman will,” Deep Halder quotes a survivor as saying in his book Blood Island: An Oral History of the Marichjhapi Massacre.
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Maybe their ingenuity and resourcefulness made the Jyoti Basu government even more angry. It soon accused them of being “in unauthorised occupation of Marichjhapi which is a part of the Sundarbans government reserve forest, violating thereby the Forest Acts”. Interestingly, Marichjhapi’s mangrove vegetation had been cleared in 1975 and was replaced by a government-sponsored programme of coconut and tamarisk plantation to increase state revenue. One rumour has it that Jyoti Basu’s interest in pushing the refugees out of the island was that he wanted to give the area to a close associate after seeing the success the settlers had had in farming prawns in the wetlands!
Be that as it may, the fact remains that these people again became homeless, but not before the government took to genocidal measures to target its own people. The state government first employed steam launches to block the island, so that these settlers had no access to drinking water and other essential supplies from outside markets. When these pressure tactics failed to gain results, the government unleashed police and Muslim thugs on them. Muslim gangs were hired because the authorities believed they would be less sympathetic to these refugees from Muslim-ruled Bangladesh. It might be an unprecedented episode when a democratically elected government hired goons to kill, main and rape its own people.
No one knows how many people died in those 72 hours of savagery in January 1979, organised and orchestrated by the “progressive” state government of the day. Though the official figure says less than 10 people died, locals and survivors put the number as high as 10,000. A theory in circulation is that it was only after the Marichjhapi massacre that the tigers of Sundarbans became man-eaters! This may or may not be true, but there’s no denying that thousands of people died of bullet wounds, disease and starvation; women were lined up and raped. And those who escaped the bullets were forced to leave for what was “more like a concentration camp or a prison”, as Amitava Ghosh writes.
The untouchables of Bengal were betrayed again. Even more chilling was the conspicuous silence — and muted consensus — among the Left-liberal intelligentsia to keep the killings under wraps. The sinister indifference seems even more appalling, or one should say Orwellian, when compared with the Left-liberal penchant in the country to paint a dystopian colour based on a few heinous but largely unconnected cases of violence.
Was the communist connection the reason why the Marichjhapi massacre was brushed under the carpet. Morichjhapi threatened to expose the pro-poor, pro-Dalit façade of the ‘progressive’ Left Front government in West Bengal. Or, was it because this one episode had the potential to call the Dalit-Muslim bonhomie bluff, pedalled way too often in independent India’s politico-academic circle? Morichjhapi, in the first place, wouldn’t have happened had the great Dalit leader of Bengal himself not fallen for the whoopla of Dalit-Muslim unity. Historically, it’s a farce, though we still hear the discourse in the pseudo-secular corridors. Ambedkar understood the exclusivist nature of Islam and the Islamic nature of Pakistan. Mandal didn’t and his immediate followers in Bengal suffered immensely for this.
Forty-two years down the line, Marichjhapi is still seeking justice. Like the Pandits of Kashmir, these children of lesser gods have been shabbily treated and their history of genocide completely sanitised. But unlike Pandits, they are poor, uneducated and badly dispersed. They too await their ‘Kashmir Files’ moment.
This is Part 2 of a two-part series. Click here to read Part 1.
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