This story first appeared in www.telegraphindia.com

A little more than 20 years ago, on a bright March morning, I was standing in front of Ehsan Jafri’s house in Gulberg Society, Ahmedabad. The former Congress MP had been killed by rioters. He had been set on fire on the first-floor balcony of his own house as he tried to protect his neighbourhood, a Muslim locality, from the rioters.

Three days had passed since the killing. The white of the walls still showed through the macabre black shapes left by the fire on the building. The balcony was gutted. Wisps of smoke were still rising. But what hit me like most was the smell of burnt flesh. It was so overwhelming that I could hardly take in anything else at first. It could have struck me down.

It was around 10.30 in the morning and a large crowd had gathered around the house, facing the balcony, as if they were an audience still witnessing the incident.

One person after another from the crowd began to narrate what had happened. On February 28, the rioters had come early in the morning to the neighbourhood, retreated after the police intervened, and come back. Many in the neighbourhood had taken shelter in Jafri’s house, because the Congress leader was a father figure. He was respected and loved and represented an earlier Gujarat that believed in communal harmony. He had been a freedom fighter and a trade union organiser, and had a deep interest in literature.

As the rioters arrived again, the crowd recounted several times, Jafri made frantic calls. “He called everyone — everyone here and in Delhi. Everyone said they were trying to do something, but nothing happened,” a man said.

Jafri was on the balcony. “Many had gathered around him, and his grandchildren were clinging on to him,” someone said. The rioters descended on him, cut him up and set him on fire. Many in his family and the neighbourhood died. The number has been put at 69.

If I close my eyes and think of Ahmedabad then, I see that charred balcony and smell that overwhelming smell. I also see an elderly, benign-looking man surrounded by people frantically making calls, so vivid were the accounts.

But I did not write about Gulberg Society then. Because I could not.

I did not have the words or the imagination to write what I felt. I was 20 years younger then. How does one write about an overpowering smell that refuses to die down? About a visual image of a bonfire made of living human bodies? I wrote about other things: about survivors, about Hindus who helped Muslims, about Muslims who still believed in good, telling myself that so many reports had already been written about Gulberg Society that it would not matter if I did not.

But the smell refused to die down. It was the same smell I would walk into at Naroda-Patiya in Ahmedabad, and in the burnt train compartment in Godhra. But Ehsan Jafri’s story was burnt into my brain.

Then the nation witnessed the Best Bakery trial, read about the harassment of activist Teesta Setalvad and the long battle of Zakia, Jafri’s wife, to get justice. On Friday, a Supreme Court bench upheld the SIT clean chit to the then chief minister and now Prime Minister, Narendra Modi.

In such moments, some turn to literature, to poetry, which Jafri loved. William Wordsworth has said that the materials of poetry are emotions recollected in tranquillity. I am as far from poetry as I am from tranquillity — I think, like me, many of us have permanently lost our sense of peace since the forces of Hindutva took over our life.

I still do not have the words for that smell. But I can remember.

It is my responsibility to do so — as a journalist and as an Indian.

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A series of events led to Anjum Zamarud Habib becoming the only woman leader in the Hurriyat Conference in Kashmir when it was formed. Anjum, in Calcutta to attend the People’s Literary Festival held recently, is part of a panel on the first day of the event with two other activist-writers. It is the day after the Pulwama terror strike.

The literary festival is organised thoughtfully and efficiently by a group of young persons belonging to the Calcutta chapter of the NGO, Bastar Solidarity Network. What inevitably comes up is the phrase “state repression”. But the words need disambiguation, says Monalisa Changkija, a panelist from Nagaland; non-state actors are as good as the state at executing it. Sometimes, she says, it is difficult to point out which is the biggest force to contend with — the state, religion or patriarchy. And resistance movements often reproduce the same structures of control.

This could have been the perfect cue for Anjum. While working with the Hurriyat Conference on behalf of her own organisation, Kashmir Tehreek-e-Khawateen, she was convicted and spent four years in Tihar jail. She wrote the bookPrisoner No. 100: An Account of My Nights and Days in an Indian Prison (originally written in Urdu, published in 2011) on her prison days. Anjum felt let down by the Hurriyat leadership during her trial and her stay at Tihar. She wrote about it. The lists of names of other jailed persons that were being forwarded to authorities with requests for release did not include her name. She felt overlooked because she was a woman.

Yet Anjum does not say much on the subject on stage. One day later, however, at the interview, she opens up. Over our conversation I also learn that her silences are important.

Anjum is a tall, handsome woman in her late fifties. Her head is covered with a dupatta. She looks piercingly at her interlocutor, and with some scepticism, it seems, but before it becomes unnerving, her face breaks into a broad smile and her eyes sparkle. It is clear from the beginning that whatever she says often goes against the grain of the resistance movement she is part of.

“They are discussing censorship here. But what about the censorship we use on ourselves,” she asks, as if thinking aloud, as we walk out of the small auditorium in Phoolbagan in east Calcutta, where the festival is being hosted. We stroll into the foyer crowded with book stalls and grab two empty chairs.

Prisoner No. 100 is her most celebrated book, but she talks about her latest, Nigah-e-Anjum. It is an account of her life, written in Urdu, which she says will be translated into English as well. It means what the stars are seeing, but it is also, quite clearly, a play on her name.

Anjum is also the author of two other “data-based” studies that she documented. One is on Kashmir’s war widows and the other on the forgotten prisoners of Kashmir. Both were published in 2009 in English.

So does she regard herself as a writer? Anjum looks stunned. “Writer? I am not a writer at all,” she asserts. Then what about these books about her own life? “They are about what happened,” she says. Writing is an act of imagination, she implies. She has only transcribed her own life. Unlike in other kinds of writing, there is no gap here between what happened and what was expressed, because all of it is completely political. But it is also her life. Can her autobiography then be called “personal documentation”? She loves the phrase.

It seems, she had not set out to be in politics, or in the “resistance” — her word — in Kashmir. After finishing her postgraduate studies, Anjum had joined Hanfia College in Anantnag city, about 50 kilometres south of Srinagar, as a teacher of Education. Soon after she joined, a dowry death occurred in the area. It disturbed her tremendously. Though dowry is not practised extensively among Muslims, Anjum realised that she needed to act. She says, “From my childhood I had wanted to do something for women. We decided to form a pressure group. Within 15 days, 200 to 300 women had joined us.” So began the Women’s Welfare Association, Islamabad — the local name for Anantnag.

In two or three years, what Kashmir calls its resistance movement and authorities in India call militancy would erupt in the Valley. By that time, the women’s association had taken root and become stronger. Anjum’s sympathies were with the resistance. So when the United Hurriyat Conference was formed in 1993 as a political outfit to advocate Kashmiri independence, her association, Kashmir Tehreek-e-Khawateen, also signed up. This was the only women’s association in the group of 26 and Anjum was the only woman leader in the Hurriyat.

It was not easy, from the start. “We were not given a place in the executive body or in the decision-making process.” This is the way, she says, women are left out from the big decisions, “individually, collectively, formally, informally.” She adds, “We, the women of Kashmir, want to live, we want to exist.”

Being alive and yet not feeling as if they exist is not a feeling that is peculiar to women in Kashmir. In Tagore’s story Jibita o Mrita, the female protagonist, Kadambini, had to commit suicide by jumping into a well to prove that she was indeed alive.

In the Hurriyat, Anjum was put in charge of the human rights cell. She looked at women’s issues. At the same time, she stresses that no issue can be separated from the political uncertainty and nothing is more important than the lives being lost in Kashmir every day. “We raised slogans of azadi. We want better political change. We are against the killing of innocent lives,” she says.

Everything else takes a backseat, she feels, when “our boys are disappearing every day. We don’t know when the men leave in the morning if we are going to see them again.” Kashmir, she says, is being denied the beauty and promise of life. “Women are singing wedding songs at the funerals of their unwed sons. War has destroyed not only the physiques of our young men, but also their psyches, their souls.”

By the late Nineties, Anjum was very much in the public eye, wanting a peaceful negotiation towards separation for Kashmir. “I was always very bold,” she says, and smiles. “I was active, I was courageous. I was visible, vibrant and vocal,” she says, still smiling, as if savouring the alliteration. “And don’t forget, I was young, and beautiful. Very beautiful,” she says with emphasis.

In 2003, she was arrested and charged under the Prevention of Terrorism Act (POTA), and thrown into Tihar jail in Delhi till end of 2007. This is something she has written and spoken about a lot, and perhaps that is why she does not want to talk about it much.

“I lived in misery,” she says, a cloud passing over her face. She does not mind repeating that the Hurriyat leadership had not stood beside her, but it seems she would rather not dwell on the subject. She remains quiet for a while. “I was born for resistance,” she says, when she looks up again. “I have great respect for (Syed Ali) Geelani [chairman of the Hurriyat Conference],” she adds. Back in Srinagar, after Tihar, she returned to her political work and writing. “The youth love me. I discuss with them everything without politicising issues because I am not a politician. Politics makes tricky and negative things strike your mind.”

In Calcutta, Anjum was also supposed to address a meeting the following week organised by the human rights organisation, Association for the Protection of Democratic Rights, but could not because there were apprehensions that miscreants would try to attack her.

What does she make of Pulwama? She is silent again for a few minutes. “We are against the killing of innocents,” she says, and continues, “India and Pakistan should come forward peacefully to negotiate the Kashmir problem.”

“No one can portray the right perspective. No one can portray your perspective other than you. My writing is my resistance,” she says, as if going back to the conversation about writing. And what does an incident like Pulwama point at? “We will go where our politicians will take us,” says Anjum. Getting up briskly, she says it is time for tea in a bhaanr from a roadside stall. She sips on it quietly and then declares — “Wonderful.”

source: The Telegraph

On January 24, 1979, the Left Front government in West Bengal cut off supplies of all essential commodities to Marichjhnapi. Section 144 had already been imposed around the area. Police boats surrounded the island in the Indian Sunderbans, close to Khulna district in Bangladesh. The island’s residents at the time were all Hindu Bengali refugees from Bangladesh.

About 10,000 to 12,000 of them were living in Marichjhnapi then, according to a statement made in February that year by Jyoti Basu, who was then the West Bengal chief minister. Unofficial estimates say the number could have been higher, as high as 35,000. They had all left Dandakaranya in central India, where they had been “rehabilitated” after they had first arrived from Bangladesh. They would be sent back to Dandakaranya, Basu insisted, though it was he who had spoken of rehabilitating the refugees in the Sunderbans in 1974 — it had been one of his pre poll promises. But Basu later reneged on his promise and his government continued the blockade in Marichjhnapi despite a Calcutta High Court order against it.

It has been 40 years since then. Basu is no more. But his party colleague Kanti Ganguly, who was minister in charge of Sunderbans Development and is himself a refugee from Barishal, justifies the action against the Marichjhnapi settlers. “The settlers were cutting trees and selling the wood. They were destroying the forest,” he tells The Telegraph. Basu too had alleged that the settlers were destroying the ecosystem for personal profit.

“The Left Front had realised long ago the effects of global warming. If we had allowed deforestation, we would have made the Sunderbans vulnerable environmentally, and that would make West Bengal vulnerable, which in turn would make India vulnerable. Besides, how could West Bengal accommodate so many refugees? It would set a precedent that West Bengal would never recover from,” Ganguly adds.

Police firing started soon after the blockade. On January 31, there were reports of six deaths. The children and the elderly died of starvation and diarrhoea. Estimates about the death toll in Marichjhnapi are like a pendulum swing — some say 30 died, others claim thousands lost their lives.

It is difficult to count the dead after 40 years. Especially when every fact and figure seems to remain suspended in the grey zone between official and unofficial estimates. So many years later, the survivors of Marichjhnapi are hard to trace. They have either dispersed or do not want to be identified with their violent past. Besides, the authorities had blocked information and very few journalists could make their way in.

“The firings went on for months. We’d hear the bullets. The waters would turn red from the blood,” says a resident of Kumirmari, an island separated from Marichjhnapi by the river Karankhali. “Bodies would be dumped into boats and carried away,” says another survivor. These accounts cannot be verified, though they float around still.

Subrata Patranabis, a photographer, managed to visit Marichjhnapi on May 17, the third day of the final police strike to remove everyone. In his piece in the two-volume account on Marichjhnapi, edited by Madhumay Pal, Patranabis writes that a hundred children died of hunger and disease since the blockade started.

But numbers are not the only way to look at a tragedy. The people of Marichjhnapi were thrice displaced. First from Bangladesh to Bengal, then from there to Dandakaranya, and then again from Marichjhnapi. Communal politics and caste played a role in this.

Bengal had experienced an influx of refugees from the time of Partition. The first batch from East Pakistan, that arrived between 1946 and 1949, comprised mostly the upper and upper-middle classes. If these people had lost their property and livelihood, they still had the social capital to build a new life here. The films of Ritwik Ghatak and Mrinal Sen often portray the bhadralok refugees.

The second wave was occasioned by an incident in the Bagerhat subdivision of Khulna district in East Pakistan in December 1949, says Sekhar Bandyopadhyay, a noted scholar on Partition and the caste question, and a professor at the Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand. He points out that almost all the refugees who crossed over this time were poor, most were peasants. An overwhelming majority of them belonged to the lower castes, especially the Namasudra community, and they were not made to feel welcome by either the West Bengal government or the Centre. In 1956, the Centre announced the Dandakaranya Scheme of rehabilitation for them —78,000 square miles of dry, arid land earmarked in the tribal areas of Orissa [now Odisha] and Madhya Pradesh. And these people were sent there.

Saibal Kumar Gupta, who was the Dandakaranya Development Authority chairman from 1963 to 1964, wrote a series of articles on the natural conditions the refugees were exposed to in Dandakaranya. The first rehabilitation project there, he writes in an article Pal published in his first volume, was in three villages in Pharasgaon, now in Chhattisgarh. There, 205 families were set up with agricultural land and 46 families with small industry. “The land was infertile, therefore even after an extensive use of chemical fertilisers the yield was not more than 4/5 maunds per acre [a maund is about 37 kg]. For about 32 families, their land has yielded absolutely nothing; 131 families have cultivated 30 maunds of paddy altogether,” wrote Gupta.

Dandakaranya was a debilitating and deeply alienating experience for many, like hell. Many had died on the way to the camps or while living there. So when the Left Front came to power in 1977, refugee leader Satish Mandal, who had formed the Udbastu Unnayansil Samity in 1973 in Dandakaranya, issued a call to return to West Bengal. Almost everyone responded. They wanted a home.

In March 1978, about 1.20 lakh refugees left Dandakaranya. They arrived in Howrah and left for Hasnabad in North 24-Parganas, from where they seized boats and crossed the Ichhamati river. Over the next three days, thousands of people swam or used the stolen boats to reach Marichjhnapi, near Gosaba.

Life was hard here too, but everyone worked hard because there was something to look forward to. In the few months that the refugees lived here, they built neat rows of huts, a market, a place to build boats and also a school. They had named Marichjhnapi, Netajinagar. “I saw poverty. I saw hunger. I saw happiness. I saw a dream too,” writes Patranabis, whose photographs from that time show barebodied men and children with protruding ribcages.

The Bengal government had used the Reserve Forest Act to justify the blockade in Marichjhnapi, accusing the settlers of felling trees and selling wood. Basu had also alleged that the refugees were selling land and that they were armed with lethal weapons.

As Gupta wrote later, the use of the Reserve Forest Act in Marichjhnapi was completely unjustified and that the mangrove trees in the island did not yield wood that would fetch high prices. “We would only cut a few trees like golpata. And when the police attacked us, yes, we would try to defend ourselves, but with chengas made with strips of wood,” says Nimai Gain, a Marichjhnapi survivor who now lives in Hasnabad.

“The refugee leaders, including Jogen Mandal, who was law and labour minister of Pakistan, never used the caste card,” points out Anasua Basu Ray Chaudhury, who is senior fellow at the Observer Research Foundation in Calcutta and has worked extensively on Marichjhnapi. The caste identity was subsumed in refugee politics, says Basu Ray Chaudhury. “‘Amra kara? Bastuhara! (Who are we? We are the refugees!)’ was their rallying cry,” adds Bandyopadhyay.

With the bhadralok Left Front leadership turning a blind eye to the caste angle, a whole people were rendered near invisible and so easily dispensable. Could one lakh Banerjees, Bhattacharyas, Basus and Sens have been dumped thus into Dandakaranya, asks Basu Ray Chaudhury.

By May 17, 1979, the police had evicted every inhabitant of Marichjhnapi, forced them into boats and ferried them to different places, including Hasnabad. In time, they were put back on trains to Dandakaranya. Those who escaped from Hasnabad now live in villages in the area and along the railway lines.

A number of Marichjhnapi families from the Paundrakshatriya caste live in Gagramari village. Nimai and Manoranjan Gain are two brothers in their early fifties who had come to India from Kashinathpur village in Satkhira, in Khulna district. They were sent to “village no. 26” in Malkangiri.

But history looks different from different places. Nimai, who works as a day labourer like his brother, can barely make two ends meet, though he is thankful that he has a home now. “We don’t know how many people were killed in Marichjhnapi. There were so many,” he says. According to him, things were difficult in Dandakaranya but not unbearable. “More than the lack of food, the Adivasis were the problem. They would harass us, they wanted us to leave their land. But we came away because Satish Mandal asked us to,” he adds.

He regrets a little not going back to Dandakaranya. “All the families that went back are doing so well now. The land is better for crops. They have bikes and hardly speak Bengali,” says Nimai. His neighbour, Matilal Gain, agrees. Another neighbour, Sati Sheel, who had gone back to Parolkot, now in Chhattisgarh, has recently returned. She is considered more prosperous than the others.

Did the violent removal of the refugees stop people from pouring in through the border? “Infiltration is not the same as the refugee problem,” says Kanti Ganguly. But Bandyopadhyay believes that every migration is forced migration.

One thing is certain though. The eviction of the people of Marichjhnapi did not stop global warming from affecting the Sunderbans. The sea level is rising alarmingly and the Bangladesh Sunderbans are particularly prone to extreme climatic events. Even if we keep aside political concerns, what if there is a rush of climate refugees here? What is the state going to do?

source: The Telegraph