Land grabbing has been one of the dirty open secrets of Bengal politics for long. But the Sandeshkhali saga has laid bare the extent of it and its devastating impact on local ecology and population. According to locals, political heavyweights like TMC leader Shahjahan Sheikh and his aides overran large swathes of agricultural land, converting them into fishing ponds and drained several ponds to convert them into land. Some say they armed young teens with guns to assist in the land grabbing operations. Shahjahan Sheikh, known locally as ‘bhai’, and his aides Shibu Hazra and Uttam Sardar, the latter known as ‘dada’, are at the centre of the protests and violence unfolding in Sandeshkhali, one of the largest islands of the Sundarbans in 24 North Parganas district of West Bengal.
The unrest began when an Enforcement Directorate team that landed to conduct a raid related to an alleged ration distribution scam involving Shajahan came under attack. More recently, the anger of locals and women erupted in the form if protests and violence against Sheikh, Hazra and Sardar. The accusations against them range from land grabbing, forced labour or slavery to the sexual harassment and abuse of local women. The agricultural land they grabbed, allege residents, was forcibly converted into fishing ponds and vice versa.
A patch of open land as one enters Sandeshkhali island near the Trimoni Bazar is testament to such ecological gambling in the sensitive Sundarbans. The land, locals told News18, was once a pond but Hazra got it converted to land, ostensibly to build schools there. No schools exist on the land now; just some straw houses nearby. Several locals said Hazra, or ‘Shibu dada’ as he was known, has similarly, and drastically, converted several critical waterbodies into land. “Dada was everything here,” a local named Biren Paramanik told News18.
As protests against the TMC trio grow louder, more locals are gathering the courage to speak up against them. Some have been vandalised properties belonging to Hazra and Sardar. “They have now got some courage, otherwise who will confront them? If their ‘dada-giri’ was reported to the police, they would say ‘go to dada and he will solve the problem’. The police will not interfere. They used to torture everyone,” a local told News18 on condition of anonymity.
Another elderly resident of the area said: “Whatever the women of Sandeshkhali are saying is true. We have been tolerating all this.” Among the more shocking instances of land grabbing was the one narrated to News18 by Chabi Das, who alleged that Uttam Sardar snatched 10 cottah land (1 cottah is roughly one-twentieth part of a bigha) from them.
“They took our land agricultural land when it was yielding good crops. During the harvest time, their (Sardar’s) people pumped saltwater there and converted it to fishing pond. When we asked for money in exchange, they threatened our husbands. We went to the police. They said police will not do anything, dada will do everything. We were forced to go to a meeting and we had to do all the work without payment.”
Similar pieces of land converted for fishing can be seen as one travels to the more interior parts of Sundarbansx. “See, this was our 2 bigha land. The first year, they gave us money. Then they hit us when we asked for money. We had to apologise to them just so we could live,” another local told News18. Some locals alleged that Sardar and others armed teenage boys with guns and forcibly recruited them in the land grabbing operations. An elderly woman said her grandson was taken by such gangs. “One day my grandson said they gave him a gun and lathi and asked him to grab others’ land in dada’s name. I told my grandson to leave this island else they would have turned him into an extortionist.”