Sandeshkhali feels like déjà vu, with Singur, Nandigram, and Lalgarh rolled into one.
The rage of the women in this rural outpost in the Sundarbans of West Bengal, marching with raised lathis, takes youback 17 years to 15 March 2007, the day after 14 people were killed in police firing at Nandigram.
On that day, I found myself swept into a march by thousands of villagers, their lathis raised high as they tramped down a dusty village road toward the site of the massacre. There was a palpable sense of the people’s anger. That same anger is tangible at Sandeshkhali, emanating from women at the end of their tether, expressing their ‘kodh’ and‘aakrosh’ towards men who have made their lives hell.
This ‘aakrosh’ led to the downfall of the ruling Left Front in West Bengal in 2011. Surely, Mamata Banerjee couldn’t have forgotten? Surely, she took lessons from it?
But, in the West Bengal assembly Thursday, she echoed the CPI-M’s responses to its decisive blunders at Singur, Nandigram, and Lalgarh. Conspiracy, she cried, hatched by the BJP in cahoots with the RSS; outsiders sent by BJP had stirred trouble in Sandeshkhali, she said.
When Mamata Banerjee was transitioning to the chief minister’s chair and afterward, she was often referred to as “the CPI-M’s best student” for the strategies and tactics she adopted to achieve her goals: her militant political movements and her pro-poor policies like Kanyashree and Lakshmir Bhandar, reaching every family in the state, for instance. But is she inadvertently also aping the CPI-M’s arrogant response to the crises it faced?
During the Nandigram violence, then-Chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharya was asked about a particularly brutal clash between CPI-M and TMC forces, where the TMC had taken a beating, and his response was: “They have been paid back in the same coin.” Hubris, followed as surely as day follows night, by downfall.
Is Mamata Banerjee treading that path? Her rivals, predictably, are not helping the situation.
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Adding fuel to the fire
The BJP’s Smriti Irani nearly added communal fuel to the already boiling Sandeshkhali pot. During a press conference she addressed in New Delhi on Monday, her main grievance was that Hindu women in Sandeshkhali were being sexually assaulted by Muslim men. However, the men against whom the women of Sandeshkhali have complained by name so far are Hindus, alleged stooges of the absconding TMC panchayat leader Sheikh Shahjahan. That Sandeshkhali hasn’t erupted into riots after Irani’s provocative and unfounded comments is a testament to the fact that the problem is not communal, nor with the people.
Even TMC spokesman Kunal Ghosh’s observations are dubious. He stopped short of declaring the Sandeshkhali episode fake news, or that the sexual assaults were orchestrated fiction, something that never happened. He didn’t say all that but his repeated questioning of the event does: ‘why did the women not complain earlier?’ That they were too scared to do so and that the police were unhelpful in registering their complaint is perhaps beyond comprehension for many.
‘What about the opposition parties? Why didn’t they raise the issue?’ The fact is, there is virtually no opposition in Sandeshkhali. In the last panchayat elections, the TMC won 323 of 347 seats uncontested. In the remaining 24 seats, the BJP and CPI-M garnered only a few seats. Effectively, 24 nil for TMC.
Taking the prize for incredible insensitivity was another TMC leader, Narain Goswami, TMC MLA from Ashoknagar in the North 24 Parganas district of which Sandeshkhali is a part. Goswami is TMC’s district chief. Local residents call him the chief minister of North 24 Parganas. This leader, like Kunal Ghosh, also questioned the veracity of the claims of sexual assault.
He said, “The tribal Adivasi women of Sandeshkhali area are easily identifiable by their body’s physique and complexion. The women complaining about sexual harassment on television are all fair. So, were they Scheduled Tribe, Adivasi women from Sandeshkhali?”
These remarks sparked a predictable storm of protest from opposition parties and civil society. But not a word of condemnation from the TMC. Or an apology.
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More signs of the past
Reported conclusions from the state and national women’s commissions, who sent teams to Sandeshkhali, have only added to the confusion.
The two teams reportedly concluded that while the women may have been harassed by TMC leaders or their men—called for meetings, kept late, made to run errands—there was no complaint of sexual assault. The National Commission for Women has contested this claim, saying their statements were distorted. But the ruling party is harping on this point, aided by the police, which is issuing tweets threatening dire consequences for those spreading false rumours, including the media.
The police handling of the Sandeshkali face-off is also reminiscent of some of its blunders during the Left regime. Leader of the Opposition Suvendu Adhikari and other BJP leaders were technically stopped inside Kolkata and barred from going to Sandeshkhali.
In 2007, Mamata Banerjee had famously taken a pillion ride on a scooter to try to reach Nandigram, the roads to which were barred by police and CPI-M cadre. Sukanta Majumdar, the state BJP chief, drove a motorcycle to skirt police blockades. The BJP also claims that the lathi-charge and tear-gassing of a BJP protest led by Majumdar was disproportionate.
On Thursday, anticipating protests, the police put up bamboo barricades at several places in the district. What was disturbing was the array of sharpened bamboo spikes protruding from the barricade, purportedly to prevent protesters from climbing over. Are these bamboo spikes, which look simply lethal, even legal? There were at least two sets of such barricades put up at Dhamakhali and Rampur on Wednesday on the route from Kolkata to Sandeshkhali. On Thursday morning, the police cut off the sharpened ends of the bamboo barriers after Adhikari launched a tirade.
The whole episode began unfolding on 5 January when the Enforcement Department went to the house of Sandeshkhali panchayat leader Sheikh Sahajahan to question, perhaps detain him in connection with a scam related to the theft of rations—a scam for which a minister is already among those arrested. Forty-three days later, Shahjahan is still absconding, and Sandeshkhali is reeling in the aftermath.
The turbulence has kicked up the question: will Sandeshkhali be Mamata Banerjee’s Waterloo? The opposition parties say yes. Analysts and observers—at least some—say it’s too early to call. But there’s no denying that Sandeshkhali is the most dangerous quicksand that Mamata Banerjee has had to tread in the last 12 years. And coming just months before the Lok Sabha election, in which she needs to snatch a huge chunk of the 18 out of 42 Lok Sabha seats that BJP grabbed in 2019, the timing couldn’t be worse for Mamata Banerjee.
Nandigram, Singur, and Lalgarh are still fresh in memory and not yet history. So, there may be no danger of a repeat of the past. But it is not just history that undoes governments. The present can be equally lethal.
The author is a senior journalist based in Kolkata. She tweets @Monideepa62. Views are personal.
(Edited by Prashant)