Sandeshkhali protest is not TMC vs BJP. It’s the arrival of SC, ST women to the mainstream

The protest by the SC/ST women should be seen as a radical arrival of the periphery to the mainstream. However, they are yet to shake the conscience of privileged urban bhadralok spaces.

File photo of women protesting land grab, sexual assault in Sandeshkhali | representational image | ANI

West Bengal’s political landscape has rarely come under radical interrogation from its rural margin, free from upper caste patronage. The small village of Sandeshkhali has busted that myth. The protest by the SC/ST women in Sandeshkhali should be seen as a radical arrival of the periphery to the mainstream.

In fact, many women were allegedly able to lodge complaints only after securing “permission” from local TMC strongmen, a clear template of the emerging Khap Panchayat phenomenon in West Bengal. Their valiant resistance stands strong despite the odds of entrenched poverty and social backwardness stacked against them. However, marginalised rural women have yet to shake the conscience of privileged urban bhadraloks of West Bengal. Sandeshkhali’s outrage to restore women’s dignity remains peripheralised and vitiated by the manufactured narratives of the TMC versus BJP political binary.

A spontaneous outburst 

The Sandeshkhali village is approximately 75km away from the posh elite centre of Kolkata. The constituency reserved for Scheduled Tribes used to be the traditional stronghold of CPI(M). Even in the 2011 statewide Mamata Banerjee wave and massive anti-incumbency against the Left Front government, the seat remained with CPI(M). It was only in the 2016 election that TMC could de-seat the CPI(M) candidate with many local Communist cadres, including Sheikh Shahjahan, the man at the centre of the women’s uprising in Sandeshkhali, joining the party. Shahjahan used to be the right hand of his uncle Moslem Sheikh before the Mamata wave in 2011. Moslem was the former CPI(M) panchayat chief of the village.

According to the 2011 census, 36.04 per cent (or 82,644) of the voters in the Sandeshkhali assembly constituency were from the SC community. There were 56,411 ST voters, which is around 25.1 per cent. Sandeshkhali shares a transboundary location with Bangladesh divided by the Ichamati River.

The spontaneous outburst of the SC/ST women—with the horrific accusations of gang rape, sexual torture, land grabs, and transformation of fertile agricultural lands into fisheries by the ruling TMC strongmen—was prompted after an Enforcement Directorate raid on Shahjahan’s residence in connection with the agency’s investigation into an alleged multi-crore ration scam. The officials who came for the raid in early January were attacked, reportedly by the followers of the TMC leader. Shahjahan absconded after that morning of ED’s raids.

When Shahjahan was on the run, the authority of the other prominent TMC leaders of Sandeshkhali, Shiba Prasad Hazra (locally popular as Shibu) and Uttam Sardar, was challenged by the residents of the area. The angry villagers started burning the properties which they said were illegally acquired by Shibu and Uttam. Subsequently, extremely marginalised women started speaking up about unimaginable gruesome stories of their everyday lives, sexual abuse “at gunpoint”, bullying, and trauma as the media reached the village.

They said their ordeal was long suppressed by the TMC strongmen. “They brought me into the party office, where a group of people were drinking. For the next one and a half days, two of them tortured me in the party office itself. I was told that my husband would not ‘take me back’ after this and so I should stay on with the men in the room—that they would give me a government job eventually. They said they would place my husband’s severed head on my palms if I complained about what they had done to me,” a woman said to The Wire.

The Calcutta High Court, on 13 February, took suo motu cognisance of the allegations. Justice Apurba Sinha Roy said he was pained and “very disturbed” over the media reports. North 24 Parganas Zilla Parishad member Shibu and Sardar have already been arrested by the local police on the charges of gang rape under huge pressure from the Sandeshkhali women and constant national media coverage. The top officials of the National Commission for Scheduled Castes, National Commission for Scheduled Tribes and National Commission for Women visited the area with their teams and expressed deep shock over the horrific allegations from the marginalised women of Sandeshkhali.

The frequent imposition of Section 144 in Sandeshkhali by the TMC-led government also came under heavy rebukes from the Calcutta High Court. The court set aside Section 144 in the area as many opposition leaders could not visit the village.

Malice of the Panchayati Raj system

The uprising in the village of Sandeshkhali is not an exception, the malice of discontentment in West Bengal’s rural villages has to do with the way Panchayati Raj evolved. The institution was once deeply opposed by the chief architect of the Indian Constitution, BR Ambedkar. He said, “A population which is hidebound by caste; a population which is infected by ancient prejudices; a population which flouts equality of status and is dominated by notions of gradations in life; a population which thinks that some are high and some are low—can it be expected to have the right notions even to discharge bare justice?….it is not proper to expect us to submit our life, and our liberty, and our property to the hands of these Panchas.”

West Bengal has a long murky history of pre and post-poll political violence, especially during the Panchayati Raj elections. The Left created the strong Panchayati Raj system to maintain dominance in rural areas and secure their vote bank. Bloodshed, murder, bombing, arson, kidnapping, and disappearances have ensued during panchayat polls since the late 1970s. The idea of ‘scientific rigging’ was popularised and pioneered during the Left’s rule. “Before the election, in semi-urban and rural areas, the party cadre would visit the homes of local anti-Left influencers and politely present widows’ garments to their wives and say: ‘Didi, you know what will happen to your husband on poll day. So, as your well-wishers, we want to make sure that you have a white saree.’ This would do the trick in many cases. The practice continues till today, though it’s no longer the CPI(M) which does it,” writes journalist Sandipan Deb.

There have been rampant allegations of rigging, and booth capturing in panchayat elections in the state. Political analysts have cited unofficial statistics that show approximately 80 people died in the 2003 panchayat election, 45 in 2008, 31 in 2013, and 75 in 2018. In 2023, CPI(M) leader Sitaram Yechury said that over 60 people died in the local body elections. The National Commission for Scheduled Castes frequently visits West Bengal in the aftermath of the panchayat elections as many victims of poll violence are Dalits. According to NCSC, in 2023, on the eve of the panchayat election, the majority of victims of the violence were from the Dalit community.

There has also been a rising percentage of unopposed victories in panchayat elections in West Bengal. As per media reports, 8.9 per cent of seats went uncontested in 1988, 11 per cent in 2003, and 34.2 per cent in 2018. In 2018, the TMC won Gram Panchayat, Samiti and Zilla Parishad with 78.48 per cent, 87.5 per cent, and 96.2 per cent vote share according to West Bengal State Election Commission, general panchayat election 2018 party-wise result. Subsequently, a growing political discontentment against the ruling TMC swung voters towards the BJP in 2019, which led to them winning a whopping 18 Lok Sabha seats.

Politics of capture and recapture

Sandeshkhali women’s spontaneous democratic uprising has to be understood in this backdrop of historically violent panchayat elections. Interestingly, the Calcutta High Court Chief Justice, in a recent hearing, said that they will hear an old complaint on the panchayat election in Sandeshkhali. The politics of capture and recapture has become the norm of the Panchayati Raj institution in West Bengal.

It is this Panchayati Raj system that led to the meteoric rise of the likes of Shahjahan, Shibu Hazra, and Uttam Sardar in Sandeshkhali. Shahjahan was sent to a 10-day police custody by a local court on 29 February.

Despite the social outrage of Sandeshkhali’s Dalit and Adivasi women, their moral urge to radically deepen democratic principles is neither recognised nor accepted in the mainstream. The rejection of the roaring margin from Sandeshkhali points toward how the high caste-dominated, gatekept Bengali mainstream society continuously fails the SC/ST community’s desire for self-respect.

This article has been updated to reflect the latest developments in the story. 

Subhajit Naskar is an Assistant Professor at the Department of International Relations, Jadavpur University. He tweets @subhajit_n. Suvajit Mondal is PhD Scholar at Department of International Relations, Jadavpur University. Views are personal. 

(Edited by Theres Sudeep)