Blood Island by Deep Halder 

Publisher: Harper Collins

The September 1948 issue of Modern Review, then a leading journal of public discourse, published a speech of eminent historian Sir Jadunath Sarkar in which he had compared the migration of Hindu refugees from East Bengal (which by then was East Pakistan) to the exodus of French Huguenots during the reign of Louis XIV. Sarkar was addressing, as Ramachandra Guha’s India After Gandhi mentions, a public meeting of Hindu refugees held on August 16, 1948.

In the same address to the refugees, Sarkar had asked people of West Bengal to absorb and integrate the refugees in an effort to build an enlightened counter—“an oasis of civilisation”, in his words—to what he termed “medieval ignorance’’ seen in the persecution faced by Hindus in East Pakistan.

However, the governmental apparatus of West Bengal was far from sympathetic to the plight of Hindu refugees who kept crossing over to the state in the wake of communal violence against them in East Pakistan (and later Bangladesh). Unlike the migration of Hindus and Sikhs from western Punjab (now in Pakistan), the migration of Bengali Hindus from East Pakistan wasn’t in a single rush but was spread across decades. 

It didn’t stop at state apathy though. In fact, what happened in May 1979 in Marichjhapi, an island in the Sundarbans about 75 kilometres east of state capital Kolkata, could rank among the most brutal manifestations of state violence. According to different accounts by its survivors and eyewitnesses, the Left Front government’s police action in the island was nothing short of a pogrom which allegedly killed 5,000-10,000 people (lack of media coverage and reliance on oral history possibly explaining the gap), raped hapless women, displacing 1.5 lakh refugees and burnt about 6,000 huts.

What, however, has been intriguing is that such a tale of brutal political betrayal by the Communist Party of India (Marxist)—which itself had assured shifting refugees from Dandakaranya forests in central India to West Bengal—and the subsequent pogrom hasn’t lingered in the shared historical memory of the Indian republic. The Jyoti Basu-led government was in denial, never admitting the death toll beyond 10. The judiciary (Justice BC Basak of Calcutta High Court dismissed the case) fell for the state government’s factually wrong and unwritten contention that the island was part of a reserved forest. It wasn’t.

Four decades after the carnage, journalist Deep Halder’s Blood Island seeks to meticulously bring together fragments of the historical memory of the horror scattered around the survivors, chroniclers and eyewitnesses. Besides a few intermittent academic exercises and a few news reports like those published in Anandabazar Patrika, The Statesman and Jugantar, Haldar had little material to dig into—an oddity considering the Marichjhapi eviction and massacre happened only 40 years ago. 

Blending narrative journalistic inquiry with a personal quest to unravel the layers around Marichjhapi, Haldar relies on oral history to tell the undocumented story of the deadly end of a rehabilitation dream on the island. The Left Front government’s violent crackdown exposed various faultlines in its avowed advocacy of the downtrodden. Most of the refugees in Marichjhapi belonged to namasudra caste, which the book identifies as “Bengal’s largest Dalit caste”.

In a way, Haldar weaves personal tales of fortitude in the face of the suffering of dislocation and all that is abruptly cut short by the leviathan state machinery. One such story is that of Jyotirmoy Mondal. He narrates the hardships endured by Sukhchand, his family and co-migrants in their journey from East Pakistan to Dandakaranya region refugee camps in India, and their failed attempt to turn the uninhabited Marichjhapi into their permanent home. He was part of the influx of Bengali Hindus from East Pakistan between December 1963 and February 1964. It was an exodus triggered by “the indiscriminate killings, rapes and looting at Khulna, Dhaka, Jessore, Faridpur, Mymensingh, Noakhali and Chattogram that drove out more than 2 lakh refugees from East Pakistan. Out of these, 1 lakh came to West Bengal, 75 thousand to Assam and 25 thousand to Tripura (Jugantar newspaper, 7 April 1964)”.

Halder cites academic Ishita Dey’s research paper saying that the 1963-64 migration was just one of the many spells of the influx in east India (from East Pakistan to West Bengal). Dey lists 1947, 1948, 1950, 1960, 1962, 1964 and 1970 as important years for large-scale migrations from East Pakistan.

The book captures the hardships, inhospitable conditions and travails of refugees in Dandakaranya camps spread across Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Odisha and Maharashtra before they leave it with the wish to settle in West Bengal—a desire that was fuelled by the promises made by CPI(M) leaders eyeing a support base. The inhuman living conditions, as the book’s author was informed by Niranjan Haldar (one of most dogged chroniclers of the pogrom), were highlighted by Saibal Gupta, of the British-era Indian Civil Sevice (ICS), entrusted with visiting the camps by the West Bengal government. Gupta subsequently quit his job in protest against the government’s apathy towards refugees.

What follows are the episodes in Marichjhapi island—some even as bizarre as having a dystopian streak—like the allegations of the government poisoning the tubewell that the refugees had dug with the assistance of an engineer from what was then Calcutta. Other deterrents that the Left Front government tried in its effort to evict the refugees included an economic blockade of Marichjhapi and cutting the supplies leading to starvation-like conditions, aggravation of health problems and further spread of diseases. Though the economic blockade was called off in early 1979 in the face of adverse public opinion and reporting in some sections of the press, what followed in May 1979, particularly on May 16 and May 17 that year, was perhaps not anticipated.

Haldar writes, “On May 17, 1979, Buddhadeb Bhattacharya, the then minister of information, declared at Writers’ Building that Marichjhapi had been cleared of refugees.” What, however, preceded it as well as followed it was days of violent eviction allegedly causing thousands of deaths, forced transportation and diseases chasing the migrants. To this list of casualties, Haldar adds the lost opportunity of Marichjhapi emerging as “an example of the entrepreneurial spirit of a band of Bengali Dalits”.

Besides survivors, the book tries to see the unfolding of the tragedy in Marichjhapi through the eyes of civil society actors, particularly the accounts of Anandbazar Patrika reporter Sukhoranjan Sengupta and lawyer Sakya Sen. The attempt of the Left regime to sweep the state repression and the carnage under the carpet couldn’t be completed without muzzling the media or limiting its access or making it an ally. The Left government did try that, perhaps that’s the explanation why more diverse and detailed accounts of the eviction aren’t available.

Niranjan Haldar, who wrote and witnessed those times as a journalist, recalls: “Pramod Dasgupta, a top Left leader, threatened to cancel all advertisements in the newspaper if they continued to publish Pannalal Dasgupta’s reports on Marichjhapi; all reportage stopped. I got sidelined myself. Apart from The Statesman, no one published any article on Marichjhapi anymore. When national publications tried to delve into the issue, their owners were approached by the West Bengal government officials who asked them not to publish anything, saying all this was a conspiracy against the Left in West Bengal.”

The silence of Bengali Bhadralok voices in media, literature and academics over the Marichjhapi carnage also amuses writer Manoranjan Byapari. In his conversation with Haldar, Byapari remembers that this seminar and literary festival-attending section of the intelligentsia “looked the other way when chotoloks (the classless and the casteless) were being butchered outside Calcutta in the island of Marichjhapi. These are the very people who kept quiet when the refugees who came back from Dandakaranya in search of home died by the wayside in Calcutta and its outskirts from hunger and illness.”

The book could have benefitted from conversations with key figures in state bureaucracy then, particularly civil servants working in the chief minister’s or home minister’s offices. Given that the political leadership of the Left government couldn’t be expected to deviate from the party line, the retired bureaucracy could give a clue about the Jyoti Basu government’s motives behind the crackdown. The book hints at some possible explanations, though it leaves more lines of political reasoning or even administrative reasoning behind the killings unexplored. That’s perhaps the homework the reader is assigned.  

As evident in the media discourse today, the blinkered perspectives and selective outrage seem to have played its role in an influential section of opinion-makers and information-disseminators downplaying the Marichjhapi carnage. Seen in that context, Haldar’s book is a significant contribution to retrieving a less-talked-about phase of state-orchestrated violence against persecuted refugees from the fringes of historical memory.