The land-grab issue that became the cornerstone for TMC’s poll cry has now become the bugbear Mamata Banerjee needs to deal with in Sandeshkhali.
Sandeshkhali, a small island in the Sundarbans area in North 24-Parganas district, about 75 km from Kolkata, is in the national news for reasons that West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee would remember with a sense of déjà vu. A mass uprising of women in Sandeshkhali, their faces hidden behind their sari pallu, wielding staffs and brooms in protest against atrocities, is reminding people of the mass movements that propelled Mamata Banerjee to power.
Political observers say that it was the allegations of “land grab” in Singur and Nandigram that brought Mamata Banerjee to power, ousting the Communists who had reigned for 34 long years.
The long-drawn movement by Mamata Banerjee between 2006 and 2008 against alleged “forcible” takeover of “fertile” land for Tata Motors’ Nano project and the Nandigram movement which came up in response to the Left Front Government’s decision to hand over 14,000 acres of land to Indonesia’s Salim Group of Industries were the catalysts that propelled her to the Chief Minister’s chair in West Bengal in the next election.
The land-grab issue that became the cornerstone for Trinamool Congress’s poll cry has now become the bugbear Mamata Banerjee needs to deal with in Sandeshkhali at a time when the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is leaving no stone unturned to corner the Trinamool Congress supremo and her party.
“Sandeshkhali is Nandigram 2.0,” says Rajagopal Dhar Chowdhury, a noted academic. Then and now, the state government and its forces have established a veritable reign of terror in the region, intimidating, assaulting and even killing activists, he says.
“In Sandeshkhali today, along with the allegations of land grab, a much more emotive issue is the sexual assault on women by Trinamool Congress leaders. This is finding resonance among people across the state, if not the country. This is the worst possible denouement for a leader like Mamata Banerjee who managed to convince the electorate that she cared for the Maa, Maati and Manush,” says Suman Chattopadhyay, a veteran journalist who had a ring-side view of the Singur and Nandigram movements.
Mamata Banerjee, then an Opposition leader, claimed to be fighting for land owners who did not want to sell their land to the West Bengal Government or Tata Motors. Banerjee claimed the land was fertile and therefore began a protest against land acquisition in Singur. The Nandigram land grab row emerged at the same time. Here, farmers protested the land acquisition for a chemical hub. In Nandigram too, Mamata Banerjee spearheaded the protests and sat on a 25-day hunger strike, emerging as the champion of the downtrodden.
Prior to her participation in these movements, Mamata Banerjee might have been admired for her “sheer ordinariness” or appreciated for her dramatic, firebrand style of politics, but she was not able to earn the support of the bhadralok (the genteel class) or win enough mass votes to topple the CPIM in West Bengal. With these movements, not only was she able to “transcend barriers of class, culture and politics,” she also took over an important bastion of Communist support: the peasantry, says Suman Chattopadhyay.
While the Sandeshkhali unrest has been centred around protests by women against alleged sexual atrocities by strongman and Trinamool Congress leader Shahjahan Sheikh and his aides, the agitation had started off against forcible land grab.
The farmers claimed that the saga of grabbing agricultural land and turning it into fisheries started in 2019 after Sheikh was made in-charge of the district’s fishery development.
The common, recurring theme of the allegations of the women that The Sunday Guardian met was: “Our land is grabbed in the name of lease. They made fisheries on the land. For the last three years, they have not paid the lease money. When we demand money, they threaten us.”
The land of those who did not want to part with it, was rendered uncultivable by pumping in salt water so that the owners were forced to give them for shrimp cultivation, the women say.
The Bharatiya Janata Party is now going by the Mamata Banerjee playbook.
Observers say the way BJP leaders including state president Sukanta Majumdar, Suvendu Adhikari, Locket Chatterjee and Agnimitra Paul have increased pressure on the Trinamool Congress by visiting Sandeshkhali, despite hurdles put up by the Administration and the police, is reminiscent of the Nandigram movement and mirrors Mamata Banerjee’s political career biography.
BJP leaders were also seen squatting on the highway, just as then Opposition leader Mamata Banerjee did during the Singur-Nandigram agitation.
“Within three years of her struggle, Mamata found an acceptance among all sections and classes of people that far exceeded her own expectation,” remembers Biswanath Chakraborty, a professor of political science, who has followed the Singur-Nandigram agitation closely.
The CPIM and its frontal organisation, the DYFI, too is trying to cash in.
Meenakshi Mukherjee, DYFI secretary, who tried to reach Sandeshkhali on Saturday but was stopped by a huge police force, said: “The people who are being looted, Police are committing atrocities against them. This is the truth of Bengal. Nobody is safe. We are being stopped from going there because they don’t want the truth to come out. Women here are trying to speak to us but Police are scaring them away.”
The BJP is leaving no stone unturned to pump up emotions across the state.
Adding to Mamata Banerjee’s worries and discomfort is the fact that her chief lieutenant and master-planner for the Nandigram movement, Suvendu Adhikari, is the leading light of the BJP who is spearheading the party’s movement against the Sandeshkhali atrocities.