United by love, divided by hate amid tribals vs migrants conflict
MALKANGIRI: Their courtship began over furtive glances inside a car. Sanjib Haldar was 29, the driver of an SUV in Odisha’s Malkangiri, and sometime in 2020, he was dropping Gayatri Padiami’s family to Kalimela for a wedding. That’s when their eyes first met. Their villages were close by, and soon they fell in love.
Padiami loved that Haldar was tall, young, a matriculate with a stable income. He promised to enrol her in a nursing school. Two years later, last month, they were married before a public notary in Malkangiri under the Special Marriage Act.
But the relationship was star crossed.
Haldar was a Bengali, a descendant of one of the 20,000 families from East Pakistan relocated to the forests of Odisha and Chhattisgarh by the government in India starting 1956, in what was then called the Dandakaranya project. Padiami is a Koya, from the indigenous adivasi community that has for long lived in Malkangiri’s forests.
The two groups have now lived next to each other for more than 60 years, but the ambitious project has left behind a trail of hostility between them, its fault lines deep and clear.
Padiami’s parents did not approve of the match, and a kangaroo court assembled a week after the wedding. It allegedly forced them to separate. The next day, Haldar drank a bottle of pesticide to kill himself.
Wedding and death
Haldar and Padiami were married on May 14, 2022 at the district headquarters. Anticipating trouble, they began living with Haldar’s uncle in Malkangiri. Three days later, a group of tribals took Gayatri away on the pretext that her mother was unwell.
On May 20, a meeting was called near Gayatri’s home in Boilapali village, which members of both the Koya tribal community and Bengali settlers attended. The tribals believed that this was another attempt by the Bengalis to usurp their land and weaken their identity. Padiami was asked what she wanted, and under duress, reportedly told the crowd that she did not want to live with Haldar.
The next day, a dejected Haldar drank a 400ml bottle of ‘Fire’, a Paraquat Dichloride chemical and drank half the bottle. On May 23, he was dead. Dipankar Haldar, Sanjib’s uncle, said that the family relocated to Malkangiri in 1971 under the terms of the Dandakaranya project, fleeing persecution in the Barisal district of what is now Bangladesh. “For a while, we believed that the tribals were our friends. We studied here, built a life here. But the death of my nephew has reminded us that we are still unwelcome. I hope the police will investigate the death properly,” he said.
Police officers said that they are still probing the matter.
But, in Malkangiri, there are concerns beyond the immediate. The district has a strong Maoist presence, and any sense of aggrievement is fertile ground for guerilla recruitment.
Malkangiri SP Nitesh Wadhwani said, “We are keeping an eye on such sensitive cases because they can be exploited by Maoists. We are aware of issues which have the potential of inflaming passions between two communities and are working towards redressing them.”
Dandakaranya Project
In 1956, rattled by the scale of the influx of Hindu Bengali migrants to West Bengal after Partition, the Centre decided to rehabilitate refugees to 65,000 sq km in the then undivided districts of Koraput in Odisha, and Bastar in Madhya Pradesh.
The Dandakaranya Development Authority project was formed in 1958, with settlers arriving in Malkangiri and Umerkote divisions of Odisha, now under the Malkangiri district, and the Paralkote and Bastar divisions of MP, now the Kanker district of Chhattisgarh.
The villages where the Bengalis were resettled in Malkangiri were serially numbered with the prefix MV (Malkangiri village) and later on some of them MPV (Malkangiri Potteru Village) after some migrants were relocated due to Potteru irrigation project in 1975, and those in Bastar were PV (Paralkote village). To this day, these are the names that these villages carry. Haldar lived in the village MV-9, one of the 216 MVs and MPVs.
Under the Dandakaranya project, to begin with, seven acres of land including half an acre for homestead and gardens, was given to each Bengali family. It was first reduced to six acres, and in November 1977, the government decided to reduce the land allotted to migrants to five, four, and three acres in non-irrigated, semi-irrigated and perennially irrigated areas, respectively. Nonagricultural families were provided an agricultural plot of two acres and a homestead plot of 7,200 sqft.
Land pattas were conferred initially for 20 years after which they were made permanent, Malkangiri district officials said.
Bhanumati Haldar and Ramesh Haldar, for instance, both in their seventies now, fled Barisal in 1971 during the war, were allotted a plot in MV-60, near Podia in Malkangiri. Most of the migrants were Namasudras, and were accorded the status of Scheduled Castes by the state government.
The community took to animal husbandry, dairy, poultry farming, and fish farming. The Dandakaranya project ensured that each Bengali village had tube wells, a head water tank, internal and approach roads, a community centre, and at least one primary school where Bengali was introduced as a medium of instruction for the primary classes.
The people were formalised in the electoral rolls, and the award of SC certificates meant that the assembly constituency became a reserved one from 1974 to 2004.
In 1985, Nadiabasi Biswas, a Bengali migrant, even became the independent MLA. In the 2019 Lok Sabha elections, district officials said that of the 600,000 voters in Malkangiri, 279,000 were Bengalis. Except, this upward mobility and the perceived largesse towards the Bengalis alienated the tribals.
Seeds of conflict
In his 2019 book, “Adivasis, Migrants and the State of India”, Jagannath Ambagudia, a Tata Institute of Social Sciences professor, wrote that the Dandakaranya project followed discriminatory practices against tribal communities. “Although land and forests are considered the twin pillars of the Adivasi economy, as well as the source of their community identity, the state did not respect this symbiotic relationship…T he clearing of precious forests in the Dandakaranya region for the settlement of Bengali migrants eventually deprived the Adivasi communities access to forest resources. The project considered the native Adivasis as the secondary social group competing for facilities. The differential treatment contributed to the income gap” he wrote.
Tribal activist and former zila parishad chairman Gangadhar Buruda said what this meant was a feeling of alienation among tribals. “Though we are sons of the soil, we were taken for granted. The Bengali migrants were far more sophisticated than the tribals and tended to corner all benefits as they were far more educated”, he said. This clash of cultures has been a deep reason for hostility, with intermittent eruptions of violence.
Violent clashes
In August 2021, Bengali migrants of MV-93 and Bhumia tribals of Phalkaguda village clashed over a 75-acre plot of land. Ugrasen Kurami, a tribal from Phalkaguda, said, “We wanted to create a forest on 75 acres of government land. But the migrants kept tilling it and converted part of it into a community graveyard which led to a clash. Section 144 was imposed. We have now requested the district administration to demarcate the land and remove all the encroachments. We will not remain silent from here on in.”
However, Nimai Sarkar, former Congress MLA of Malkangiri, said the allegations were a systematic attempt to defame the Bengalis.
In Odisha, and more prominently in neighbouring Chhattisgarh, religious beliefs have also been a core bone of contention, centered around Durga Puja. The festival typically has idols that show Durga killing Mahisasur, considered a symbol of evil. To tribals, particularly Gonds, however, the Mahisasur is a king. This divide also means a sense of deep suspicion when it comes to tribalmigrant marriages.
“In tribal households, a woman is usually not given property rights in her parental home. But in their communities, they do. Even the Supreme Court, in January 2021, said that a girl can inherit her parent’s property. So now migrants end up buying land in the names of their tribal wives leaving us with very little”, said Jara Sabar Madhi, a tribal and president of Malkangiri unit of BSP.
Back at MV-9, Purnima Haldar clutches her son’s Aadhaar card, one of the only photographs of Sanjib that she has. Two weeks have passed; there is grief and disbelief. “My son married the love of his life. He did not care whether she was tribal or Bengali. I did not know the amount of hate the marriage would generate,” she said.