Fear stalks scarred Sandeshkhali in polls run-up

Every night for the past two months, the pattern has been the same. As the sun recedes into the night sky, 52-year-old Sadhan Maity steps out of his thatched hut in Natunpara, and says his goodbyes to his wife, daughter-inlaw and two grandchildren.

His lanky frame disappears into the darkness, only to re-emerge at the first light of dawn. The family has taken a strategic decision. They can’t all leave together. If they do, their absence would become conspicuous. So every night, wracked by fear, Maity’s wife watches him go, closes the door, latches the bolt from inside, and prays for the morning to come.

The strategy is built on fear; fear of an attack on his home that is more likely at night when security presence is minimal, more likely if he is at home. So every night, he takes sanctuary in the fields, in the hope that he is more difficult to trace in the dark.

Maity is not alone. Since the turn of the year, the island of Sandeshkhali, 80km southeast of Kolkata and part of the Sunderbans delta, has been in the eye of a storm. On January 5, officers of the Enforcement Directorate (ED) descended on the village to search the home of Sheikh Shahjahan – a local Trinamool Congress (TMC) leader who ran his writ over the island for the last decade – in connection with an alleged ration distribution scam. Whether the 45-year-old man whom Sandeshkhali calls “bhai (brother)” was home or not was moot; the officers came under violent attack from an angry mob that thrashed them and burnt their vehicles, leaving three injured. Shahjahan went on the run, and was arrested after 55 days of protests and high court reprimands.

A month after the attack, Sandeshkhali began to seethe again, but for a different reason. Groups of residents, led mostly by local women, took to the streets — their protests often turned violent — alleging widespread sexual harassment and land-grab at the hands of local TMC leaders such as Shahjahan and his henchmen Shibaprasad Hazra and Uttam Sardar.

The leaders were arrested by February 17, but even two months later, fear continues to stalk the villages.