AN UNTOUCHABLE MASSACRE

Ross Mallick

It was the largest government massacre in independent India, but for thirty years it was forgotten. It involved two of the most venerable politicians in India, Prime Minister Desai and the Chief Minister of West Bengal, Jyoti Basu. In the nearly 4 decades since then much has been learned about it but the scale of the massacre and the reasons for it remain unknown. Eventually all the major ruling parties were implicated, or failed to investigate it. The attempts to uncover what happened speak to the difficulties of achieving human rights in India. No government agency or NGO investigated it and no government report in any language exists on the Marichjhapi massacre. What we know results from the efforts of a handful of individuals to publicize the massacre. Some things have not changed since the 1979 massacre; the deaths continue to be estimated at between 3 and 5 figures, with no progress made in identifying the victims or narrowing the wide range in estimates. The reasons for it are still a mystery, though numerous explanations of varying plausibility have been broached to explain it. Though historical interpretations continue to be advanced, the basic events are not in dispute. The Mughal conquest of India led to many Untouchables and lower castes converting to Islam. As independence approached religion became a mobilizing force for political change which resulted in partition of India and the creation of Pakistan. Hindus in East Bengal fled to the West while the Muslims in the West fled East. However as the Muslims and Untouchables were in a political alliance it was only when communal feeling turned against the Untouchables that they fled to India. As they did not have the assets of the middle class Hindus and landlords who had fled earlier, they became dependent on government assistance for survival. The conditions in the refugee camps in central India were considered appalling both by the media and the government's own reports. The Communist opposition in West Bengal took advantage of their plight to discredit the ruling Congress Party and demand their return to West Bengal, with the undeveloped Sundarbans Ganges Delta as a plausible resettlement area. This presented no problem until the Communists came to power in West Bengal, and the refugees took them at their word and began returning to Bengal where they set up a settlement at Marichjhapi in the delta on an abandoned government plantation. They had been encouraged to do so by Ministers in the Left Front government who visited the Dandakaranya refugee camps of central India. As the refugees had been subject to hostility from the local armed tribals who did not want encroachment on their land, and camp administrators who exploited them and stole government supplies, the offer was enticing. What the refugees did not know initially was that while the junior partners in the Left Front government continued to promote resettlement in West Bengal, the dominant Communist Party Marxist (CPM) would come to reverse its position and oppose it. The split in the Cabinet reflected long standing rivalries between different Left parties as they used state power to expand their influence at the expense of each other. As the refugees were geographically separated from West Bengal in Dandakaranya they did not understand the impact this would have on their fate.

AN UNTOUCHABLE MASSACRE Marichjhapi was the largest government massacre in independent India, yet for thirty years it was forgotten. It involved two of the most venerable politicians in India, Prime Minister Desai and the Chief Minister of West Bengal, Jyoti Basu. In the 4 decades since then much has been learned but the scale of the massacre and the reasons for the massacre remain unknown. Eventually all the ruling parties were implicated, or failed to investigate what happened. The attempts to uncover what happened speak to the difficulties of achieving human rights in India. No government agency or NGO investigated it and no government or NGO report in any language exists on the Marichjhapi massacre. What we know results from the efforts of a handful of individuals to publicize it. Some things have not changed since the 1979 massacre; the deaths continue to be estimated at between 3 and 5 figures, with little progress made in identifying the victims or narrowing the wide range in estimates. The reasons for it are still a mystery, though numerous explanations of varying plausibility have been suggested to explain it. Though historical interpretations continue to be advanced, the basic events that led up to it are not in dispute. The Mughal conquest of India led to many Untouchables and lower castes converting to Islam. As independence approached religion became a mobilizing force for political change which resulted in partition of India and the creation of Pakistan. Hindus in East Bengal fled to the West while the Muslims in the West fled East. However as the Muslims and Untouchables were in a political alliance it was only when communal feeling turned against the Untouchables that they fled to India. As they did not have the assets of the middle class Hindus and landlords who had fled earlier, they became dependent on government assistance for survival. The conditions in the refugee camps in central India were considered appalling both by the media and the government's own reports. The Communist opposition in West Bengal took advantage of the refugees’ plight to discredit the ruling Congress Party and demand their return to West Bengal, with the undeveloped Sundarbans Ganges Delta as a suitable resettlement area. This presented no problem until the Communists came to power in West Bengal, and the refugees took them at their word and began returning to Bengal, where they set up a settlement at Marichjhapi in the delta on an abandoned government plantation. They had been encouraged to do so by Ministers in the Left Front government who visited the Dandakaranya refugee camps of central India. As the refugees had been subject to hostility from the local armed tribals who did not want encroachment on their land, and camp administrators who exploited them and stole government supplies, the offer was enticing. What the refugees did not know initially was that while the junior partners in the Left Front government continued to promote resettlement in West Bengal, the dominant Communist Party Marxist (CPM) would come to reverse its position and oppose it. The split in the Cabinet reflected long standing rivalries between different Left parties as they 1 used state power to expand their influence at the expense of each other. As the refugees were geographically separated from West Bengal in Dandakaranya they did not understand the impact this would have on their fate. Contested Explanations There is almost nothing else about the “incident” that is not contested by one or other party. Even the massacre was denied by the state government which claimed only two innocent bystanders had been shot by police. Critics claimed that these deaths could not be hidden as they were local residents unlike the out of state refugees, and the police aim was unlikely to have been so poor as to have killed only residents including one who was killed inside her home. Eye witness accounts would later debunk the government assertions. What was not contested is that the resettlement was successful in development terms providing schools, health centre, a viable fishing industry, and most significantly total self-sufficiency from government assistance.1 None of this mattered to the government, and at some point the Communist Party Marxist in deliberations that have never been revealed decided on an eviction. Some theories had more evidence to back them up. One internet comment claimed the motivation for the massacre lay in rivalries within the Left Front government. The Revolutionary Socialist Party (RSP) was helping the refugees, thereby threatening its dominant coalition partner, the Communist Party Marxist (CPM). As the RSP allegedly had Trotskyist antecedents, and the CPM was Stalinist, the old ideological rivalries were being played out within the government.2 Though the RSP which had a base in the Sundarbans did help the refugees, the CPM had far greater party and state resources and could have easily outspent its coalition partner rivals without having to kill the refugees. As the refugees were supporters of the CPM the erosion of this support when the CPM reversed policy and opposed resettlement played into the hands of the RSP, which would have been particularly erksome to the CPM. Given the opportunity the CPM had to support the refugees and marginalize the junior Left Front partners this might seem a secondary motivation for the eviction, though another interpretation implicitly gives the struggle for dominance within the Left Front greater significance.3 Prasannbhai Mehta MP, Laxmi Naranyan Pandey MP, Mangaldev Visharat MP, “Report on Marichjhapi Affairs”, April 18, 1979, mimeographed. CPM MPs prevented the report being presented to Parliament though as it preceded the massacre it was relatively innocuous. Prime Minister Desai’s Janata Party were allied with the CPM at the national level, but the state Janata Party opposed the Left Front, and persuaded the Prime Minister to send a parliamentary delegation. This may have caused the CPM to fear losing the support of the central government on Marichjhapi and change from the slower method of starving out the refugees in a siege to wiping out the settlement with an eviction. It would explain Jyoti Basu’s exasperation with press leaks that forced postponement of the eviction. 2 Abheek Barman “How West Bengal’s Left Front government committed genocide on Dalits”, The Economic Times, July 29, 2016. 3 Deep Halder, Sangam Talks, Blood Island, April 17, 2020, Youtube. 1 2 The geopolitical explanation which has been repeatedly used, but cannot be verified, is that the CPM on coming to power reversed policy as it then saw the opportunity of establishing a base amongst the refugees in Dandakaranya, a region that was in the hinterland of several strategic central Indian states. From there it could spread its base into neighbouring populations. Though given the cultural and language differences that may have seemed farfetched, it was not without precedent. Before and during the Emergency its cadre had fled to other states where they began to make some headway before being recalled when the Left Front took power. That their Maoist insurgent rivals made Dandakaranya a major base amongst tribals indicates it could have been done. However having encouraged settlement in West Bengal which was culturally and ecologically more hospitable to the refugees, the CPM could not evict the refugees who settled in Marichjhapi without ruining their own political prospects both in Dandakaranya and eventually as word got out about the massacre in West Bengal itself. The return of the Marichjhapi survivors meant that Dandakaranya was no longer a potential Bengali base for the CPM. The Party would have been better off encouraging some refugee settlement in West Bengal while developing a base in Dandakaranya. By massacring the refugees it contributed to ending their prospects in both places. In retrospect the election of the Left Front in 1977 was the high water mark of Indian Communism as thereafter they never launched a social movement let alone a political one, and gradually descended into corruption and terror, rigging elections, and dispensed state patronage to remain in power for decades due to a divided opposition. It is easy to overrate the importance of the massacre in the Communist downfall, but it alienated sections of the Untouchable community which came to turn against it as their grievances were ignored. The official explanation most often cited for the eviction was the environmental justification. Being in a reserve forest the settlement endangered a fragile ecosystem which included the Tiger Sanctuary. Though the settlement was not in the Sanctuary itself the government claimed it was part of the neighbouring Forest Reserve where settlement was prohibited, though its location in the Reserve is disputed.4 This claim of a forest reserve was undermined by the development of the government’s own plantation on the island, which though defunct, hardly made it a pristine area. It was nevertheless the best argument for eviction that the government could make. Subsequently however when the government wanted to build a nuclear plant and hand nearby areas to a private corporation for tourist development, the outcry from conservationists led to the abandonment of the idea.5 This suggests that environmentalism was not the imperative that the government claimed. U.N. Biswas, a Minister in the post-Communist government (Youtube) and the Refugee High Court Advocate Sakya Sen both claim Marichjhapi is outside the Reserve though some maps and observers put it within the Reserve. 5 Amites Mukhopadhyay, “Negotiating Development: The Nuclear Episode in the Sundarbans of West Bengal, Anthropology Matters, Vo. 7, No.1, 2005 Annu Jalais, “The Sundarbans: Whose World Heritage Site?, Conservation and Society, Vol. 5, No. 3, 2007 4 3 The other strongest justification was the threat of too many people landing up in West Bengal for the government to handle. There had been ongoing infiltration of both Hindu and Muslim Bangladeshis into the state which had to be controlled if not stopped in the government view. The Marichjhapi refugees were not dependent on government resources and had developed the community on their own, giving the state no non-violent leverage available for their removal. When an economic blockade failed to get them to abandon the settlement, despite numerous deaths from starvation and disease, the police in 30 motor launches occupied the settlement and drove them out, with the assistance of “volunteers” variously described as party workers and gangsters. The bodies of the victims were then dumped in the Ganges or in forests. According to local residents dumping the bodies in the jungle habituated the Tigers to becoming maneaters6. The government claimed the settlement had housed between 6 to 8 thousand people, while independent estimates put it around 30,000 and the very highest estimate at 60,000. Either way it was a marginal addition to a state of 91 million (2011 census), so the influx does not seem to have warranted the government’s response. As Indian citizens they had a perfect right to remain in West Bengal as had minorities since prehistory, but it was never about law and all about what the CPM wanted. Partition of Bengal would enable Congress to regain power most effectively if the Namasudra populated districts were given to Pakistan. According to a Partitionspecializing professor at a western university who did not respond to a request to be cited “The will to break the Namasudra movement can be seen in the insistence of the Congress to divide Bengal in the first place. It was designed to ensure upper-caste hegemony by ‘leaving behind’ the Namasudras in East Bengal.” It was not anticipated that the Muslim communalists would turn on their former Untouchable allies once the dominant Hindu castes had gone. The resulting influx of Untouchable refugees to West Bengal threatened to undo the Congress purpose in dividing Bengal in the first place. The refugees were dispersed to other states by the Congress government to prevent the continuance of what was arguably the most powerful Untouchable movement in India. A “vital reason for these policies was to weaken the strength of the Namasudra [Untouchable] movement…..The scattering of these refugees would not only dismember the Namasudra community but also ensure the prevention of the rise of the Namasudras in the tri-caste hierarchy of West Bengal electoral politics.”7 Partition of Bengal would not achieve its political objective of reestablishing tri-caste Congress control of the state, if a refugee influx enabled the Untouchables and Muslims to re-elect themselves to power.8 This could most effectively be prevented by caste-based “ethnic cleansing”. The term was not used, but as the higher castes had the political and caste connections to remain in West Bengal, and the Untouchables did not, the effect was the same. Destitute refugees, despite multiple protests, were in no position to prevent the government moving Annu Jalais, “Dwelling on Marichjhanpi: When Tigers become ‘Citizens’, Refugees ‘Tiger Food’”, Economic and Political Weekly, April 23, 2005. 7 Debdatta Chowdhury, Marginal Lives, Peripheral Practices: A study of border narratives along the West Bengal-Bangladesh Border”. PhD Thesis, University of Westminster, May, 2014, p.174. 8 Indrajit Roy, “Transformative Politics” in The Politics of Caste in West Bengal”, edited by Uday Chandra, Geir Heierstrad, and Kenneth Bo Nielsen, Routledge, 2017, p.188. 6 4 them to other states. Even the distant Andaman Islands which had previously been used as a British penal colony for political prisoners were settled. Usually politicians get rid of their opponents by targeting leaders, but in this novel approach their followers were targeted with mass deportations to unfamiliar lands occupied by tribals. Out of one population of deportees nearly 27,030 families out of 42,000 perished.9 To achieve this objective the Congress Chief Minister, Dr. B.C. Roy, needed the support of Prime Minister Nehru to whom he wrote “we have...refugees coming in a state of mental excitement which enables the careerist politician to get hold of them and utilise them for various types of propaganda against the Government and the Congress.”10 He persuaded Prime Minister Nehru to use his influence to persuade other very reluctant states to take the refugees. As Nehru wrote to B.C. Roy “in spite of our efforts, it is difficult to induce most provinces to absorb more refugees. We have been pressing them to do so for some time.”11 The underlying political objective of marginalizing the Untouchable movement by forcing an exodus of the most marginalized and poorest people is not stated, but anyone with a basic knowledge of the politics of the Bengal partition could have guessed what they were doing and that it was Untouchables’ leaders he was likely most afraid of. This political calculation was shown on the ground where refugee camps of higher castes with professed allegiance to B.C. Roy and the Congress were spared deportation.12 Though brutal in causing thousands of unknown deaths during Congress rule it was totally effective in destroying the Untouchable movement. It provided the Communist opposition with an issue to gain support amongst the Scheduled Castes as well. Thereafter the Namasudras became a persecuted minority in India as they had been for thousands of years, and in Bangladesh as a target of Islamic fundamentalists. I tried to confirm the political motive for dispersing the refugees to other states but it was omitted from academic publications, and it was left to a couple of doctoral students writing in unpublished theses to confirm it.“The upper caste government’s discrepancy and divisive politics was in no way coincidental, but a conscious calculated effort to firstly disintegrate the erstwhile Namasudra political force, and next, to create in Bengal a hegemonic upper caste homogenous leadership”.13 Leading historians on the subject did not respond to my emails raising the question, though they knew my background and had cited my publications. That history professors would not deal with this issue reflects the silence of the tri-caste academia about human rights abuses. As the politicians responsible for the caste cleansing had died decades before there was even less reason for covering them up than the Bengali intellectuals had with the Marichjhapi massacre. Atharobaki Biswas, “Why Dandakaranya a Failure, Why Mass Exodus, Where Solution?”, The Oppressed Indian, Vol.4, No.4, 1982, p.18. 10 S. Chakrabarty, With Dr. B.C. Roy, p.182, quoted in Joya Chatterji, The Spoils of Partition, CUP, p.130-1. 11 S. Chakrabarty, With Dr. B.C. Roy, p.107 quoted in Jyota Chatterji, The Spoils of Partition, CUP, p.133. 12 Uditi Sen, “The Myths Refugees Live By: Memory and history in the making of Bengali refugee identity” Modern Asian Studies, 48, 2014, p. 48. 13 Debatri Sengupta, “The Marichjhapi Massacre and the Myth of Caste in the Politics of West Bengal”, p.7, Internal Assessment Semester 4, April 19, 2016, University of Delhi, Department of English, in academia.edu/31518498. 9 5 It would be unfair to single out individual historians, for these approaches pervade the field. Omitting perspectives unpalatable to the elite removes any kind of claim to objectivity. From an Untouchable perspective, human rights was by far the most important reason for studying them, but this silence in the scholarship was a tangible sign of dominant elite influence. Though the intellectual elite come from upper castes that are outnumbered by the Untouchables, the lack of Untouchables in the elite means that an objective perspective on India is almost entirely lacking. The caste cleansing of the Congress Party became in these tri-caste histories a well meaning innocuous program that only failed through poor administration, rather than the manipulative oppression of the poor that it really was. To have said otherwise would have implicated some of the most powerful and iconic politicians in the country in human rights abuses and shown them for what they really were. The same reasoning for dispersing the refugees would come to be applied by the Communists as well. Parallel government was thus code for the takeover of the whole state by Untouchables and other minorities who made up the majority of the electorate. It is a plausible argument for the massacre, but if that was the case there were not enough settlers at Marichjhapi to make such a difference. They could have been brought on the Communist side had they been allowed to remain, as had many other Untouchables already resident in West Bengal. What should have been an opportunity for the Communists to expand their base came to be seen by them as a problem to be got rid of. In opposition they had seen the opportunity but once in power they came somehow to see it as a problem. With no Untouchables in their leadership perhaps they could not see outside their traditional upper caste outlook to the possibilities in Untouchable empowerment under Communism. The reasons for the massacre have baffled people ever since. The historian, Partha Chatterjee, argues “government policies of refugee rehabilitation in the 1950s were strongly tilted in favour of upper-caste refugees. Forced migration to Dandakaranya and the Andamans was confined only to SC [Untouchable] refugees. When some of them wanted to return to West Bengal after the formation of the LF [Left Front] in 1977, they were violently repressed at Marichjhapi. But these decisions only show that the upper castes were able to protect and promote their particular interests.”14 This tells us the effect of the policies, but the motivations of the decision makers for the eviction are more difficult to attribute to prejudice against Untouchables. None of them had a reputation for being anti-Untouchable. They did however have an acute understanding of what human rights abuses they could get away with, and would have known that mass murder of Untouchables would carry no consequences unlike more influential minorities. The refugees must have been considered a threat to the CPM but whether this was due to their caste, class or both remains undetermined. Other smaller parties in the Left Front of similar upper caste leadership supported the refugees as did some cadre within the CPM. The difference between these parties in the government may have been ideological or Partha Chatterjee, “Partition and the Disappearance of Caste’, The Politics of Caste in West Bengal, edited by Uday Chandra, Geir Heierstad, and Kenneth Bo Nielsen, Routledge, 2017, p.97 14 6 opportunist in seeing a way of undermining the CPM from the Left. None of these governing parties pursued the case after the massacre. The Bengali intellectuals in the Subaltern Series omitted it entirely from their publications, perhaps due to family and party ties with those responsible. If the CPM saw it as a threat to its hegemony, it seems too small a settlement to raise such concerns. There was more to be lost by killing them than ignoring them. As 16% of the Indian electorate the Untouchables were not a community the Communists should have wanted to alienate. That they chose to act as a Stalinist hegemonic party of the traditional Master Castes rather than as Communists, reflects their real nature. Though not apparently recognised as such by the dominant high caste elite, it was a pivotal moment in West Bengal politics for it was made clear to the Untouchables that the Master Castes were prepared to kill to preserve their power even when not directly challenged.15 Even decades after the massacre the former Left Front leaders displayed an incapacity to comprehend what happened or at least admit it publically. An Editor at India Today magazine was able to find only one leader prepared to be interviewed on the subject. Kanti Ganguly, the Left Front Sundarbans Minister at the time massacre stated less than 10 fatalities occurred despite the Editor saying he had talked to participants and witnesses who claimed there were thousands. Though he conceded encouraging the refugees to return to West Bengal had been “cheap politics” and their campaign to stop computers had been a mistake, that was as far he would go. The former Minister did not make a good impression by occupying an apartment meant for people with Special Needs.16 Ganguly denied caste had been a factor in the government decision. “The Namasudra angle wasn’t a factor at all in our decision to clear that island. The Namasudras did bear a lot of anger and hatred towards higher castes, towards Brahminism, but our government had no bias against the lower caste refugees…. Those Namasudras carried a deep-rooted anger towards Brahmins. I am a Brahmin, and have seen this for myself.”17 By then practically every political conscious person in the state had heard reports of a large scale massacre that were considered credible by Untouchables, so simply denying anything of In the revisionist history “The Politics of Caste in West Bengal” which reveals the ongoing presence of caste, the Massacre is only mentioned in passing, seriously understating its significance for Untouchables and inadvertently indicating the gulf that separates elite caste and foreign scholarship from Untouchable perceptions. An even more egregious omission is in Dwaipayan Bhattacharyya’s 2016 book published long after the Left Front was defeated which states the government “took the highly controversial decision to stop the flow of refugees from Dandakaranya” without mentioning Marichjhapi or the massacre, but citing Pal’s book as reference, a book which presents the massacre in all its gory detail. Though the author clearly knew of the massacre from reading this book and my Cambridge University Press book manuscript, no mention of massacre is included despite a whole chapter devoted to the much less violent and widely publicized Singur and Nandigram evictions. The failure of Bengali intellectuals who knew about Marichjhapi to deal with the massacre long after the defeat of the left is indicative of a refusal to come to terms with the past and their role in the cover up. Dwaipayan Bhattacharyya, Government as Practice: Democratic Left in a Transforming India, Cambridge University Press, 2016, p.12. 16 My own CPM minder showed similar upward mobility when it came to apartments, which was a common form of corruption under the Left Front government. The stealing of property for the benefit of ruling party followers, while poor squatters were murdered by the government as in Marichjhapi was one of the reasons for the demise of the Left Front regime as it exposed the contrast and hypocracy of the Left. 17 Deep Halder, Blood Island: An Oral History of the Marichjhapi Massacre”, HarperCollins, 2019, p.1400 15 7 the kind had happened was not going to solve the alienation problem the Left Front had developed among Untouchables. An investigation might have been a first step towards caste reconciliation, but since nearly everyone knew the government line was false, any credible investigation would only dig a deeper hole for the Communists, hence denial of all the credible reports. When I consulted a Professor as to the real reason for the massacre the response was; “There are several theories about the CPM acting the way they did, each as ridiculous as the other.” One CPM cadre said his party had dealt with the refugees in a “bureaucratic way” and should have helped them in order to get a “solid base”, however no one on the CPM State Committee had opposed Promode Das Gupta, the party State Secretary, on this issue. According to the Marichjhapi refugee Advocate in the Calcutta High Court case, Shakya Sen, “Why the government suddenly became desperate to send refugees back to Dandakaranya remains a mystery. Jyoti Basu was like a dictator. He probably couldn’t digest the fact hat they were disobeying his orders. It was his hurt ego, nothing else.”18 The internal party deliberations are unknown, but other State Committee members may have known how the decision was arrived at. Those still alive are in some of the most senior party positions and none have been forthcoming so it will probably never be known. Though it was not realized at the time, had they resettled the refugees it would have been their only successful program, as all others failed to help the poor in a better way than any other government would have done. It was remarkable not only for being the longest ruling democratically elected Communist government in world history, but for how little it did to justify that status. The reasons for the leftist opposition to the massacre should have been obvious to the decision makers. The Untouchables were nearly a quarter of West Bengal and 16% of India’s population. 201 million people were not a constituency any political party would want to alienate. Even the Hindu fundamentalists who doctrinally might be expected to defend Untouchability chose to solicit them as a potential voter base. Having already alienated the Muslims, doing the same to Untouchables would make the electoral road to power much too difficult. It would also further promote their conversion to Christianity and Islam that they hoped to prevent in order to maintain Hindu rule, though their promotion of cow vigilantism threatened to undermine that effort. However if anyone was attracted to Communism, logic would suggest the Untouchables would find it most appealing, so killing them was nonsensical. The Untouchables were largely unorganized and politically divided so the Communists must have thought they could get away with the eviction without any political repercussions. For the next three decades they were proven right. What they did not seem to recognize was that the Untouchables could not be counted on to remain unorganized or ignorant of the massacre forever. It was well known at the time that the Communists had the backing of the central government as the ruling Janata Party needed the support of CPM MPs in parliament. Prime Minister Desai was therefore motivated to go along with whatever the West Deep Halder, Blood Island: An Oral History of the Marichjhapi Massacre, HarperCollins, 2019, Kindle edition Location 1047. 18 8 Bengal government wanted. Jyoti Basu tabled in the West Bengal Legislative Assembly the private correspondence between the Prime Minister and Chief Minister, presumably to pass on more responsibility for Marichjhapi to Prime Minister Desai. Though the content of telephone conversations they had are unknown Jyoti Basu released the letters that were exchanged on the subject. The private English correspondence between the Chief Minister and Prime Minister Desai was published in which Jyoti Basu’s public claim of CIA responsibility was omitted but Oxfam mentioned as the only foreign agency blamed, presumably because the Prime Minister was not as gullible as the Communist supporters. More substantively the cordial correspondence revealed the Chief Minister could have inferred that no central government intervention was likely to be forthcoming. In Jyoti Basu’s letter to the Prime Minister of January 24th 1979 he states “We have now decided to take action for containing the situation in Marichjhapi and to make every effort to repatriate the deserters....I should be grateful for your assistance at the political level to tackle this serious problem developing in the Sunderbans.” In Prime Minister Desai’s letter of January 30, 1979 to Jyoti Basu he states “I agree with you in regard to the action that you have taken or prepared to take”.19 As the Prime Minister put no caveats on this it was probably fair for Jyoti Basu to interpret this as a carte blanche to do as he pleased without central government interference. Given the significance of the correspondence some interpretation is useful. While everyone else refers to them as refugees, which usually implies they are in need of assistance, Jyoti Basu refers to them as “deserters” a term normally associated with those who leave an army, and in some wars are liable to execution. This attempt to put them in the worst possible light, when the Chief Minister would have known the condition of the refugee camps they were deserting, since he had taken up their cause when he was in opposition, suggests the action he was planning. Just four years before, Jyoti Basu had invited Dandakaranya refugee leaders to a meeting with him at Bhilai on January 25, 1975 at which he promised to provide government assistance for them to resettle in West Bengal should he come to power.20 His opposition to the Congress policy was well known and long standing. In 1951 he said “that force should not be used in the matter of evicting refugees occupying other’s premises in an unauthorized manner and alternative accommodation should be found for them.”21 With the eviction decision made, Jyoti Basu wanted to get the local Left Front leaders in line with the policy reversal and called them to his office in Calcutta. According to Prafulla Mandal, the Panchayat [Village Council] Chief of Kumirmari Island the Chief Minister said: I called you, because you are supporting the refugees. “We said “No we are not supporting.” Jyoti Basu “Then what are you doing?” Answer “We are neither supporting nor opposing.” Jyoti Basu ”Now there is a directive from the Central Government that they should be evicted. I called you, because you are the local Left Front leaders. If you have co-operated with them in the past, don’t do this in future. If you defy my orders I will see you.” I asked “Do you think the Bengali Madhumay Pal (ed) Marichjhapi; Chhinna Desh, Chhinna Itihas, 2011, p. 87-88 A.K. Biswas, “Memoirs of Chandal Jeevan: An Underdog’s Story”, Mainstream, April 13, 2013. 21 Jyoti Basu, West Bengal Legislative Assembly Proceedings, February 22, 1951, p. 290. 19 20 9 refugees are dogs and goats?” Jyoti Basu “Why are you saying so?” “He was angry.” I said “You see they were driven out of Bangladesh [ie. East Pakistan] and sent to Mana camp, Andaman Islands, and some places like domestic animals. We take them from one place to another as we wish. But they must have been encouraged to come back to West Bengal and who did so?? We the Left Front leaders.!! If the West Bengal government had no desire to get them here why they were not pushed back from the Bengal border?” Jyoti Basu “I am not used to listen to such comments from you boys. But one thing I tell you, they are to be evicted. And what you said, I would not deny...Government has made some mistakes.” I replied “But the refugees will have to pay the price with their lives for your government’s mistake, sir.” Jyoti Basu said “There is no place for sentiment in politics. From now on don’t co-operate with the refugees.” 22 The Chief Minister’s exchange with the villagers diverts the prime responsibility for the eviction to the Central Government even though there is no evidence of a Central Government directive and it was clearly a State government initiative. The villagers could not know that, but Jyoti Basu appears to have made it up to impress the villagers and avoid his own responsibility. The government mistake Jyoti Basu may be referring to could be from a meeting he had with 18 refugee leaders after he came to power at which he said they could settle in Marichjhapi provided they did not ask for government assistance.23 This they did which explains how they could make the settlement in the first place. At some point after that a decision was made to evict them for reasons that remain unknown. The Left Front Minister, Ram Chatterjee of the Forward Bloc has been blamed for going to Dandakaranya to encourage settlement in West Bengal, however he was only following the policy of the former Left opposition and subsequent government. He was not to know the policy would be totally reversed by the CPM. According to Manoranjan Byapari whose father died from complications caused by his ribs being crushed by a police rifle butt at Marichjhapi “The irony is these people had worshipped Basu as their God. They were blind believers of the CPM. They had marched from Dandakaranya on the assurance of that Ram Chatterjee. When Chatterjee visited Dandakaranya and asked them to come to Bengal, they believed he had the support of Basu. If they knew Basu didn’t want them there, these people simply wouldn’t have responded to Chatterjee’s call.”24 The journalist, Sukumar Debnath, sees the policy reversal in the personal character of Jyoti Basu. “Basu swore by Stalin. He had a complete intolerance of dissent. Rapes were rampant in Marichjhapi, too, almost like a weapon of war against dissenters…. They openly defied Basu. And they paid the price.”25 With other issues to occupy him as Chief Minister, Jyoti Basu may have given little thought to refugee resettlement until after they had settled themselves by which time it was too late. He Tushar Bhattacharya, documentary director producer, “Marichjhapi: Tortured Humanity”, Vimeo in English, Youtube in Bengali. 23 Jhuma Sen, “Reconstructing Marichjhapi”, in Partition: The Long Shadow, edited by Urvashi Butalia, Penguin Viking, 2015, p.112. 24 Deep Halder Blood Island p. 162. 25 Deep Halder Blood Island, p. 167 22 10 would have had to kill them, help them or drop the matter, and his ego and political beliefs may in his mind not have permitted a climb down. This encounter with the village leaders could quite possibly be the only instance of “truth being told to power” over Marichjhapi. Over 90% of the cabinet at the time were from the 6% tricaste elite, and with no Untouchables in the cabinet or CPM party leadership, there could be no opposition from Untouchables at that level. The split in the cabinet was reflective of party divisions between the CPM and the rest of the Left Front so Jyoti Basu might have dismissed them as politically motivated. However 236 deaths by starvation, disease, and police firing at three different locations were reported to the central government with the names and ages of the deceased given, and similar reports appeared in the press prior to the massacre. Unless he did not read the newspapers or was not informed by anyone, it was impossible not to know the deaths he was causing. In fact according to Dr. Samanta at a meeting he attended with the Chief Minister and others on May 11, 1979 Jyoti Basu “angrily spoke of the presence of spies in the administration who were leaking secrets to the press. He continued for a few minutes like this though he identified no one. We were feeling uneasy. Then he asked what our next move was. We said we would implement the said plan on 14 May. We clarified that the leaders should be arrested soon after landing. He agreed. Before we broke up, the Chief Minister insisted on secrecy as he had on earlier occasion.”26 The eviction had been postponed once due to press leaks so his anger was understandable. However an operation on this scale could not be hidden from local villagers and the Marichjhapi leaders came to realize what would happen and planned their escape. Jyoti Basu and the people around him seem not to have realized that killing poor people, and feeding the dead and injured to tigers and crocodiles while in their power, was not in the long term interests of his Communist Party. Even in an avowedly democratic centralist party, where centralism was the operative word, some information must have reached the decision makers. In his authorized biography “Jyoti Basu”, written by an English Professor, who received an illegal plot at a fraction of market value along with many other notable CPM supporters too numerous to mention, there is no mention of the massacre.27 His autobiography “With the People”, only claims that “after the state government’s tolerant and sustained efforts” the refugees returned to their previous camps.28 From this it appears he did not know of the deaths he was causing. However in his leaflet publicly distributed to the refugees he states “Dear Brothers and Sisters, I am grieved for your present unbearable conditions. I have the deepest sympathy for you. In the meantime some of your fellow refugees have passed away. A good number of people have been afflicted with illness, some of them are seriously ill. You people have been going through an unenviable plight….The West Bengal Left Front Government is always with you and would render all kinds of assistance for your establishment there [in Dandakaranya].”29 When this did Amiya K. Samanta, “Marichjhapi” in Madhumay Pal (editor), Marichjhapi Ananya Roy, City Requiem, Calcutta: Gender and the Politics of Poverty, University of Minnesota Press, 2003, p.10. 28 Biswajit Roy, “Controversies that dogged the pragmatic chief minister”, The Telegraph, January 18, 2010. 29 Jyoti Basu, “To the Dandakaranya Refugees”, Government of West Bengal, April 11, 1978. 26 27 11 not work he instituted a blockade of food, water, and medicine in defiance of the Calcutta High Court injunction causing more deaths and banned journalists from visiting Marichjhapi.The prudent thing would have been to go along with the High Court injunction and quietly drop the matter. If the media image of Jyoti Basu is perused one would get the impression of an urbane barrister, quite at home with the urban elite, who on his return from England, found his forte in the Legislative Assembly and electoral politics. He would have been Prime Minister but for his own CPM Central Committee voting against the offer in what he called a “historic blunder”. However, despite his gentlemanly demeanour, those in the know realized there was a ruthless side to him that didn’t get press coverage. When he first came to power in a United Front government as the Minister responsible for the Police, a police officer, Ranjit Kumar Gupta, to advance his career passed on the names of the police informers in the Communist Party, resulting in the murder of about 100 of them.The murders were investigated and those responsible discovered, though no action was taken against anyone and the officer became Calcutta Police Commissioner and Inspector General of Police.30 In a role similar to that of the Princelings in China, in a mixture of sentiment and politics, Jyoti Basu’s son was able to use his government connections to become rich, and despite criticisms even within the party Jyoti Basu did not attempt to stop this corruption. The lack of accountability to anyone may have given the Chief Minister a sense of invincibility that led him to believe there would be no consequences for the massacre, and until after his retirement this proved correct. Such was the standing of the former Chief Minister, that on his deathbed, he was visited by Prime Minister Singh, and the eulogies made no mention of Marichjhapi. Following the personal instructions by Jyoti Basu given to Dr. Samanta, the 24 Parganas Police Superintendent carried out his orders to evict the refugees. Dr Samanta would later receive internet comment for his role.“Ex-Director General of Police, West Bengal A.K. Samanta will do a great job; if he allows us to have a glance at his monstrous role in attacking in dead of night with police constables packed in 30 motor boats residents of Marichjhapi, Sundarbans, in the Bay of Bengal. That attack was planned by the ruling CPM party in its HQ, Alimuddin Street against socially deprived people. He justifies criminal prosecution but because he was in the good book of the ruling party[escaped justice]. Samanta has to answer it someday. The deaths of countless people cannot [be] in vain.”31 That was to be wishful thinking as those that are still alive have almost all retired and no investigation let alone prosecution was ever undertaken. Fortunately for the Police Superintendent he did not serve in the colonial period. After the Amritsar massacre the British set up the Hunter Commission which resulted in the Commanding Officer being dismissed from the army. In Dr. Samanta’s case he only received promotions. Though he stuck to the official two person death toll, a better defence as more information came out might have been that he could not see far in the dark when the operation was launched Interviews, Sukumar Mullick, ICS, Chief Secretary of West Bengal. Profulla Roy Choudhury, West Bengal- A Decade 1965-1975, Calcutta, 1977, p.225. 31 Jhimli Mukherjee Pandey “Ex-Cop traces lost Rash Behari Bose Records”, Times of India, August 17, 2015. 30 12 and be everywhere in such a large settlement, with the retention of gangsters and CPM party workers to help carry out the eviction making him not totally in command of the forces at his disposal.32 Undoubtedly Dr. Samanta was put in a difficult position. Other policemen and Home Guard officers had taken leave en bloc rather than participate33, but as the IPS officer on the spot it may have been more difficult for him not to obey the orders given personally by the Chief Minister, even though he disapproved of the policy. Whether he saw this as putting himself in an impossible predicament or as a career opportunity only he is likely to know. His moral dilemma and perhaps remorse and conflicted feelings was hinted at in a speech he gave. “There are cross currents of political interests at play in civil service....You have to maintain strict impartiality. When we joined the service, it was less corrupt, less immoral. The challenge is to retire with dignity and without regret”.34 With the politicians primarily responsible now deceased, it is perhaps unfair to single out Dr. Samanta simply because he is the last man standing. Unless we are in such a position we never know what we would do (Denial, Film). The government initially attempted to starve out the refugees by setting up a blockade which was easily done since the settlement was on an island. Bharat Sevashram Sangha and the Ramakrishna Mission which had provided relief were forced out of the area. “Till then Mother Teresa had been sending relief materials to the refugees. The situation had an impact on her. In a message she said that she was sorry not to send any more relief to the refugees. She also added that she was unable to answer the reason behind it.”35 The refugee advocates took the matter to the Calcutta High Court which ordered that the blockade be lifted, but the government through a pro-government judge, Justice B.C. Basak, successfully appealed the order and continued the blockade resulting in an unknown number of deaths from starvation and disease.36 “One night, someone came and I asked S.P. Mallik IAS for the names of those who actually did the killing but this had never been compiled as there was no investigation. A.K. Biswas IAS asked the Presidency Divisional Commissioner, A.K. Majumdar about the role of the civil administration but he said “It’s handled by the police and party cadres. District Administration is nowhere involved.” A.K. Biswas, “Memoirs of Chandal Jeevan: An Underdog’s Story”, Mainstream, April 14, 2013. A Doctor told me the District Magistrate 24 Parganas had ordered the requisition of stretchers from the hospitals for the operation, and I interviewed a civil servant who went on leave rather than take part in the eviction so that response is not accurate. 33 Kiran Talukdar, Mukunda Behari Mullick: Life and Mission, Calcutta, 2010, p.19. 34 Sudeshna Banerjee, “Words of advice for civil service rankers” The Telegraph, June 17, 2016 35 Tushar Bhattacharya “The Refugee Settlement that Vanished into Nowhere” in Madhumay. Pal (editor) Marichjhapi: Chhinna Desh, Chhinna Itihas, 2009, also in Marichjhapi, Tortured Humanity, Vimeo, www and Ananya Dutta, “Basu and Mother Teresa: A Special Association”, The Hindu, January 17, 2010. 36 Deep Halder, Blood Island: An Oral History of the Marichjhapi Massacre, HarperCollins India, 2019, p. 113. The refugee Advocate, Sakya Sen, mentions the role of the Advocate General of West Bengal, Snehangshu Acharya, in representing the government in the Marichjhapi case. After nearly 4 decades I now found a possible reason for Mr. Acharya refusing to be interviewed by me. Acharya was the son of the Maharaja of Mymensingh, and a generous funder of the Communist Party. My uncle, Sukumar Mullick ICS, had phoned him initially to get me the interview and I made several followup phone calls to get an appointment which he eventually refused outright. My uncle was surprised at his refusal. When my uncle was a Cambridge law student, he had got his eldest brother who had a medical practice in London to arrange an illegal abortion for Acharya’s girlfriend. Despite the favour, it was not returned. Given our 32 13 dropped a bottle of poison into the tube well. Thirteen people died the next day. Babies were dying like rats from diseases, and women were afraid to venture out for fear of being raped by policemen. There were several incidents of our boats being hit by police launches and sunk mid-river.” 37 The refugees hoped that the police would not interfere if women went to the mainland for supplies and some women volunteered to do it, but their boats were rammed and sunk by motorized police launches. Some women were rescued by the police and gang raped for several days in prison before being released while others drowned or managed to swim to a nearby island where they were repeatedly raped by the police and party cadre.38 The government finally launched an eviction using motorized police launches at midnight on May 14, 1979. “At first the Marichjhapi market place was set on fire. Then came the turn of the school, rural hospital, bakery, and boat manufacturing unit. ...Hundreds or more than a thousand refugees were burnt and shot at in an hour’s time and their bodies, some of them still alive, were sent to be thrown at the tiger project, to be fed to the Reserved Forest tigers, by a launch controlled by the police. The rest of the corpses were deposited in the Bay of Bengal water, not very far from the holy pilgrimage site of mythical saint Kapil. This is no fiction. The entire episode had been witnessed by the inhabitants of Kumirmari island which is situated not far from the scene of the massacre. The operation went on unabated for two consecutive days, without interruption. The commotion, lamentation and wailing came to a stop at last….Till date, the people of Kumirmari, who had seen the operation standing beyond a stretch of water could not get away from the trauma.”39 According to the launch driver the injured cried out “We are still alive, spare us from the tigers”.40 He later absconded fearing elimination as an eyewitness. The police had hoped to arrest the community leaders on the Chief Minister’s orders41 but they escaped with the help of the boatmen’s union. One source put the number killed at about 1700 and claimed children caught in a school were decapitated.42 While the locals said three quarters of the refugees died,43 the actual number remains unknown. The locals claimed that the tigers ate the bodies and thus became maneaters that preyed on them thereafter. Others were eaten by crocodiles making exhumation impossible. As part of the plan approved by the Chief Minister the refugees were sent back in specially ordered trains.44 “When the refugees were forcibly sent back to family background he may have assumed that his role in the deaths from starvation and disease, which would have disproportionately killed babies and children, that resulted from the Marichjhapi blockade might have come up in a interview. A Law College was subsequently named after him which Jyoti Basu inaugurated. 37 Deep Halder, Blood Island: An Oral History of the Marichjhapi Massacre”, HarperCollins India, 2019 p. 65. 38 Deep Halder, Blood Island pp. 135-6. 39 Tushar Bhattacharjee, “The Refugee Settlement that Vanished into Nowhere” in Madhumay Pal, Marichjhapi: Chhinna Desh, Chhinna Pal. 40 Tushar Bhattacharjee op. cit. 41 Amiya K. Samanta, “Marichjhapi” in Madhumay Pal (editor) Marichjhapi: Chhinna Desh, Chhinna Pal. 42 Jaideep Mazumdar, “The Forgotten Story of the Marichjhapi Massacre By Marxists”, Swarajya, January 30, 2017. 43 Annu Jalais,”Dwelling on Marichjhanpi”, Economic and Political Weekly, April 23, 2005, p. 1761. 44 Amiya K. Samanta, “Marichjhapi” 14 Dandakaranya in special trains, they were packed in the compartments as sardines. The trains had no arrangement for food, drinking water or medicines and they were treated worse than animals. In the course of their journey, during sweltering summer many children died.”45 “Many were separated from their families, many were too ill or infirm to be moved, and children who succumbed to death during the horrendous journey were summarily thrown out of the moving trains.46 The CPM congratulated its cadre for their participation in the eviction, and the Information Minister, Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee, who was to succeed Jyoti Basu as Chief Minister, announced in the Legislative Assembly that Marichjhapi was now free of the refugees.47 The only missing count came when the refugees were returned by the government to the Dandakaranya refugee camps. The authorities there counted the number of families who didn’t return as 4,128 but if and how they died is unknown.48 Some families who returned would have lost individual members, but these were not counted so the losses may have been higher. They estimated about 3,000 individuals had managed to escape suggesting lower total fatalities but whether this made up for individual losses in families that returned is unknown. Assuming families of four it made for a loss of 17,000. Some survivors made it to the urban anonymity of Calcutta. A documentary filmmaker tried to interview them but they were too afraid to go on camera. In the four decades since no better estimate of the casualties has been made. Only a government or NGO would have the resources to identify the victims. Without such an investigation no accurate estimate of casualties can be made. Though the runup to the massacre is fairly well documented and includes a partial list of those shot by police, or died of starvation and disease during the blockade, documentation ends with the massacre. The bodies having floated out to sea or been devoured can no longer be examined. After that the only sources of evidence were eyewitness accounts which only started to become available with the decline and fall of the Communist government 3 decades later. These accounts though invaluable are nowhere near providing a comprehensive picture. With no one on the government or CPM side forthcoming, victim testimony has had to suffice. Despite thousands of Itibritte Chandal Jeevan, Vol. 1 by Manoranjan Byapari, Priya Sipla Prakashan, p. 272 cited in A.K. Biswas, “Memoirs of Chandal Jeevan”, Mainstream, April 13, 2013. 46 Manoranjan Byapari, Interrogating My Chandal Life: An Autobiography of a Dalit, Sage 2014, New Delhi, p. 241. 47 Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPM), 1982, Rajnaityik-Sangathanik Report, (“Political-Organizational Report”) West Bengal State Committee. 48 Atharobaki Biswas, “Why Dandakaranya a Failure, Why Mass Exodus, Where Solution?” The Oppressed Indian, 1982, 4(4):18-20. The count stated between January and July 1978 14,388 families left with 10,260 returning by October 31, 1978. This figure is therefore of an ongoing desertion and return before the massacre. As it was printed before the massacre we have no way of knowing how many returned after the massacre, or how many more might have gone to occupy Marichjhapi after this count. 45 15 survivors not more than a tiny fraction have been interviewed.49 With no authoritative comprehensive investigation likely, this constitutes the best available information. Outing the Whistleblower For three decades the massacre was forgotten, and those most responsible, Prime Minister Desai, Chief Minister Jyoti Basu, and Communist Party Marxist State Secretary Promode Das Gupta, died of natural causes. After the initial flurry of press coverage, the matter was dropped except for some niche Untouchable publications; though it still comes up “often” in local Sundarbans conversations.50 It was twenty years after the event before my academic article appeared on the subject, and that only after years of publication attempts. According to the editor of the American journal that eventually published it, after it had been rejected by the previous editor without external review ,“after all this time ... we have yet to obtain one solid outside referee report on your manuscript. We have solicited several referees and some have even accepted the task, only to have the ms [manuscript] returned to us in a few weeks with a terse statement that they felt unable to provide the promised report.” The editor searched and finally found a couple of favourable reviewers so it could be published. Needless to say the author never found an academic job, though it took many years to fully realize the extent to which academics were on the side of the oppressors. A generation later this article proved more difficult to publish despite more information being available, the Communists being out of power, and those most responsible for the massacre deceased. This should have made finding a publisher easier, but in fact it seemed to have become impossible. Academics resisted human rights exposures that did not conform to their beliefs. The evidence indicated the original article could not have been published in a Western academic journal today. When the massacre topic was included in my Oxford doctoral thesis the external examiner would only recommend an MLitt without allowing a resubmission and the university would not permit me to write another thesis, so I had to write another one at Cambridge to get a PhD. The theses were subsequently published by Oxford and Cambridge University presses. The examiner, T.J. Nossiter (LSE), wrote that Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi’s reputed statement that Jyoti Basu “was more fit for the role [of Prime Minister], the comment was not only a gracious courtesy but a proper tribute to Basu’s standing.”51 Nossiter organized Jyoti Basu’s annual visits to London and public meetings at the London School of Economics where Marichjhapi didn’t get raised, though Nossiter knew about it from the doctoral thesis he failed. Nossiter may have been concerned that exposing the Marichjhapi massacre would damage Jyoti Basu’s chances The largest number of academic articles are literary criticisms stemming from Amitav Ghosh’s novel, which as a work of fiction doesn’t add to the historical record, though providing more publicity than all the other academic works on the massacre. It provided credibility that Untouchables could never have obtained on their own. Debjani Sengupta, “The Partition of Bengal: Fragile Borders and New Identities”, Cambridge University Press, 2016. 50 Amites Mukhopadhyay, Living with Disasters: Communities and Development in the Indian Sundarbans, Cambridge University Press, 2016, p. 40. 51 T.J. Nossiter, Marxist State Governments in India, Pinter, 1988, p.139. 49 16 of becoming Prime Minister. However to my knowledge no major Indian politician has been prevented or removed from office solely or primarily for human rights abuses, and being sent to the International Criminal Court is not something that concerns them. My appeal to the Office of the Prosecutor at the International Criminal Court received a form letter response in two languages, while Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International had similar responses and did nothing. The American publication of my article was followed several years later with an article by Annu Jalais in the leading Indian social science journal Economic and Political Weekly.52 Considering it was published while the Communists were still in power and bound to be read by them this was really courageous. This grassroots anthropological work complemented my state level research in showing the local reaction and most importantly confirming that the massacre took place with ¾ of the refugees perishing, by local accounts.The former Left Front Finance Minister who was in office at the time of the massacre responded that it was massacre “hyperbole” as only 2 people had been killed. “To describe what had then happened as a ‘massacre’ is nothing short of grotesque. Hyperbole does not add to, but detracts from scholarship.” 53 He did not clarify what his own role or position on Marichjhapi was. As it was the first non-Untouchable academic writing, it could not be readily dismissed as self-interested, as my own writing was. Very significantly both these articles were by EU nationals not subject to the same restraints as Indian academics, though all Bengali intellectuals at least seem to have heard about the massacre. None of these Bengalis, including those working abroad and therefore professionally safe from the regime, wrote about it. That it was left to foreign doctoral students to first research it in academia, reflects badly on the profession. The first book on the subject was published in Calcutta in Bengali only, and included 37 pages listing the names of victims.54 The author was the son of a Minister in Colonial Bengal and later Law Minister in Pakistan. Perhaps more significantly the author had been in the Communist Party and shared jail space with Jyoti Basu when he was in the opposition. Whether he was spared for his prominence or for old times sake is impossible to say, but a newspaper book reviewer was fired from his paper for reviewing the book. The reviewer took the case to court where the Judge found he was unlawfully dismissed as he had only done what the Editor had asked of him. Another columnist was Pannalal Dasgupta. “Promod Das Gupta threatened to cancel all advertisements in the newspaper “Jugantar” if they continued to publish Pannalal Dasgupta’s reports on Marichjhapi. Promod Das Gupta was a founding Politbureau member of the CPIM, its state secretary and a stalwart of the Left Front government at that time and Pannalal Dasgupta was his very own brother!”55 Jugantar ceased publication Annu Jalais, “Dwelling on Morichjhanpi: When Tigers became ‘citizens’, and Refugees ‘tiger food’” Economic and Political Weekly, April 23, 2005. 53 Ashok Mitra, “Hyperbole about Massacre”, Economic and Political Weekly, Vol. 40, No. 20, May 14, 2005. 54 Jagadish Chandra Mandal, Marichjhapi: Naishabder Antarale, Sujan Publications, 2002. 55 Biswajit Bandyopadhyay, “The Tale of Marichjhapi”, Radical Socialist, February 19, 2012. 52 17 of articles on Marichjhapi as did other leading Bengali dailies similarly intimidated by threats to advertising and union disruption. “The Marichjhapi story should have been picked up by the national media and should have made headlines beyond borders, but even the local media did not give it the kind of play it deserved. Why? Debnath takes me back in time again. The most powerful newspaper group in West Bengal, the Anandabazar Patrika, had decided to go anti-CPM. The result? The group’s employees were beaten up outside their office as cops looked away. ‘That, and the threat of withdrawing government advertisement always works.”56 With foreign academics, perspectives on the regime varied widely but the predominant view was expressed by an endowed Chair at Princeton who wrote West Bengal had “good governance”57 and in fact “under the CPM probably is India’s best governed state” 58 . An LSE Professor, T. J. Nossiter, claimed they had made “a truly remarkable accomplishment” including “indubitably impressive”59 land reforms. None of my relatives in the government made such claims and in all the decades I never found a shred of evidence to support such claims. What you seek you will likely find. If you researched Marichjhapi you would find the torture and murder of others, and possibly yourself if you were not careful. I, as the first foreign scholar to study it, was warned by a friendly CPM cadre that being a scholar would not save me from torture by their regime. I was warned by my own relatives that they did not have the connections to protect me, and was told of a journalist who had tried to investigate a murder by a CPM MLA who murdered her as well. There were a number of publicized murders by the CPM which had been put on hold for decades. A cousin introduced me to a former Maoist from the slum adjoining the family house who had been tortured nearly to death by the police and had the scars to prove it. I was told I would not be able to withstand what the police torture could do to me. The implication was that since I was bound to reveal my sources under torture, I should not be doing the research, with the massacre remaining undiscovered. This was a touching but futile warning to the “innocent abroad” about government methods. However my sources being in the system were even better informed of the consequences than I was, and if they were willing to help I could not easily refuse to publicize the massacre. Knowing police methods, they would have realized any promises of confidentiality were problematic at best. The govenment should not get to determine the news just because they had the torturers, and one never knows what one can put up with till it is experienced. Of the horror stories told by the cousins about what happened to people who got on the wrong side of the government, my favourite, because it was the only one that couldn’t apply to me, was of the foreign tourist who overstayed his visa and spent over twenty years in jail as he was forgotten. Though the senior family members in government service were passing on information to me some of my cousins were discouraging involvement with warnings of torture and death, as they claimed our family Deep Halder interviewing journalist Sukumar Debnath, Blood Island, Kindle edition, location 1498. Atul Kohli, “Can the Periphery Control the Center? Indian Politics at the Crossroads.” Washington Quarterly, 1996, 19 (4), p. 121. 58 Atul Kohli, Democracy and Discontent: India’s Growing Crisis of Governability, Cambridge University Press, 1990, p. 268. 59 T.J. Nossiter, Marxist State Governments in India, Pinter Publishers, 1988, p. 184, 140. 56 57 18 did not have the connections to protect me. This difference did not occur to me at the time as I was preoccupied with getting the information without being caught. Mistakes were made in interviewing people who turned out to support the party line on Marichjhapi, but no one apparently turned me in, though for a long time I expected to be picked up at any moment. Unlike in South Africa and Rhodesia where I had moved frequently to avoid getting caught, in Calcutta I stayed with my Uncle in my grandfather’s house in hopes it would discourage a police raid. My room had a defunct direct phone line to police headquarters left over from the time my Uncle was Chief Secretary. With no place to hide my banned Maoist insurgent literature I locked it in the cabinet as I could not ask my relatives where it could be hidden without implicating them, and then just hoped family position would prevent a police search. When I interviewed Sukharanjan Sengupta, a prominent journalist and editor who had defied the government ban on journalists visiting Marichjhapi, we were interrupted by a man who entered his home and sat down in his living room uninvited, and listened to our conversation which was fortunately in English as Mr. Sengupta told me he was a police informer who kept an eye on him. The relative who accompanied me had suspected as much, but though having a Bengali background, with a foreign upbringing I had missed the subtleties despite my uncle telling me the police hired informants to watch over persons of interest. I was clearly not the best person to do this prohibited research. Rural research was practically precluded as a professor warned me there were “Communists in every village” and they were bound to report any mention of Marichjhapi. As the sources included my own relatives in the ICS/IAS I would be highly motivated not to reveal their names and my sources and relatives presumably motivated to use their connections to prevent my torture in case I revealed their identity. Given Jyoti Basu’s aversion to leakers and the murder of police informers, this investigation could have dire consequences if discovered. One does not do this type of research if you do not accept the possible consequences, and I kept it from Oxbridge as the supervisors might have objected to it as too risky. The informers had not only refused to let me name them as sources in my Cambridge University Press book, but no one in India was willing to be even acknowledged in any capacity in the preface, leaving only my doctoral supervisor, Geoffrey Hawthorn, to be mentioned as he was safe in Cambridge. It was unclear by then whether the bureaucrats had the power to prevent the politicians doing what they wanted to me. The politically affiliated gangsters were outside state control entirely and more likely to resort to murder. There was evidence of CPM party leaders who became a Central Committee member, a State Minister, and an MP, murdering two brothers whose mother was forced to swallow their blood, but were never brought to trial, despite the publicity.60 Media coverage was ineffective in getting any action taken, and as for the many more rural cases there was not even this publicity. Being above the law undoubtedly had short-term political advantages but continuing murder and extortion in the long term eroded electoral support among the people. The party leadership were incredibly short sighted over Marichjhapi, but it was part of a wider incompetence that D. Bandyopadhyay, Census of Political Murders in West Bengal during CPI-M Rule, 1977-2009, Mainstream, August 14, 2010. Sainbari Incident , Wikipedia. 60 19 made them incapable of leading any socialist transition, though to be fair many of their followers were too interested in their own privileges to work for reform, preferring to accumulate privileges instead. Despite this, academia continued to publish nonsense about their “good governance”61 as if they were in a parallel universe.62 When the author phoned U.N. Biswas, a retired Indian Police Service (IPS) officer, turned human rights activist, who subsequently became a Minister in the post-Communist government, about Marichjhapi, a cousin in the Indian Administrative Service (IAS) warned me the phone might be tapped. The IAS officer was about to undertake important educational reforms that would give millions of poor children a decent education, and if replicated in the rest of India and the World billions of children would benefit. The teachers would have had their pay based on the test results of their students.63 If he had to use his political capital to save his cousin, these reforms could be jeopardized. In the end the reforms were halted by the teachers’ unions and corrupt politicians, and Marichjhapi had nothing to do with it. It was however the only time I questioned if I was doing the right thing. I subsequently wrote up the failed education experiment, but could not find an academic publisher so put it on the internet. When I was offered an interview with a police officer who was known for having enjoyed torturing leftist women while under the influence of alcohol, I discovered the man was close to the Chief Minister who continued to rely on his services. I decided not to interview him as I was concerned about being tortured if the interview did not go well, given the policeman’s past, and his present connections. One might have thought Jyoti Basu would have wanted to divest himself of the Police portfolio as it inevitably led to a personal connection with human rights abuses, but “plausible deniability” was foreign thinking. The Communists had years before organized a Police mutiny in Howrah that could only be put down by the army. The mutineers were dismissed but then reinstated I once made the mistake of publically asking my uncle, S.K. Mallick ICS, whether governance was better under the British or independent India. He smiled and said nothing causing the other government officials to laugh. He later privately said the administration was better under the British but lacked the degree of development orientation of the independent Indian government. 62 An assumption the Communists must be interested in the humane treatment of Untouchables or the poor in general was disproved by their practices. The slum next to our ancestral home had been created when the owners emigrated to America and squatters occupied the vacant land. When my uncle became Chief Secretary they could have been evicted by the police or informally by his police bodyguards, but he would not do it as it would be “inhumane”. Like the other ICS officers he had no pretensions of creating a “dictatorship of the proletariat” but those politicians that did had no compunction in evicting poor Untouchables. 63 The West Bengal Communist government took the opposite approach significantly increasing pay without linking it to productivity in order to help achieve rural party hegemony at public expense, thereby enhancing teacher moneylending and other businesses. The educational results were dismal even by the deplorable Indian standards.The teaching of English was stopped effectively hindering significant upward mobility for the lower classes despite strenuous parent objections. The Communist elite continued to send their children to private English medium schools and rig overseas scholarships so they hold coveted academic and other positions despite losing power back home. Foreign universities did nothing to insure the public and private scholarships were being fairly awarded. 61 20 when the Communists came to power.64 The Police union was Communist controlled, and could be counted on to disobey the Courts as at Marichjhapi. There were good reasons for Jyoti Basu keeping the “coercive apparatus of the state” to himself. As I was a foreign writer living abroad, retaliation had to take a literary form. Oddly enough it came from a police scholar who had also written a book on Indian Communism.65 The 24 Parganas District Police Superintendent who had taken face to face instructions for the eviction from the Chief Minister, by his own admission, took up the role as massacre denier. However a former University Vice Chancellor condemned the “stunning insinuations” against the writer, by which he presumably meant that the Police Officer, Amiya Kumar Samanta, had outed the scholar as an Untouchable foreigner.66 Given the prejudices against Untouchables as uncivilized and unclean, and Indian xenophobia it would be a compelling criticism for many Indians. 67 In a criticism that would not be obvious to foreigners and even many Indians, Dr. Samanta described the author as “a Canadian of Indian origin, and scion of a big land owning family of Bagerhat, Khulna, now in Bangladesh”, thereby questioning their authenticity as representative of typical Untouchables and putting them in an unfavourable light as landlords. A more complete history which goes unmentioned would be that the Zamindar’s Factor murdered the author’s great-grandfather to grab the land and the eldest son fled with his mother and four younger brothers (a fifth was posthumous) to the relative safety of Calcutta. The grandfather was reputed to be the first Untouchable university graduate in India and the first in the Bengal Civil Service.68 He was nominated by Missionary Professors at Scottish Church College, Calcutta, and got the position despite a Brahmin on the interview committee telling him he should be tilling the soil. He used his salary to put his five younger brothers through law school. The size of the property lost in the 19th century is unknown even to the family, though they did know their original surname which showed they had been agricultural labourers and “very low on the social scale” according to a descendant. The family founded the Namasudra Association in 191269, marking the entry of the Untouchables into modern electoral politics, with great uncles who were Ministers in Colonial Bengal. “Even Ambedkar found it difficult to contest the election [for the Constituent Assembly] from his home state of Maharashtra and depended instead on his Namasudra friends in Bengal, mainly Mandal and Mullick.”70 When Sardar Patel offered Mullick a Congress seat on the Constituent Assembly he refused as it was the landlord party. He went to Pakistan, only Interview, Sukumar Mullick ICS, then District Magistrate, Howrah. Amiya Kumar Samanta, Left Extremist Movement in West Bengal: An Experiment in Armed Agrarian Struggle, Firma KLM, 1984. 66 A.K. Biswas, Mainstream, April 13, 2013 67 Stalin K. “India Untouched”, documentary film, Youtube. 68 Sekhar Bandyopadhyay, Caste, Protest and Identity in Colonial India: The Namasudras of Bengal, 1872-1947, OUP, 2011,, p.71. 69 Amiya K, Samanta in Madhumay Pal (editor), Marichjhapi: Chhinna Desh, Chhinna Itihas, 2009. J.H. Broomfield, Elite Politics in a Plural Society: Twentieth-Century Bengal, University of California Press, 1968, p.158. 70 Sekhar Bandyopadhyay, Caste, Protest and Identity in Colonial India: The Namasudras of Bengal, 1872-1947, Oxford University Press, 2011, p. 204. 64 65 21 to flee back to India in the face of Muslim communal riots.71 Thereafter the Namasudras became a persecuted minority in both countries, no longer needed as a swing voting bloc by either ruling elites. Two of my uncles were the only Untouchables in the Indian Civil Service (ICS)72, one of whom had been the Chief Secretary (top state bureaucrat) of West Bengal which Dr. Samanta retells accurately enough, along with the comment that “Ross Mallick’s father migrated and eventually settled in Canada.”73 These dog whistle political comments discredit the nascent middle class Untouchables as a “creamy layer” unrepresentative of their caste, and therefore legitimizes the rule of the upper caste class who understand Untouchable needs better. This follows common falsehoods used to promote Bengal’s exceptional enlightenment on Caste. While the press claimed how emancipated they were by having India’s first Untouchable Chief Secretary when the Minorities Commission Chairman criticized their caste prejudices, that same press had launched a campaign against his appointment and there was a demonstration against it.74 Though the senior ICS officer in the state he was appointed only through Jagivan Ram, who had known the family since colonial times, interceding with Prime Minister Indira Gandhi during President’s Rule. The dominant caste campaign continued under the Left Front which had to face constituent opposition for even the innocuous appointment of a token Untouchable as Primary Education Minister, They had been criticized for bad optics in having no Untouchables in the Cabinet, despite their being 23% of the population. Dr. Samanta, who became a Law Professor after his retirement as Inspector General of Police (Intelligence), argued that no living sources had been given for the author’s information in his Cambridge University Press book.75 Considering that his police force conducts extrajudicial killings and routinely tortures people, this is disingenuous.76 He apparently never found out that the writer had relatives in the Dandakaranya refugee camps. They did not go to Marichjhapi, but they knew of people who had. I had seen poverty from growing up on a northern Canadian Indian Reservation and become desensitised by experience, so seeing relatives living in poverty should not Interview, S.K. Mallick ICS. Wikipedia, Indian Civil Service (British India). 73 Dr. Samanta may be credited with excellent detective work as I had tried to hide my family background, or perhaps it was just deduction. A Professor I interviewed was able to deduce my background before meeting me. The subject of Marichjhapi suggested an Untouchable father. A brother of ICS officers would be anglicised enough to give a British first name to me, so though he did not know my father existed, he had figured out my identity with just three words, my name and Marichjhapi. The detective work might have been better spent finding the killers at Marichjhapi than researching my family life. 74 A.K. Biswas, Mainstream, End of Misrule by Coterie: West Bengal in Political Cross-Road? June 28, 2014. 75 Amiya Kumar Samanta in Madhumay Pal (editor), Marichjhapi: Chhinna Desh, Chhinna Itihas, 2009, p. 243. 76 For accounts of police death squads known in India as “encounter specialists” see my cousins, Dr. Monica Sharma, Principal Advisor UNICEF, Radical Transformational Leadership: Strategic Action for Change Agents, 2017, North Atlantic Books, Berkeley, p. 130 and for a “fictionalized” account see the novel “The Unkindest Cut” by Sumit Mullick IAS, Chief Secretary of Maharashtra. For references to the torture of poor people by the Communist government see Dayabati Roy, Rural Politics in India: Political Stratification and Governance in West Bengal, Cambridge University Press, 2014, p.224, 229. 71 72 22 have bothered me, but it did.77 Though Dr. Samanta criticized high caste writers, only the Untouchable had his family caste background exposed. In his critique of Amitav Ghosh he writes “little did Amitav realize that there was no police action in Marichjhapi”, and then several pages later details his own role as 24 Parganas Police Superintendent and that of the police forces under his command in the eviction, making it difficult to know what to make of this contradiction. In an academic and media world dominated by a very small percentage of upper castes, and a foreign scholarship sympathetic to India, the Untouchable writer had a major credibility problem.78 With the Untouchables probably not so much. If the Party wanted to discredit the author with Untouchables, Dr. Samanta was not the best person to do it given his role at Marichjhapi. The fact of the matter was the CPM had no Untouchables with the stature to do this effectively. Though Promode Das Gupta promoted a group of Untouchables to lead the community, adherence to the party line on Marichjhapi undermined their credibility as it required defending the indefensible. Once state power and its patronage was lost, the membership imploded. The leader of the group though saying our family had “humble origins” and had been “like gods” to the Untouchables, would not budge from the party line on Marichjhapi even in private conversations. Though the author had never mentioned Dr. Samanta in previous writings, in gathering police intelligence Dr. Samanta found his Untouchability, and decided to make it personal in a way he did not do for anyone else. According to the Bengal Governor, they were a “loyal and respectable family”79, so Dr. Samanta’s police detectives would have failed to come up with any criminality or corruption, making him choose to mention our Untouchability, which we were born with and couldn’t change. With no Untouchables in western academia publishing on human rights abuses, academia is the preserve of the traditional intellectual elite and western intellectuals with similar views of India. The problem of western intellectuals “going native” in India is that their views come to reflect those of the Indian elite, as happened all too often even under colonialism. As the President of the All-Bengal Namasudra Association put it to the Simon Commission in 1929 “It has been seen in more than one case that British members of the Indian Civil Service, on account of their living in this country for a long time, and by coming into contact with only a section of the people, are mentally captured by the The visit was arranged by an IAS relative in Dandakaranya. He would not let me leave his home unless accompanied by him, though whether that was because I might be attacked by Maoist insurgents who frequented the area or because I might try to meet them for my Oxford doctoral thesis on India Communism was never made clear. Under the circumstances a meeting was impossible and had to be done in a city where I was less conspicuous.The refugee relatives lived in a mud and thatched hut devoid of anything of value, except perhaps a parrot which they probably got free from the jungle but would be worth something in a western pet shop. They did have something none of the elite relatives had, a Bengali book about the Namasudras showing photographs of my grandfather and elite family members in their business suits. I could not imagine how they must have felt seeing relatives in positions they could never hope to attain doing things that were impossible for them. An accident of birth had separated the family, and enabled me to do activities they might not comprehend. I avoided probing the issues as I was most uncomfortable with all the implications of a family divided by class. 78 Anil Chamadia, “Meaning of being a Dalit in Media”, Forward Press, January 7, 2017. 79 Sir Thomas Rutherford, Governor’s Half Yearly Report on Ministers to the Viceroy Lord Linlithgow, 16 September 1943, India Office Library (London), 11. 77 23 ideas of those few people who are in the position of social aristocrats”80 This influence continues in Indian studies today, with the Indian diaspora supporting it. The upper caste diaspora in Britain fights for a religious exemption so caste discrimination can continue outside the law.81 It is not that there is no criticism of India, but that it is confined within certain perspectives that hide a more disturbing reality. The distortions are even present at a pinnacle of Indian studies in America when a professor who later was promoted to an endowed Chair at Princeton claimed that in Bengal even in the 12th and 13th centuries “the untouchables could eat with members of cleaner castes” which is the equivalent of saying there was never segregation in the American South.82 A statement like that about America would not go unchallenged at Princeton, but ignorance about Untouchable segregation is such that it went unchallenged. In his testimony to the Simon Commission, Mukunda Behari Mullick, who later became a Minister in the Fazlul Huq government of undivided Bengal, states that “children of depressed classes were given back and separate seats in schools, and were badly beaten….There is no arrangement for these children to drink water. I myself had the experience in my boyhood. We have to wait outside the room where water is kept till a caste-Hindu friend comes and puts water in our hands.”83 One can only imagine the circles one would have to move in not to pick up such information about segregation. One graduate student at Oxford made a similar claim to Professor Kohli about contemporary West Bengal being integrated. He was corrected by another student but it showed how it was possible to live one’s life in Calcutta and be ignorant about fundamental living conditions just outside the city. This reflects elite ignorance and lack of concern about human rights which gets reflected in the media, society, and scholarship as well. When I passed for high caste in rural India to use their facilities I had to worry about being beaten up or worse if caught. Unless the facilities have since been purified by reciting mumbo jumbo and cleaned with cow excrement the customers are still being polluted. Pollution is not a problem high caste or foreign scholars would have to consider so it is understandable why it would not feature in their writings. The situation in rural India is worse than in South Africa under Apartheid, as I found from travelling there during the anti-Apartheid struggle, though Apartheid got much more adverse publicity. In Apartheid era South Africa rule was based on unjust laws, but in India as the Master Castes are a mob in waiting they are more dangerous to servile castes. The difference meant that apartheid laws were abolished overnight, while Indian attitudes will take generations to change if they change at all.84 Mukunda Behari Mullick, Indian Statutory Commission [Simon Commission]: Selections from Memoranda and Oral Evidence by Non-Officials (Part II), Vol.17, 1929, Reprinted 1988. Delhi: Swati Publications, p. 93-94. 81 “Caste in Great Britain and Equality Law: A Public Consultation”, Government Equalities Office, March 2017. 82 Atul Kohli, “From elite activism to democratic consolidation: The rise of reform communism in West Bengal,” in Francine R. Frankel and M.S.A. Rao (eds). Dominance and State Power in Modern India Vol.II, OUP, p. 395. 83 Simon Commission, 1929, Vol. 17, p.98. 84 The reasons why Apartheid was not as bad as Untouchability are too complex to be examined here, but are rooted in differences between subordinate minority and majority populations, state versus mob rule, and cultural and religious incorporation of dominant beliefs. By way of a personal anecdote to illustrate the difference, while in a segregated South African restaurant with Indians, they complained they had been put 80 24 The most effective criticism both in India and abroad came from another foreign scholar specializing in India who was close to the CPM. In the Economic and Political Weekly he wrote that I was a Maoist. Abroad it jeopardized job prospects which may have been his intention. As the Maoists were in a guerrilla war with the government and both sides tortured and executed each other, such charges could have resulted in it happening to me. In a system where the only protection for suspects are their connections, if they have them, such false dangerous accusations should not be made. Whether for this or my human rights writing, I got on the Indian government computer at immigration, and was only released when apparently nothing was found in the biggest book I had ever seen, that was presumably more secure and definitive, sparing me a “third degree interrogation” which was the Indian euphemism for torture. On previous arrivals I had been met just off the plane by S.K. Mallick ICS, and wasn’t concerned about this. As I was now alone and could disappear without trace, which was the best way to dispose of me given my connections, I was left to wonder if I would be as lucky the next time. Many had been tortured and killed for doing far less than I had done. Coming from a prominent Untouchable family whose castes constituted 23% of the West Bengal electorate, and as a foreign scholar any detention might lift me from obscurity into a “sticky commodity” (Dr. Zhivago, film) for the Stalinists, so murder might seem to be their best option. In their place I would have advocated it as the usual co-option and intimidation would not work for someone in my position, so a murder that was untraceable to the party state was best. Therefore on the next and last visit I brought my wife and children along. I would have preferred to use my British passport under a partly different name which might have enabled me to avoid identification, but it would have made my wife suspicious I was up to no good and refuse to accompany me so I used my Canadian passport. If I was to be taken into custody I would tell my wife whom to contact, which would hopefully intimidate the officials and discourage them from doing something to me. However, the children were so disruptive we were put at the front of the queue and the immigration officer was so keen to get us on our way that he didn’t read off his computer. It was an early indication our children were autistic, putting an end to my travels and career prospects as the children grew more violent and difficult, making a return to India impossible. That none of the writers were tortured or killed suggests they may have had little to fear from the government. If that was the case the silence of the Bengali intellectual class becomes less excusable. They could not have it both ways and maintain credibility. Whether it was fear, ideology, or self-interest that kept the intellectuals quiet for 3 in a different room from the whites though the Manager claimed it was an international restaurant and therefore integrated. Despite the obvious segregation the manager stuck to his claim resulting in a futile argument. As I was doing undercover photojournalism for the Toronto Committee for the Liberation of Southern Africa I was worried that someone would call the police and I might get caught so wanted them to keep quiet. One would be crazy to try that in rural India where Untouchables are only 16% of the population and Untouchables are liable to be beaten up or even lynched by a Master Caste mob. Even in Communist West Bengal my CPM Minder freely admitted that Untouchables were not allowed in the restaurant we were using. 25 decades, their silence was deafening. Some of these academics had international reputations, others tenured foreign jobs, but all were “good Germans” (Spotlight, film) in keeping quiet. That it was foreigners who exposed the massacre in academia did not speak well of tri-caste intellectual “progressivism”, and showed their conduct to be disgraceful. In sending out versions of this article to prominent Indian public intellectuals with national and even international reputations, the almost complete lack of response suggests either hypocrisy or fear of retribution. Some had made their reputations in part through advocacy work, but their undoubted connections that might have facilitated publication were not offered. At the very least it suggests a lack of interest in Untouchable human rights that makes the ignorance of ongoing atrocities understandable in light of the silence among public opinion makers. Where every group can only get incensed over violence to their own, influence and money determine whether justice will be done. The fact of the matter was that with very few exceptions in the dominant intellectual elite, all either acquiesce in or are apologists for the caste-class they come from. Those who acquiesce omit facts and perspectives that might challenge their views, thereby taking the discourse in deceptive directions. Caste is the most philosophically and practically exploitive, oppressive system devised by man existing on such a large scale to the present day, but you would never realize that from reading the literature intellectuals produce. That the majority of Indians live this way, was not apparent from media or academic representations of the nation. Marichjhapi was not an exception except in scale and top level political involvement, but the methods used are a fairly typical example of Indian culture and society, and its political system, and the hypocritical intellectuals in India and abroad who are complicit in it. With only an estimated tenth of human rights violations against Untouchables being recorded, Marichjhapi despite incomplete information, was probably the most documented and publicized atrocity. A couple of academic journals rejected this article for lack of documentation, but by that standard all human rights violations against Untouchables would be unpublishable in academia. With this excuse plenty of other research subjects would be unpublishable as well including most of antiquity. The Communist Downfall In the end none of the publications on the massacre seem to have made the slightest difference when they were published. They only became salient when the opposition successfully mobilized against the government, and used Marichjhapi to discredit it with Untouchables. A documentary on the massacre was shown in the election campaign and on television, the articles circulated on the internet, and the massacre again came to public attention. With Communism on the defensive the literature on the massacre again found itself in the mainstream media. Most of it was derived from earlier work but significant details were now being added. There was very little by way of investigative journalism, though with the fall of the Communists the obstacles to it had been largely removed. There was surprisingly little reflection on why the people who now exposed it 26 had kept quiet earlier when those politicians responsible could have been brought to justice. “Trusting the leftist leaders, who had once promised them rehabilitation in Bengal, that brave endeavour soon ended in frustration and death in the muddy fields of Marichjhapi. After a long contrived silence that story is just coming to light with all its morbid details.”85 A couple of the largest circulation newspapers did report on meetings of survivors commemorating the event, but these were mainly anecdotal. The Hindustan Times interviewed a woman who had first lost three children in Dandakaranya and her last three at Marichjhapi.86 Estimating the scale of the losses was beyond the resources of reporters or any other individuals. From the evidence it seems that a disproportionate number of babies and children died from starvation and disease while most of those shot dead were adults. The resurfacing of the story appears to be a classic case of elite mobilization of the masses for its own ends. The Communists could only be removed through a democratic election for which the 23% Untouchable electorate would be virtually essential. How to mobilize the Untouchables without letting it get out of hand was difficult for the various elite parties that competed for their votes. The Communists had done this electoral mobilization through a judicious use of state patronage, terror and vote rigging which was common among all major parties before the Election Commission had closed some loopholes.87 The bedrock on which the Communists had remained in power for 34 years was the rural vote. At the beginning of their rule they had gained control of village councils which dispensed state development aid, jobs and other patronage to the villagers. This required many recipients to be effectively followers of the ruling party. As these councils were controlled by traditional ruling elites with some up and coming additions, the elites were able to supplement their own personal patronage resources with those of the state, creating a hegemony of elite control that extended from the villages all the way up to the Cabinet.88 89This could only be adequately funded through deficit financing, but the Sekhar Bandyopadhyay, Caste, Protest, and Identity in Colonial India: The Namasudras of Bengal, 1872-1947”, Oxford University Press, 2011, p. 274. 86 Snigdhendu Bhattacharya, “Ghost of Marichjhapi returns to haunt”, Hindustan Times, April 25, 2011. 87 To my knowledge there is no systematic book length examination of vote rigging in India, but anecdotal evidence certainly exists. A Calcutta prostitute showed me her finger where acid had been applied to remove the indelible ink mark used to prevent repeat voting. They were escorted to different booths to repeatedly vote for the ruling Congress party, with a box of chocolates as a reward and a beating by the brothel owners if they refused. The brothel votes were insufficient to win that election and the Emergency ended with the Left Front being elected to power a few weeks later. Thereafter Congress blamed the Left Front for vote rigging the elections. 88 Dayabati Roy, Rural Politics in India: Political Stratification and Governance in West Bengal, Cambridge University Press, 2014. 89 Interviews, S.P. Mallik IAS, Land Reforms Commissioner, Panchayat Secretary, Government of West Bengal. S.P. Mallik was point man for rural reform during many of the initial years of the Left Front government when it was still thought it might do something. He said he put a lot of work into it but the political parties were unwilling to do their part, which could not be done by the administration. When the 85 27 central government continued to fund what would have been a bankrupt state, as the support of the Communists was important to their own survival. The Communists knew they were too big to fail. Those voters who supported other parties, or even did not provide extortion money could be denied access to state funding, beaten up or worse. During their rule there were 55,408 political murders and about 72,600 political rapes that were protected from prosecution by the ruling party.90 When you have murdered that many it is easy to make it one more (Once upon a Time in the West, film). Problem was there was no definitive line separating those who could be murdered and tortured from those whose status and connections made them untouchable. This ambiguity made the silence of the middle class understandable. There were more murders than those guillotined during the French Revolution, though it received far less media coverage. As it happened to poorer rural people it was beneath the radar of the state media and academia. It was not class war but turf war for ruling party hegemony against all rivals. The Communists were scrupulous in not killing capitalists, or public figures which could have created difficulties and adverse media coverage for themselves. At their worst they were a regime of Stalinist “reason backed up by murder” (The Godfather Part 111 film) operating as a protection racket that extorted money and interfered in people’s personal lives.91 At best they provided state-elite patronage all the way down to the village level with an unknown percentage reaching the poor. While annually large sums of central government funding for Untouchables and Tribals were left undisbursed, the Communist Party Marxist misappropriated state funds for party purposes indicating where their real priorities lay. Under the present post-Communist government the allocation of funds for Scheduled Castes and Tribes continues to be spent elsewhere. Though no massacre approached Marichjhapi in scale during their regime, it was a harbinger of how the Communists would conduct themselves. The eviction of agricultural labourers from land wanted by capitalists, though causing only 18 deaths served as reminders of what they had already done, and were still doing on a smaller scale. This eviction was found by the Supreme Court years later to have been illegal, but by then the Left Front was out of power. It has been argued that Marichjhapi did not get the attention it deserved at the time due to the prohibition on journalists visiting the island but more importantly on the state of the media. Only government radio and television existed, and Left Front unexpectedly came to power they were thin on the ground in rural areas so traded quality for quantity and brought in relatively privileged rural classes. Rationalised at the theoretical level as a multi-class alliance it effectively gave the power to the relatively privileged who then used the state to advance their own interests. S.P. Mallik invited the author on a tour of the Sundarbans aboard the 24 Parganas District Magistrate’s launch where government officials discussed the massacre bringing it to the attention of the author. S.P. Mallik’s cousin Sukumar Mullick ICS said taking me along violated government regulations but he would know what he was doing. To this day I don’t know if I discovered the massacre by accident or if it was set up for me to discover it. Sukumar Mullick had said that because of his position the police would consult him first and he would assure them I had only an academic interest in my thesis topic. Adding on Marichjhapi though only a thesis chapter, put the research in a whole other problematic category. But once exposed to the facts of the massacre it would have been very difficult to turn away when there was something I could do about it, and the less the consequences were thought about the better. 90 D. Bandyopadhyay, Mainstream, August 14, 2010 91 Bidyut Chakrabarty, Communism in India, Oxford University Press, 2014, p. 103. 28 in the pre-internet days only newspapers were relatively free to report on events in a highly illiterate society. The subsequent deaths and evictions at Singur and Nandigram occurred with widely utilized electronic media including private television channels, the internet, and social media circulating the information. With the terror and corruption already eroding its reputation the Communists were on the back foot. Though the fall of the Soviet bloc undoubtedly rattled the intelligentsia, its voter bloc remained intact, and domestic issues finally brought it down. Their support for the Tiananmen Square massacre and North Korea however was not likely to gain them the new generation of students who were brought up in a post-Stalinist world. How the Communists thought their methods would consolidate and expand their base over the long term in an electoral democracy is a mystery. Perhaps it was like the fable of the scorpion and the frog, and it was just their nature. In any event their loss in West Bengal left them in an existential crisis of their own making, a considerable decline from their days as India’s leading opposition party. The Aftermath In the election campaign of 2011 the Opposition put up posters saying “Remember Marichjhapi”. On coming to power that year the new government reneged on its promise to investigate the massacre. Even assistance to the 1,040 surviving Marichjhapi families then recorded as residing in West Bengal was not given.92 An Untouchable Minister who advocated for an investigation was blocked by cabinet colleagues. “The complete silence about the incident in the landscapes of upper-caste memory for three decades raises serious questions about the constitution of civil society and the complete collective privileging of the bhadralok [tricaste] memory over others. The interrogation of caste in the post-partition memory-building project did not find a place in non-Dalit [Untouchable] writing in those three decades – a massacre at the beginning of the Left regime went largely unnoticed, but towards the end of the same government’s rule, Marichjhapi came into circulation in public and largely privileged memory. Was it then appropriated by the bhadralok to oust a government they didn’t want?”93 With the government ousted the matter was dropped by the new regime. Though never officially explained, the reasons for this can be surmised by the circumstances of the new government. As the old government fell it took on defectors from the Communist Party. The police who had conducted the massacre being part of the new government now supported them, so they would have had to be investigated, as well as any gangsters and cadre who may have switched sides. This would have been less of a problem initially but as months turned to years and the government got re-elected in 2016 an investigation was no longer to be expected. A 2017 appeal was ignored. Subsequently the Chief Minister promised to erect a memorial without bothering to identify the victims or their murderers suggesting the commemoration had more to do with embarrassing the Communist Letters from Additional District Magistrate, North 24 Parganas to Deputy Secretary, Refugee, Relief and Rehabilitation Department, Government of West Bengal, Subject “Information on refugees once lived at Marichjhapi”, Ref No. C/390/L&LR and Ref No.1086, Dated 29-05-2011 and 15/07/2011. 93 Jhuma Sen, “Reconstructing Marichjhapi” in Partition the Long Shadow, edited by Urvashi Butalia, Penguin Viking, 2015, p.123-4. 92 29 opposition, rather than obtaining justice.94 A more profound reason for doing nothing can be deduced from the nature of the society. The tiny tricaste political elite were related to each other regardless of ideology and party affiliation, so justice would be detrimental to their own friends and relations. On the other hand though the Untouchable caste was described in the Laws of Manu as the “lowest of mankind” and the Upanishads imply they are lower than animals, they had acquired a greater asset base than most other Untouchable castes.95 The Untouchable refugees had come from several districts in what is now Bangladesh. During the colonial period they had cleared the jungle and acquired land which gave them more autonomy than was usual for Untouchables.96 Their large population size and concentration enabled them to take state power in alliance with the Muslims, excluding the traditional tricaste elite from power during the late colonial period.“The alliance between the Muslims and the scheduled castes worked so well that from 1927 till independence the upper caste dominated Congress Party was effectively excluded from political power”97 This history gave the Marichjhapi refugees the skills and attitude to defy the government and set up a successful development community without government assistance. However this history which was still in living memory, was a potential threat to the continued rule of the tricaste elite which had dominated both the government and opposition ever since independence. An alliance of Untouchables and Muslims if repeated would give them a bare majority and if the 8% Tribals were added a substantial one.98 As the dominant Hindus were multiply divided along different party lines significantly less than a majority was required to form a government. History could repeat itself if these three groups could get their act together. Multiple divisions within the Untouchable community prevented this from happening but it became a topic of popular and academic discussion.99 The government had a powerful incentive not to investigate something that would ignite Untouchable caste passions that with the right seat adjustment with Muslims and Tribals could remove them from power, and result in the minorities using state power for themselves. It was something the government had to be very careful about lest the 6% tricastes which had monopolized power for their own benefit in the 70 years since independence, were outvoted. Electoral politics in other states had already removed “Mamata govt to build memorial at Marichjhapi where Bengali refugees were killed in Left rule”, Newsmen, July 26, 2018. 95 Nilanjana Chatterjee, Midnight’s Unwanted Children, PhD. dissertation, Brown University, 1992, p. 65. 96 Sekhar Bandyopadhyay, Caste, Protest and Identity in Colonial India: The Namasudras of Bengal, 1872-1947, Second Edition, Oxford University Press, 2011, p.21-22. 97 Abhijit Dasgupta, “In the Citadel of Bhadralok Politicians: The Scheduled Castes of West Bengal, Journal of Indian School of Political Economy, July-December, 2000, p.245. 98 Dennis Walker, “Matua Untouchable Writers in West Bengal: Between Islam and India’s Changing Upper Caste-led System”, Islamic Studies 28:4, 1999, p.586. 99 Praskanua Sinharay, “Dalit Question in the Upcoming West Bengal Assembly Elections”, Economic and Political Weekly, February 27, 2016. Sarbani Bandyopadhyay, “Caste and Politics in Bengal”, Economic and Political Weekly, November 3, 2012. Dwaipayan Sen, “An Absent-Minded Casteism?” in The Politics of Caste in West Bengal edited by Uday Chandra, Geir Heierstad, and Kenneth Bo Nielsen, Routledge, 2017, pp.118-120. 94 30 similar elites from office as power moved down the caste-class pyramid. West Bengal was an outlier in having been able to prevent this. Electoral politics was of no small consequence. The tricastes were so aggrieved by their loss of power during the late colonial period that they opted for the partition of India even though it would mean the loss of sometimes substantial properties in the East.100 Having regained power through partition it would not be easily relinquished. Even with partition they were still only 6% of West Bengal, too small a political base to be elected using caste as a mobilizer. Secular ideologies such as Gandhianism and particularly Communism hide the class-caste basis of their rule under a cloak of secularism and lower class poverty alleviation. More primal identities had to be ignored if they were to rule. That they accumulated class privileges through that rule by corruption and nepotism, had to be hidden behind a rhetoric of proletarian and peasant empowerment. This view of their hidden class interests was espoused by a Secretary of the West Bengal government who was over zealous in implementing the Communist program but attributed their failure to “the middle class fetishism of the Communist Party led by the urban middle class elite. With all their pretensions of being “declassed” they remain to their salt and to their class interests.”101 There was no end of intellectuals and academics who believed the rhetoric instead of examining the facts on the ground. While studying rhetoric and theory was easy the facts were hard to find. To use a phrase from the Soviet era these “useful idiots” had not learned from the western intellectual experience with the Soviet Union and other left totalitarian regimes, and failed to absorb the critical thinking required to find out what was really going on. At worst they put their ideology before their conscience, at best it was credulity and ignorance. By covering up human rights abuses in the long run they did the Left no favours, and eventually it was uncovered making a Left comeback all the more difficult. After the collapse of West Bengal Communism they made no confessions or reappraisals as to how they came to get it all wrong, as everyone had by then quietly left the field for other subjects. Given the reluctance of the state elite to investigate the massacre the only authority left to do so was the central government, which the state government could not have prevented from undertaking. Before the massacre Prime Minister Desai had sent a parliamentary delegation of three MPs to investigate the situation in Marichjhapi despite the objection of the state government.102 It was to prove the only government report ever made though as it preceded the massacre it could not report on what was to happen. After the massacre the central government’s national Commission for Scheduled Castes and Tribes stated in its Annual Report that there had been no atrocities against Untouchables in West Bengal. However the Commission was well aware of the massacre as a reading of their internal Marichjhapi file proved. It even contained a partial list with names and ages of 236 Joya Chatterji, Bengal Divided, Cambridge University Press,1994. D. Bandyopadhyay quoted in Dayabati Roy, Rural Politics in India, Cambridge University Press, 2014, p.191. 102 Prasannbhai Mehta MP, Laxmi Naranyan Pandey MP, and Mangaldev Visharay MP, “Report on Marichjhapi Affairs”, April 18 1979, mimeographed. 100 101 31 people who had died of starvation, disease and police shootings before the massacre, as well as official correspondence on the matter and press clippings.103 It is not known what percentage of the national political elite were aware of the massacre, but some certainly were. At a graduate seminar in Oxford, Salman Khurshid, whose father was a central government Minister commented on my presentation about the massacre. He later became Law Minister and External Affairs Minister in a Congress government allied to the Communists. The Gandhian Congress Party and the Stalinist Communist Party formed an electoral alliance in an unsuccessful attempt to regain power in the 2016 elections. The grandson of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi and MP of the ruling BJP, a successor to Prime Minister Desai’s Janata Party coalition government, Varun Gandhi, wrote “After decades of penury, the refugees left for Marichjhapi Island in the Sunderbans. The State government responded with forcible eviction, economically blockading them and conducting police firing on a random basis.”104 Both these dominant ruling parties, though not directly implicated in the massacre certainly did nothing to investigate it. Congress had created the refugee diaspora and the BJP precursor, the Jana Sangh Janata government gave the green light for the eviction. This was typical as no ruling party in India has ever attempted rural desegregation of Untouchables, making them, after the ending of Apartheid, the last segregated population in the world. It would have been political suicide to attempt desegregation which indicates the unique true nature of India. Finding exposure of this Indian exceptionalism in the literature would be challenging as I have hardly ever come across it. The omission means a balanced and realistic portrayal of the country is not being made. This attitude went beyond the coverup by governments and ruling parties. To gauge public opinion amongst the English speaking middle and upper class readership of the Indian Express, I put in a comment about the massacre to measure the likes and dislikes on the internet. “Just because the Maoists do it does not absolve the government of human rights abuses. Take for instance just one massacre at Marichjhapi. Nothing to do with violent resistance, but it was done to unarmed refugees. It implicated all major ruling parties in the act itself or its subsequent cover-up. The anti-Sikh massacre got 9 government inquiries but the Dalit refugees have yet to get a single government investigation despite the film, articles and books that have been written about it.”105 The dislikes of this comment outnumbered likes by 3 to 1. Considering that an investigation would be de rigueur in an advanced democracy106, this view reveals the attitudes of this Interviews, S.K. Mallick ICS, Member, national Commission for Scheduled Castes and Tribes. Feroze Varun Gandhi, “The State of the Stateless”, The Hindu, November 25, 2016. 105 R.K. Vij, “Maoists’ use of IEDs reveals true nature of their projects”, Indian Express, May 18, 2016. 106 By contrast in advanced democracies abuses get investigated and punished eventually. For example in Canada the “cultural genocide” employed to civilize the Natives through physical and sexual abuse of aboriginal [tribal] children at government funded Church run Indian Residential Schools, which I attended, resulted in convictions, a Truth and Reconciliation Commission, an apology by the Prime Minister in Parliament, compensation, and inclusion in the current school curriculum. A schoolmate got the Order of Canada for exposing the abuse (Garnetsjourney.com). Though I worked for Native organizations, I never kept up with my classmates or revisited the Reservation, however the statistics indicate most students will have passed away prematurely from suicide, and drug and alcohol addictions funded in part by government 103 104 32 class and the chasm that must be crossed if caste reconciliation is ever to be achieved. That this influential class was hostile reflects the divinely ordained inequality inherent in the “peculiar institution” of Hinduism that pervades all the major religions in India. It is not written about this way because it insults India’s self image, but this culture is so pervasive that it affects all aspects of human development. It is a reason why it lags behind China and now even Bangladesh by various measures of poverty alleviation, despite its much vaunted economic growth.107 With the decline of the Communists a considerable literature has emerged dealing with the massacre. A documentary film by Tushar Bhattacharya108 was made and a well known writer Amitav Ghosh109 wrote a novel about it. However most remained available only in Bengali. Three historical books remain untranslated as are the Bengali novels. The historical books were by unilingual Bengali activists who put the “professionals” and their mostly useless research to shame, while the English speaking Bengali intellectuals who could have published for a national and international audience kept quiet, with the sole exception of Amitav Ghosh. This despite the academics having far greater protection from torture or assassination than most of the activists. The massacre did not catch the imagination of the national public let alone an international one. The occasional academic and newspaper articles had no tangible result. However, its reemergence in the campaign to defeat the Communists provided enough information to leave the politically committed deniers isolated. Though without an authoritative government investigation, debate was bound to continue over the details, no one could seriously deny it happened and maintain their credibility. The massacre was the result ultimately of the tri-castes attempting to maintain political control of the state. The problem was created by the then ruling Congress Party exiling the Untouchable refugees to non Bengali states, where they would not be a political threat. The Communists ultimately did the same thing in a policy reversal, but with even more fatal results. It proved the hollowness of the Communist propaganda about empowering the poor. As possessors of “the truth” they could remove all threats to their power real or imagined, and maintain power for themselves in a tiny tri-caste elite that felt entitled to rule as their ancestors had done through religious indoctrination, exploitation and oppression since the beginning of the caste system thousands of years before. “India’s traditional caste system was the most closed society known”110 and the descendants of the elite castes continued to reap the benefits of their inheritance. compensation and welfare payments. While governments can take remedial action to compensate for past injustices it can’t micromanage all the repercussions. Nevertheless the government did what it could. Marichjhapi got none of this type of remedial action though it was well within the government’s means to do so. 107 Amartya Sen, “Why Is the Penalty of Inequality so High in India?”, Lecture, Brown University, Published September 20, 2013, Youtube. 108 Tushar Bhattacharya “Marichjhapi 1978-79: Tortured Humanity”, Vimeo www. 109 Amitav Ghosh, The Hungry Tide, Ravi Dayal Publisher, 2004. 110 Metta Spencer, “Foundations of Modern Sociology”, Prentice-Hall, 1981, p.269. 33 Time was however not on the side of the tri-caste elite. If “demography is destiny” in electoral politics, the 6% could not rule indefinitely. The Untouchable population of West Bengal increased to nearly a quarter of the population today. The Muslims had a similar increase and are now slightly larger giving the two historical political allies a slight majority. These minorities along with the Scheduled Tribes now have a substantial majority, and could topple any government if they got their seat adjustments in order. This is why the government would not want to raise caste feelings by investigating Marichjhapi. In other states in India both dominant and subordinate populations have been mobilized on caste lines for political advantage, but the dominant castes in West Bengal are too small to be politically relevant as an electoral base. They may be ruling on borrowed time. With Gandhianism and Communism largely discredited with the electorate, there is no all encompassing ideological justification for their rule, which has become more manipulative than transcendent. Only the multiple divisions within and between the minorities enabled them to stay in power. The tri-caste intelligentsia with very few individual exceptions, covered up the abuses, preferring to adhere to their class and caste rather than promote human rights. The Untouchables and human rights activists who researched and publicized the massacre were used by the anti-Communist elite, who appropriated the material for their own political purposes to remove the Communists from power and dropped the issue when this was achieved. The Communists ended up following the same policy as their Congress predecessors in evicting the Untouchable refugees, though the Communists, perhaps due to their self-avowed Stalinism were even more ruthless about it. Reaction to the Article Drafts Over the years variations of this article were sent to all the western academic journals likely to deal with the subject, and some others as well, without eliciting a single positive review. One reviewer for Past and Present stated there were ways of presenting the massacre but the draft article in which the personal was omitted, was not one of them, though the way to present it was not indicated, thereby being unhelpful.111 Some journals could argue that they didn’t deal with human rights, but that was not the case with Indian journals where it was very much within their coverage. Most notable was the Economic and Political Weekly which had published an article by Annu Jalais on the Marichjhapi massacre. When Professor Gopal Guru was appointed its Editor, making him the first How atrocities should be presented is a problem in itself. Proving the existence of them presents marginalized people with issues of credibility, media access, and fitting them in world views elites can appreciate. Whether outrage should be expressed and in which forums and to what degree has no definitive answer for all venues. The Untouchable Bengal Information Minister, Pulin Behari Mullick, stated in the Bengal Legislative Assembly “We know what sort of treatment we are receiving in our daily life. We know the treatment that we receive from Caste Hindus; we know that and that has been our experience and the sum total of our experience for generations together. It is no use talking of that, for one is apt to lose one’s temper when one thinks of the sum total of grievances and difficulties and the insults and assaults committed upon us - the Scheduled Caste. Therefore, I refrain from going into the matter lest I should be apt to lose my temper.” Bengal Legislative Assembly Proceedings, August 16, 1938. For the context of this debate see Dwaipayan Sen “Representation, Education and Agrarian Reform: Jogendranath Mandal and the Nature of Scheduled Caste Politics”, Modern Asian Studies. January 2014, p.19. 111 34 Untouchable Editor of a major Indian publication, I thought I might now have a chance, but three submissions received no acknowledgement. After being forewarned I then sent out appeals to prominent Untouchable intellectuals and their supporters to see if he could be influenced into accepting the submission, but to no avail. I pointed out to him that he had to take a position on Untouchable human rights which by failing to acknowledge my submission he was doing. He had made his career in part through the study of Untouchable humiliation, and now it was his turn.112 He had to choose between being a token Untouchable appointed to give the appearance of media diversity or someone who was prepared to take a stand on Untouchable human rights. Pointing out that he had to find the courage of the previous Editor who published on Marichjhapi did not move him to act. He had chosen the side he was on. The elite intellectuals who selected him as an Untouchable almost certainly knew what they were doing when they provided the Untouchable community with their very own Clarence Thomas figure. Even niche Untouchable publications were no more forthcoming. Pramod Ranjan of Forward Press refused to publish it. Like everyone seeking Untouchable support from left to right they embraced Dr. Ambedkar, but as a friend of my family it is hard to imagine Ambedkar would have opposed its publication given his beliefs and writings.113 Perhaps the police ransacking of the Forward Press office and death threats against its Hindi editor from Hindu fundamentalists had influenced them not to publish.114 Manohar Biswas editor of the Calcutta based Dalit Mirror whom I talked to did not respond to my article or three emails despite being a refugee from the same caste and district as our family. It was not always this way. By contrast my original article along with the one by Annu Jalais was published in a Tamil Untouchable periodical and both were reproduced in a Bengali book on Marichjhapi. When rights activists were arrested on trumped up charges of being “urban Maoists”, there was media criticism of the harassment, but though the charges would almost certainly not stand up in court it was a favourite Gopal Guru, editor, Humiliation, Oxford University Press, 2011. These days everyone seems to invoke Dr. Ambedkar, as drafter of the Indian Constitution, but in his lifetime his role was not without controversy. When Gandhi went on a “a fast to the death” to prevent Untouchable emancipation which the British were willing to concede, Ambedkar buckled to his demand and compromised on the Poona Pact effectively making them politically dependant on the dominant castes to this day, as the Untouchables had to be elected by the dominant majority. Our family and other Namasudra leaders opposed the concession realizing its consequences, but Ambedkar fearing genocide capitulated. (Sarbani Bandyopadhayay, DalitCameraAmbedkar, Youtube Part I and 11). The Untouchable politicians in dominant parties are living examples of that legacy, but compliant Untouchables as a persecuted minority can be found in every occupation, including the media and academia. M.K. Gandhi was the greatest enemy the Untouchables ever had, but many have been indoctrinated into thinking the opposite. The incident is well known amongst India hands but to my knowledge none have dared to suggest that in effect Gandhi was blackmailing Ambedkar with the threat of genocide. Meghnad Desai, “Modi’s support was across caste Hindus and Dalits, but not Muslims” Indian Express, July 14, 2019. Joseph Lelyveld, Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and his struggle with India, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 2011 p.230. Oddly enough government offices hang both portraits, while following neither. 114 Pramod Ranjan, “Hindi Editor of Forward Press, Receives Death Threats”, Countercurrents.org, May 31, 2018. 112 113 35 government tactic to silence dissent.115 Even before this the failed attempts to publish this article in India indicated the degree to which self censorship had taken its toll. A Professor I corresponded with had his home raided and charges filed by police so the draft article can be assumed to have come into their possession116. That “one of the most important writers and intellectuals of his generation”117, an IIT Professor, Ex Corporate CEO, and husband of Dr. Ambedkar’s granddaughter, could be charged, indicated that class and lineage no longer provided protection, and all government critics were fair game for poltically motivated prosecution.118 That may have been the intention and the muted reaction indicated the use of baseless prosecutions against political opponents had become an accepted norm in Indian politics. It had previously been commonly used against rival politicians but had now spread to the intellectuals and there was no one with enough clout to effectively defend them outside the judiciary, which recent Supreme Court cases suggest is not willing to stand up to the government. “The cowardly lack of outrage amongst India’s legal luminaries and elites”119 against egregious court rulings meant there was no more avenues for effective resistence outside the streets and ballot boxes. The Supreme Court refused bail though it is well known that those awaiting trial in jail often spent longer there than the maximum sentence if they were found quilty. Scholars I had previously communicated with stopped responding. I found myself self censoring communications with India or cutting it off entirely depending on the persons being corresponded with in case they became associated with the “foreign hand”. The current article had become untouchable even for Untouchable publishers, who through self-censorship, could not be assumed to represent the views of their community. The writer, Arundhati Roy, who had taken up controversial issues including Untouchability in the past, did not respond to my emails. There seemed to be a narrowing of what was publishable both in the West and India. In the West it was more likely due to an increased interest in not giving offence to minority students, colleagues and nationalities, while in India legal and extra-judicial threats were increasingly used to intimidate critics. The result is a distortion of Indian realities that can’t make it into print. The right wing Hindu fundamentalist government was making the same mistakes regarding the treatment of Untouchables that the Communists had made. In attempting to achieve party hegemony they attacked Untouchables between elections on the assumption that all would be forgiven and forgotten on election day. This only accumulated grievances and made their reelection more difficult, whatever the immediate advantages of repression may have seemed at the time. Michael Safi, “Protests in India as rights activists placed under house arrest”, The Guardian, August 29, 2018. 116 Anand Teltumbde “I need your support”, January 15, 2019. Academia.edu. Apoorvanand, “Police Action Against Anand Teltumbde is further proof of Modi Govt’s Arrogance” The Wire, January 22, 2019. 117 Pavan Dahat, “Pune Court Rejects Anand Teltumbde’s Bail Application” HuffingtonPost.In, February 1, 2019. 118 Priyamvada Gopal and Salil Tripathi, “Why is India targeting writers during the coronavirus pandemic? The Guardian, April 16, 2020. 119 Pratap Bhanu Mehta, “Covid lockdown is seen as a cover for Jammu and Kashmir”, Indian Express, May 16, 2020. 115 36 With virtually no acknowledgement of receiving the draft article, let alone commenting on it, public intellectuals and academics seemed to have chosen discretion over valour. I was too far from the scene to assess the risks of responding to the draft, as this would vary over time and between states, as well as with the status of the individual intellectuals. The overall trend however was unmistakably in the direction of self-censorship, both in India and abroad. It raised the question of whom I could safely initiate communications with without endangering them or at least their careers. The implications for the “world’s largest democracy” are apparent. While Untouchables were understandably afraid to publish the article, mainstream Indian, and especially foreign periodicals had far less to worry about. That so many knuckled under to perceived threats indicated the vulnerability to free expression in the media that is a hallmark of democracy. The editors proved surprisingly craven and apparently took their positions as jobs rather than a calling, conforming to dominant conventions rather than being provocative.120 These Editors were not the only ones covering up mass murder; virtually all of the intellectuals did. The foreign ones arguably had little comprehension of India, and therefore could feel no compassion for the victims. Considering the problem of comprehending minorities in their own countries, understanding the Untouchable plight in a universe too foreign to be appreciated makes sense. They may have felt themselves to be good persons but whether they realized they were covering up mass murder is unclear. That the editors all held the positions of gatekeepers for their universities, associations, and memberships indicates that the people they answered to felt the same way. Their covering up of atrocities reflected badly not only on themselves but on the universities and associations in which they held prominent places as journal editors. The western intellectuals were not open to the exposure of human rights violations that did not fall within their prejudices. All specialist rejections were essentially rationalizations for obstructing justice. That Indian studies academics are so inimical to the exposure of human rights abuses is indicative of the state of Indian studies abroad. The diversity policies of western universities have perpetuated an Indian diaspora view that is even less critical of India than found among people having to live out their lives in Indian conditions without the money the diaspora has to overcome many obstacles. This idealization of India perpetuates myths that the dominant Indian elite have promoted for thousands of years, with self-serving updates. Exposure to the West and its Enlightenment by the diaspora has not led to a fundamental reconsideration of their It was not practical for me to call out every Editor and Board over their record in exposing human rights abuses, but in the case of the Association for Asian Studies, as the premier scholarly Asian studies group in America, an exception was made. As the Editor of the Journal of Asian Studies, Vinayak Chaturvedi, had stated an intellectual affinity for the Subaltern Studies group some of whose Bengali members had Party and family ties with those responsible for the massacre and coverup, I requested that he be recused from considering the article. The Board refused and when the article was submitted he rejected it without sending it for external review, which could have provided him with some cover. A complaint about this was rejected by the President of the Association, Thomas Rawski, and no response was received from the other Board members. Past Presidents were sent the correspondence but none intervened. This was then communicated to many Untouchable intellectuals and their supporters in case they had dealings with the scholarly community. 120 37 country of origin, but rather its idealization. The journals’ obstruction of justice for Untouchable victims, even when presented with restrained criticism, shows their limitations as sources of knowledge. The universal obstruction by reviewers and editors of human rights exposure makes them participants in the ongoing coverup of the massacre. It raises the issue of what nonsense they presumably teach students about India, for without including these topics an accurate presentation of India cannot be made. It suggests that informal censorship in western academia about India may be as extreme as the censorship in India. This can be seen in the academic literature published in the West about Untouchables which conforms to what the dominant castes would consider acceptable.121 Nothing is published anymore that would be considered really offensive to their Master class/caste. In not being prepared to publish the truth for fear of offending the Masters’ culture and religion they abrogated their pretense of enlightenment and free expression. When Untouchables cannot get to publish their plight and criticism of their Master castes, academics forfeit their claims to moral and academic integrity. They have abandoned the principles of the enlightenment and sided with the oppressors of Untouchables. They are so imbued with the dominant discourses of the Master Castes that I suspect they are not even aware of the Untouchable perspective, or recognize their personal role in covering up abuses in their writing, editing, reviewing and teaching. For foreign editors, most would have only connections through colleagues of Indian origin who in their academic circles would come from the Master Castes, least likely to be objective about India. Even if outside reviewers are sought these have limited contact with Untouchables, who in any case prefer to be invisible and are hardly likely to share feelings with outsiders. Academic incentives in this milieu are with getting India wrong. Realistic portrayals will antagonize colleagues in the field, the Indian government and public, marginalizing those who write “inconvenient truths”. They are probably too set in their way of thinking to change. What Untouchables should do about this is up to them to decide. There are indications of a rupture in scholarly relations already taking place, with push back by Untouchables. It could come to the point as in North America where the Native American default position is non-cooperation. In socializing with academics their real perspectives are not usually revealed. The autonomous reviews bring their prejudices out and reveal the extent they adhere to the dominant elite view by being willing to cover up mass murder. Their socialization within the elite indicates that by the stage in their careers when they do reviews they are past the A whole study could be made of this but a recent example of the genre can be seen in “Dalit Studies”, Ramnarayan S. Rawat and K. Satyanarayana, editors, Duke University Press, 2016, which provides an unintended guide on how to write within the parameters acceptable to the Master Castes. Of nearly 300 submissions only 10 were published but as no information is given on the overwhelming number of rejections we will never know if any of these wrote substantively about human rights or outside the Master Caste envelope. All we know is that none of the published chapters did. The Editors in what could be taken as a criticism of me, write that the Dalit contributors “do not have PhDs from English institutions such as Oxford and Cambridge, which is characteristic of Indian academia. Another crucial feature of this group is that for the majority of them English is not their first language; they learned it in college.” p.3 The problem is dependency does not make for authenticity in writing, quite the opposite. I have a freedom of expression they may not have, and particularly so if they are dependent on the master castes for employment and favours and are resident in India. 121 38 point when they will change their minds and appreciate an Untouchable perspective. S.K, Mallick ICS refused to be interviewed by Professor T.V. Sathyamurthy, but this is not usually an option for Untouchables needing to maintain a livelihood or career. For rural Untouchables where opposition can mean torture and death, the options for resistance by this persecuted minority are quite limited. Barring evidence of commitment to Untouchable human rights, academics should not receive voluntary cooperation. The test for this is whether they include the atrocities in their research and publications. Without inclusion of human rights, the research is of little or no use to Untouchables. Out of nearly 300 submissions, Dalit Studies selected 10 compliant contributors and rewarded them with publication and a free trip to America. The resultant book must have required extensive vetting and censorship to exclude the atrocities. Such is the norm in this academic field. The servile position of Untouchables means only puny measures of resistance are currently available to them, but their absence from the academic literature in an authentic presentation does not mean these views are non-existent. The universal rejection of this article indicates the lengths to which academics will go to exclude human rights atrocities and sanitize Untouchable voices. This reflects badly not only on the editors and reviewers but on their universities and associations as well. Ultimately this article showed which side they were on and no amount of excuses and sophistry could hide it. The appropriation of Untouchables to advance careers without giving much back to the community was a common practice when dealing with subalterns, but the lack of alternative outlets meant reality was effectively sanitized for the convenience of careerists. Part of this reluctance to expose mass murder can be attributed to ideology and nationalism, but the influence of cowardness should not be underestimated. Even when not faced with torture, death, or job loss, the avoidence of controversy by not covering Untouchable human rights atrocities is the best option for cowards. Naming editors and board members who will leave their positions in due course, leaves only a temporary impression, but their journals could go on for generations till a time when Untouchables may be in a position to do something about it. The journals will then be in a position of having to deal with their complicity and coverup of mass murder. Someday they will be judged. This is already happening in America where institutions are having to deal with their involvement in slavery and genocide. The editors and board members can best be described as being in positions of privilege. In America this is sometimes referred to as “white privilege” but in India it could be described as Master Caste privilege. The only significant thing they share with the lower classes is a common language but though this enables communication they live in two solitudes. Few of this group have substantive experience of deprivation and discrimination. By the time they have reached their occupations they are in a position to exploit the temporary sessional lecturers which can be proved by the wage disparities. They have learned to accept this situation and become accustomed to it. From a publication perspective white privilege when combined with the Master Caste privilege makes the obstacles to the exposure of Untouchable atrocities appear insurmountable. While this would be understandable in Indian studies, one would have thought that those 39 journals devoted to human rights would have space for Untouchable atrocities but this proved not to be the case. The size of their population and unique segregation today made no difference. This is particularly inexplicable when considering the number of inconsequential articles that appear in the journals indicating they have become lost in their ivory towers. Few Untouchables are in a position to evaluate scholars, and particularly so on their home turf at universities. As a stress test this article illustrates just what an anathema the exposure of Untouchable human rights are for scholars. Nationalism and ideology trumps justice and good scholarship itself. How Untouchables should channel hatred is a lot less clear given their lack of resources and access to institutions. However the onus is on scholars to show their good intensions and this can be judged by Untouchables according to what is written about them. So far scholars with few exceptions have failed spectacularly in this. The neutered journals are not going to change in the foreseeable future. In my experience “it’s a case of ostracization and generally being ignored”122 but I was not the only one. According to the writer, Sajeev Sanyal “I have on many occasions brought this [Marichjhapi Massacre] up in literature festivals for example, and it is quite extraordinary, someone in the panel will very very quickly shut me down, so it is not that it is just people know about [it], those who need to know, but it is a systematic effort to wipe it out from our memory.”123 As Bibek Debroy puts it “All Bengalis, not just on the left, all Indians in one fashion or another are complicit in the guilt”.124 More specifically scholars who are in a position to publicize it or obstruct exposure are complicit in gang rape and mass murder. The massacre can be used to support nearly every political position from “fascist” to Maoist and most positions in between. My research on Marichjhapi has been used to support causes across the political spectrum through the careful selection of facts that suit the authors.125 Most are subtle selections of information to support the personal views of the authors. An illustration of this is a blog article based on this draft which was given sole credit as the source.126 Other information on the site including a sympathetic biography of the Hindu fundamentalist leader Shyam Prasad Mukherjee, whose party he founded was a predecessor to the ruling national BJP, suggesting a Hindu nationalist Bibek Debroy, Chairman of the Economic Advisory Council to the Prime Minister, Book Discussion/ Blood Island : An Oral History of the Marichjhapi Massacre, Youtube. 123 Sanjeev Sanyal, Principal Economic Advisor, Ministry of Finance, Government of India, Book Discussion/Blood Island: An Oral History of the Marichjhapi Massacre, Youtube. 124 Bibek Debroy, Book Discussion/Blood Island; An Oral History of the Marichjapi Massacre, Youtube. 125 In some cases it is quite benign. One published paper had been lifted almost in its entirety from my Cambridge book without attribution. I wrote to the “author” congratulating him on an excellect paper which I agreed with completely. I got no response so he may have wondered if I even realized it was my own work. Academics are often very particular about getting credit for their own work, but having been unable to get seven of my book manuscripts published I gave one to a student to submit for his doctorate which he got and subsequently went on to a successful career, so at least it did someone some good. 126 Wandering Rani, Marichjhapi - A Despicable Saga of the Leftist bloodbath in Sunderbans. Anonymous. 122 40 position. None of my criticisms of Hinduism were included, but the role of Mother Teresa was mentioned. As not a central figure in Marichjhapi events this might seem unworthy of mention but from the political perspective of the blog it made sense. By keeping quiet about the blockade, “Saint Teresa of Calcutta” had gone along with government orders to cut off relief supplies, and became complicit in the deaths by starvation and disease of hundreds or thousands of babies and children along with their parents. As one of the very few people with the national and international influence and connections which could have been used to prevent the blockade and massacre, or at least publicized it, she deserves mention, but not to the exclusion of the role of Hinduism in creating the enabling conditions for the massacre. Saint Teresa had a good working relationship with Jyoti Basu and would not have wanted to jeopardize this by bringing pressure to bear on him. Given Saint Teresas’ solicitation of dictatorships such as in Haiti, this is entirely in character.127 Time is now running out to interview participants in the massacre as most are now retired or deceased. The refugee leaders have passed away and those massacre survivors still alive can be expected to have a lower life expectancy given their poverty (Untouchables have a life expectancy of 48 compared with 60 for Indians and 80 for Americans).128 With this in mind the author funded the filming of interviews with massacre survivors and the translation into English of Bengali books on the massacre to reach a larger audience and provide material for future resurrection of the subject at a time more conducive to human rights investigation. This required my funding of the defence of Dr. Samanta, with my further public humiliation through dissemination of the insinuations against me to a wider English readership of his book chapter, but there was no principled way around this as the book was too important not to be published.129 Finding a translator would be no problem Christopher Hitchens, The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice, Verso 1995. Ramesh Venkataraman, “Undoing injustice against Dalits requires upper caste support”, Indian Express, January 9, 2019. 129 Publication of these books will not end the debate over whether myself or Dr. Samanta is the more convincing. As an eyewitness and operational leader Dr. Samanta has information I cannot obtain, and he remains the only organizer willing to go on record, so is an important source of information on the events, which as someone coming to the massacre years later I cannot match. Hopefully someday Dr. Samanta will make a full and free confession. This now seems overly optimistic as he refused to be interviewed for Deep Halder’s book, claiming only one person had died through an accidental miss fire. “ [Left Front Minister] Ganguly, seventy-five, is the only CPM leader or police official who has agreed to talk to me on the subject. Amiya Kumar Samanta, the superintendent of police who spearheaded Operation Marichjhapi that allegedly left thousands dead, flatly refused to even meet me, saying he knew ‘what people like you will write about me and the incident. I have read many biased, blatantly distorted narrations of the happenings.’ This was despite repeated assurances that all I wanted was his version of the events that took place on Marichjhapi between January and May1979.” Blood Island, Kindle l323 In a Facebook debate his version was found more convincing by at least one reader. “What did really happen at #Marichjhapi? Who can tell me? I want neither the Ross Mallick account nor the Wikipedia version of it, much of which, I believe, is mostly based on hearsay and deliberately manufactured. …[Dr. Samanta] seems to be rather convincing.” Sowmen Mitter October 10,2013. On the other hand Joy Kar takes the opposite view. “I just finished reading this piece by Ross Mallick - “Refugee Resettlement in Forest Reserves: West Bengal Policy Reversal and the Marichjhapi Massacre” - oh so many questions and the intent of people in power and the power of the state to crush, quell and treat my fellow Bengalis in a manner akin to animals. I am outraged after so many years to read about it. I am ashamed that it could have happened in a state that is my home. 127 128 41 at the going rate given the author’s connections, or so he thought. A scholar he had corresponded with on Marichjhapi and had cited his work didn’t respond to his emails asking if anyone who might translate it. Professors who had cited my publications on the massacre failed to respond to requests to find a translator, even though their intermediary role was unlikely to be discovered should they have wished to keep it confidential. The academics who had cited my work were unhelpful, while the non-academics, though taking my money, didn’t do the work. The necessity of having to do this long distance made the project unviable. I had done what I could under my circumstances. After writing this, on the 40th anniversary of the massacre, the journalist and Executive Editor of India Today magazine published the first English book on the subject, but it remains to be seen if publication by the world’s largest international book publisher will result in remedial action or the massacre will be forgotten.130 Though the book was listed by the international Book Authority as one of the “51 Best Slavery Books of All Time” and got universally positive reviews in India, none suggested investigation and prosecution, as if the reviewers knew it would be futile and perhaps even naive to suggest this. Nevertheless this book represents probably the last and best chance for getting a conviction before the perpetrators pass away. The lack of a public outcry in response to the book indicates that not only does India have atrocious governance, but the culture promotes this indifference to suffering. While in the past non-Bengalis could claim that the bulk of the literature was in Bengali and therefore inaccessible, the last excuse for doing nothing had gone. Now that “people who mattered” (The Rugrats, film) could read enough of the relevant details, the Indian middle class and elite had no excuse for their complicity. Deep Halder’s father had been one of the social activists who had helped the refugees in Marichjhapi and hidden a Marichjhapi child after the massacre, when the author was five. “The stories that he heard as a child were of blood, violence and human cruelty, and the horror tales were unfortunately real. When he grew up, those stories kept haunting him. He set out on a search to find the truth, which unfortunately was gory, gruesome and devastating.”131 Like Jhuma Sen’s father, Shakya Sen, who had won the Calcutta High History needs to uncover this truth and the dead deserve an unqualified apology from us all”. Deep Halder in his book described my article as “one of the most definitive papers on the massacre” so he did not accept Samanta’s or the CPM version of events. Deep Halder, Blood Island: An Oral History of the Marichjhapi Massacre, HarperCollins, 2019, p.7. 130 Deep Halder, Blood Island: An Oral History of the Marichjhapi Massacre, HarperCollins, New Delhi, May 2019. 131 Despite the research being done after the Communists lost power, Halder found “It was difficult tracking down Marichjhapi’s survivors. It was more difficult making them trust me enough to revisit a tragedy that destroyed their lives 40 years ago. They would break down while retelling their stories, sometimes turn hostile or even question my intention behind interviewing them. It took me five years to write the book, It was mentally draining to search for them, make them agree to talk to me and go back again and again.” Naina Arora, “Author Deep Halder: It’s important to revisit tragedies that have been glossed over” Hindustan Times, June 21, 2019. If hiding an innocent child seems an over the top reaction to the massacre it should be remembered that Mini Munda, a resident of Kumirmari across the river from Marichjhapi,who hid a Marichjhapi survivor family, had her home broken into by police who fatally shot her in the head and 42 Court Injunction against the government, this continued family social activist tradition, while passing engagement on to a new generation, raised disturbing questions about a lack of activist effectiveness due to public indifference. “Although I have to admit that even when the issue came to light, there wasn’t an outpouring of support from the general public. Some people fought for the refugees, but they were too few in number. It was a failure, not only of the legal system but of a generation - my generation - then in their twenties and thirties. We lacked a collective conscience. We destroyed Marichjhapi - all of us.”132 A handful of activists could keep writing to no effect for a public that was indifferent to human rights that were not their own. The governments meanwhile felt no need to fulfill their responsibility to investigate, knowing the public indifference. With the Communists not electing a single MP, there was no longer a political party advantage to discrediting them as they were moribund in West Bengal, and little to be gained from the government prosecuting a spent force. With a fundamentalist central government espousing a Hinduism that was antithetical to human rights the prospects for justice were bleak. Halder’s book apparently got no more response than previous publications, indicating the ongoing isolation and vulnerability of the Indian human rights community, in country where a universal conception of human rights hardly exists and rights are almost exclusively to be practiced for one’s own identity group. The thin veneer of civilization represented by social activists in a society that does not believe in or practice civilized behaviour, could disappear very quickly given the right conditions.133 Without a coalition Untouchables did not have the resources or influence to make Untouchability a national let alone international issue that could lead to boycotts and sanctions for law enforcement that other more influential movements could muster. The lack of public interest was made manifest by the massacre and the passage of decades since has shown no indication this will change. Another last attempt to influence public opinion for an investigation will come from a different media, a feature movie with a love story. The Director, Bauddhayan Mukherji, stated “I was introduced to Marichjhapi during my [Calcutta] college days in the mid-1990s. When I researched on it, I found out not many people around me knew about this incident. Some didn’t even hear of Marichjhapi. That very moment I decided to do a took away the family. Despite the execution of a non-Marichjhapi resident she is considered one of its martyrs. (Bood Island, p.172) 132 Shakya Sen quoted in Deep Halder, Blood Island, Kindle edition, Location 1038. 133 Though human rights conditions are particularly bleak in India given their majority religion and culture, it is in other respects, such as racism, far from unique even in developed countries. After we immigrated to Canada, when I was a preschooler neighbouring children would repeatedly beat me up on orders of their mother who provided the implements in the vain hope of chasing us out of town. Everyone in the Hospital Compound knew about this but no one in the community did anything about it. When I attended the local Indian Residential School, if you left its compound which I did without getting caught, the punishment was being “bent over a chair and whipped on the bare bum. The other boys were forced to watch. During these strappings and whippings, the boys’ supervisor would yell profanities and make derogatory remarks about our racial background. His remarks were always about our elders and our parents being savages and about them being ignorant.” Florence Kaefer and Edward Gamblin, Back to the Red Road, Caitlin Press, 2014, p.58. 43 film on it.”134 “I wish to awaken the 40 year old ghost of Marichjhapi, let the world know of it”.135 The Director asked if I knew the distance between the huts at Marichjhapi which I didn’t with the excuse that the information needed by a doctoral student were different from those of a movie director. That information would likely have been erased in the flames that left a red glow in the sky which was witnessed from miles away. When I passed nearby on the launch of the 24 Parganas District Collector years later there were government and elected party officials on board who might have reported any visitation by us as the island was then uninhabited. Though the Director had recruited the actor from The Life of Pi and had directed other movies I was sceptical the $800,000 could be raised. However on his visit to the Cannes Film Festival a Co-producer was found and shooting on location in the Sundarbans was scheduled for 2021. The photographer Soumya Sankar Bose will be publishing an art book completing the range of media platforms presenting the massacre.136 What effect these will have remains to be seen. The governments had apparently ended attempts at coverup, leaving it to intellectuals to do the job. Unlike in more recent democracies where governments at least attempt a coverup of their actions137, the Indian government ignored Marichjhapi knowing there was nothing that would make them do anything. It was left to the intellectuals to cover it up which they did long after there was ample evidence of the massacre. That a feature film could be made reflects a change from Left Front rule, but some were not so easily convinced it now safe to work on Marichjhapi. The request for translation to one Bengali Calcutta resident with an American doctorate who did professional translation work, was that “being the author of the books you have published, you are protected, and no one will get to you. I might not be as safe. It is an important document and should be published. The government now in power [in West Bengal] is doing atrocious things and a document like this would only empower them.” The influence of writing is exaggerated, or something would have been done about the massacre by now. But the fact that politically connected murderers and rapists are roaming around the state unpunished, does not give confidence and security for those involved in the project. Even if a politician does not order retaliation there is nothing to prevent lower level cadre and gangsters taking the initiative, which is the norm. Whether exposing rights abuses only when it is politically expedient, or revealing them whenever they occur should be an easy decision. In choosing to expose the abuses, regardless of those involved, a lot of criticism was made over a wide political spectrum. Had there been institutional constraints preventing the massacre and subsequent human “Bauddhayan’s ‘Marichjhapi’ to explore love amidst pain”, Times of India, Entertainment Times, July 1, 2019. 135 “Suman Ghosh and Bauddhayan Mukherji’s new films at Busan’s Asian Project Market”, Rutwji Nakhwa, On Global Screens Magazine, August 16, 2019. Naman Ramachandran, “Busan: India’s Adil Hussain Boards APM Project ‘Marichjhapi” (Exclusive)”, Variety, October 7, 2019. 136 Ashley Okwuosa, “Representing Migration: Two photographers creating new ways to see history and sanctuary”, The Revealer, August 9, 2019. 137 Anabel Hernandez, A Massacre in Mexico, Verso, New York, 2018. 134 44 rights abuses, the Left in West Bengal and elsewhere wouldn’t likely be in its present debacle, and secularism in India would not be so threatened. Though it is argued that provincial level transitions to socialism are very difficult given their limited local powers, in the West Bengal case the federalized Indian system gave the Communists too much power, which they used without any apparent ethics. Power had given them the opportunity to showcase their shortcomings to the public. Eventually the public tired of this corruption. The author had waited decades for a government or NGO to do something substantive, but it was becoming clear it was unlikely to come in the lifetime of any survivors, if at all. The flurry of coverage which came with the decline and fall of the Left Front government ended, though significant questions remained unanswered. That it was left to an unemployed scholar from the other side of the world to expose this when so many with far greater resources and influence said neither a word nor lifted a finger speaks volumes about Indian human rights and Indian studies. The refusal to respond raised questions of character and conscience, as virtually everyone who knew chose to do nothing. Like the British ICS officers who went Native before them, the current crop of foreign India hands are as one with the dominant Master Caste intellectuals. Their failure to realistically portray the uniquely benighted country, leaves them, with very few exceptions, in league with the interests of the dominant elite rather than the Untouchables. The pernicious influence of Hinduism on the subcontinent, which is antithetical to human rights and civilization, makes the public immune to humanitarian appeals that do not affect their own identity group. The attempt to investigate the massacre had been a waste of money and effort as the society and government were not interested, which was hardly surprising for anyone familiar with India. However, beneath the elite discourse, in folk culture amongst Bengali Untouchables, shrines and songs commemorating Marichjhapi continue to influence opinion and electoral outcomes.138 There is not even a pretense of doing justice, in the absence of which revenge becomes a popular objective. With no effective international institution for justice, and national ones covering up the massacre, the folk memory is disconnected from dominant beliefs and reconciliation becomes increasingly difficult. When the first Untouchable was elected to the Bengal Legislative Council a century ago, Nirode Behari Mullick, Vice President of the Bengal Namasudra Association, stated “The interests of the depressed classes are not safe in the hands of so-called high-caste officers” as they are “antagonistic to the aspirations of the depressed classes.”139 The history especially since the partition of Bengal, continues this central theme of which the massacre is an extreme example. Whatever their often antagonist differences the tri-caste elite maintained their dominance through partition in a remarkably long self-interested rule despite being vastly outnumbered by Untouchables and other minorities. Carole Erika Lorea, “Religion, Caste, and Displacement: The Matua Community”, Oxford Research Encyclopedia, Asian History, Oxford University Press, 2020, p.13. 139 Dwaipayan Sen, The Decline of the Caste Question: Jogendranath Mandal and the defeat of Dalit Politics in Bengal, Cambridge University University Press, 2018, p.45. 138 45 That the reasons for the massacre remain speculative and the fatalities unknown shows a disinterest from the government and society. Some members of the CPM and the State Committee who might know are still alive but they are in some cases senior party officials unlikely to testify as to the real reasons for the expulsion. Perhaps the best explanation came from the Police Superintendent, Dr. Samanta, who followed orders implementing the eviction. “At one point of time these Communists were very much sympathetic to the refugees. They protested against the rehabilitation of the refugees in the Andamans….But when they came to power, their sympathy towards the refugees turned sour. They did everything to prevent the refugees settling in Bengal. They are hypocrites of a finer kind. Earlier they used the refugees for their petty political gain.”140 Whether the massacre will fade from history or be significantly remembered will depend on the politics of India and in particular the trajectory of the Untouchable movement. If it is remembered it will probably be by the Untouchables as an example of heroic resistance against an oppressive state. For them it could achieve the status of a Masada or Wounded Knee. Soon all the participants will have passed away, and there may come a time when the subject will be resurrected to serve some social or political project that cannot now be known. That it came to implicate so many parties, prominent people and elites in a coverup will only serve to discredit them amongst the Untouchable electorate. The highly discriminatory access to justice based on wealth, connections, and caste that Marichjhapi illustrates, and intellectuals were complicit in, will not be easily overcome. The massacre, like so many other atrocities against Untouchables, does not bode well for improving caste-class relations in India. Postscript: The following are some of the journals that rejected versions of this article with or without external reviewers, or did not acknowledge receiving the submission. Journal of Asian Studies Modern Asian Studies Asian Survey Development and Change New Yorker Past and Present The English Historical Review American Historical Review Granta Holocaust and Genocide Studies Genocide Studies International Economic and Political Weekly (India) Forward Press (India) Outlook (India) The Caravan (India) Public Culture Current Anthropology 140 Amiya Kumar Samanta “Marichjhapi” in Madhumay Pal editor, Marichjhapi [Bengali]. 46 Journal of Peasant Studies Perspectives on Politics Comparative Studies in History and Society American Anthropologist Political Science Quarterly Journal of Global History Third World Quarterly New Left Review Radical History Review Mainstream (India) Development in Practice Journal of Contemporary Asia Ethnohistory American Sociological Review World Development Human Rights Quarterly Commonwealth and Comparative Politics The Wire (India) Journal of Democracy World Politics Journal of Genocide Research 47

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