Nandigram today: 20 years after violence, locals say ‘nothing has changed

From Esplanade to Haldia by bus, get off at the ferry ghat where the giant statue of Hanuman stands, take a ferry to Kendyamari and from there drive down another 15 kilometres to Nandigram.

The car that picks us up seems to draw too much attention. The only modes of transport in this area seem to be trekkers, totos, autos, van rickshaws, bicycles and motorcycles. Plastered on the walls of the shops and lamp posts are advertisements of jobs for migrant labourers.

Nandigram is not one gram, but a gaggle of villages divided into administrative blocks. We enter Bhutar More, then drive through Shyamsundari Chowk and Garchakraberia. The driver of the car peers at us through the rearview mirror and says, “Mini Pakistan.” Then adds, “There are so many mosques here.”

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Not many young people are in sight, only women busy with chores. No hotels or restaurants till we reach Sonachura Bazar. The seasonal paddy has been harvested and there is no sign of green anywhere. Land in the area is neither fertile nor is there a proper irrigation system; only submersible pumps here and there. But shrimp and crab farms demarcated by blue nylon nets leap to the eye. Venami chaash, is what locals say. Venami being the colloquialism for vannamei shrimps. It is a risky but profitable means of livelihood.

The first new construction we see is at Gangra. It is a white-and-blue building with air conditioners, LED lights and marble flooring. We are told this is where a Ram Mandir will be erected, courtesy the BJP. The air conditioners are for the engineers who will be supervising its construction.

Gangra is also where there is a statue of Nishikanta Mondal. Nishikanta was a Trinamool leader and the head of Sonachura gram panchayat. He was also a prominent leader of the Bhoomi Uchchhed Protirodh Committee or BUPC, a group of villagers who had come together to save their land and homes when the CPM-led government tried to wrest 14,000 acres comprising 27 mouzas in Nandigram block and two mouzas in neighbouring Khejuri block to create a Special Economic Zone. Nishikanta was not one of those killed in the violence of 2007. He was shot dead in September 2009, allegedly by Maoists who had been in collusion with a section of the BUPC. It is his son Satyajit, who is in charge of the under-construction Ram Mandir; he is with the BJP.

The Ram Mandir is not only a religious project but also a social welfare project, explains Satyajit. “I have told Dada we will hire people from Nandigram. There are many educated, qualified, unemployed youth here.”

Dada here is Suvendu Adhikari. Satyajit is full of stories of Dada’s largesse, how he will put a stop to youth from the region migrating to other states in search of work, how he
will set right the schools and the malfunctioning health centres. It is not clear if he is speaking only about Nandigram or all of Bengal. Adhikari has been MLA of Nandigram the last 10 years; the first five as a Trinamool leader, and the last five as a BJP leader. He is not from Nandigram but neighbouring Contai.

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We arrive at Bhangabera bridge which is at the edge of Nandigram. A tailor whom we met in a hole-in-the-wall shop stitching mosquito nets had told us, “The bridge was the border. On the other side is Khejuri, from where the police marched into Bhangabera and opened fire on us.”

The bridge is where we meet a group of women who stop our car and ask for chanda for Mahaprabhu seba and kirtan. When we ask them if they remember those string of days from 2007, they scatter away, as if stung.

No one wants to talk, except one. She says, “That day too there was a Mahaprabhu sabha near the bridge when they opened fire.” She is most likely talking about March 14 of 2007, the day with the heaviest casualty. The BUPC members had dug up the road to prevent the entry of police vehicles, but armed men crossed the gap-toothed road with guns and crude bombs. “We never thought they would open fire on a group of women and children, but they did. The sound of the bullets… jeno khoi phutchhe,” adds the woman who would have been in her late teens back then.

The tailor had already told us what the woman could not bring herself to recall. He had said, “They looted everything. They entered houses and raped the women and murdered the men. Many people were kidnapped, many remain missing.” One man with a bicycle who was hanging around the tailor’s shop pretending not to be interested had said, “Many dived into the ponds to escape. Only their footwear was found on the banks, thousands of them.”

There had been clashes before March 2007 — in January — and also after — in November.

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And so, Nandigram is full of memorials or shahid bedis as they are known in local parlance. There is one in Gokulnagar, another in Karpally, another at Sonachura. The tallest is a Shahid Minar, which was inaugurated in January 2014, seven years after the Bhangabera killings. A 40-metre high monument, a medical centre, a prayer hall and a guest house stand half a kilometre from the Bhangabera bridge.

The 20-year-old story arrives in installments for the rest of our journeying. How the BUPC had no place for differences of caste, class or religious colour. It was a social group. And it included all political parties — Trinamool, Congress, Maoists, APDR, Jamiat Ulama-i-Hind, and some Left supporters — except the ruling CPM, points out Abu Taher, who is with the Trinamool. The killings from 2007 pulverised Nandigram, brought it to its knees.

But as the locals tell it, it was the 2021 Assembly election that really quartered the place. Says Taher, “We had been united all through. When Sher Shah had come to Khejuri, at the time of the Tebhaga Movement of 1946 and even in 2007, but now there’s communal rift.”

At Gangra, a woman in a faded white sari stops to stare at us. When we raise our hands in namaskar she says, “You are from Calcutta. Nandigram to you is a place from where poriborton started. But nothing has changed here. All three male members of my family work as construction labourers in Chennai.”