Lalgarh (Bengal): “Back in 2020, during the lockdown, we went without food for as many as six days. We saw the old die. No work, nothing for miles in the forest. Some people working with Pandey babu took mercy on us and brought us rice and daal in bags and we were saved.”
Alka Sabar says this. She lives in the Jhargram’s Purnapani forests, beyond Lalgarh, a province famed in Bengal’s politics. She collects saal leaves for a living. A day’s worth of collection sells for Rs 34. She has a family of four.
Between 2001 and 2011, Lalgarh was on the boil, involving a violent tussle between Maoists and state forces. But how have the Adivasi Sabar people fared?
The Sabars who are around a thousand in number are the subject of many novels, studies and films. For Khukumuni Sabar, this fact about her community is one she can do without. Her house has mud walls, and the roof is asbestos.
Khukumuni too collects saal leaves for a living. “We need to dry 2,000 leaves, bundle them up, before selling them to the middleman. All for Rs 34. In my family, two of us do this work. My husband collects firewood from the forest and sells it at the market. Our family earns around Rs 50 to Rs 70 a day,” she says.
Her husband Gautam Sabar says hunger is the primary problem for them. “But the government has abandoned us. It says we are drinking and dying,” he adds.
His father, Nalini Sabar, interrupts. “Why do you want to know so much? You want to make a film on us? Have you ever been hungry? Do you know what it feels like to be this hungry?” he asks. Rice and three potatoes boil in a container on a mud oven in this house.
Gautam and Khukumuni’s daughter Riya has studied till class four. She has not been going to school since last month. “What good will a school education do?” Khukumuni asks.
At Dharampur, Ujjwal Pandey is a worker of the Communist Party of India (Marxist). Ujjwal is the ‘Pandey babu’ that Alka Sabar speaks of at the beginning of the piece.
Ujjwal says that he and his party colleagues brought sacks of rice to members of the community during the COVID-19 lockdown – “when the governments ignored them entirely.” Ujjwal claims that the very business of saal leaves that Chhatradhar Mahato – the face of the Maoist-backed tribal movement in Lalgarh who in 2020 joined the TMC – used to control, is now dying in the area.
Ujjwal adds that because Sabars work with their hands, their fingertips smoothen with time, making Aadhaar cards difficult and pushing them out of the public distribution system.
The Jnaneswari coach in Jhargram’s Sardiha station. Photo: Joydeep Sarkar/The Wire.
This is a vital issue this election. The Jhargram Lok Sabha seat is reserved for Scheduled Tribes. The area has seen brutal violence, including the derailment of the Jnaneswari Express that killed 147 people in 2010. The incident was believed to have bee engineered by Chhatradhar and the committee he directed. Chhatradhar has been jailed over this. The coach of the derailed train now lies beside the Sardiha station. The issue has been alive this election season, with TMC supremo Mamata Banerjee saying at a rally on May 17 that Chhatradhar was her entry into Jhargram.
Also read: Once a Maoist Hotbed, Bengal’s Jungle Mahal Is Now Battling Hunger and Anger
Conversation on Mamata’s ties with the Maoists in the lead up to her victory in 2011 has all but died down. Maoist leader Kishenji had said that he wanted to see Mamata as the state’s chief minister. Within months after her victory, Kishenji was killed in an alleged encounter.
With its checkered history, the ‘Jangalmahal’ of Bengal comprises 22 blocks. Fifteen of these make up the Jhargram parliamentary seat.
What used to be a CPI(M) stronghold now has paltry presence of party leaders, many of whom were killed or forced to leave the area after 2011. CPI(M) district secretary Pradip Sarkar claims “450 leaders and workers of the party were killed by the combined forces of the TMC and the Maoists.”
BJP candidate Pranat Tudu in Jhargram. Photo: By arrangement.
Meanwhile, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh and the Bharatiya Janata Party made use of the permanent state of tussle and established themselves in the area.
The BJP district secretary Jayant Ray tells The Wire that the Sangh Parivar is headquartered at Chhatinashol village. “We have two ashrams in place. More will be opened. We have workers around Binpur, Belpahari, Bandoan and Balarampur. We are working for the upliftment of forest communities.”
Amidst violence, there is a state of constant unemployment.
TMC candidate Kalipada Soren in Jhargram. Photo: By arrangement.
A year ago, cricket legend Sourav Ganguly had announced that he would unveil a steel factory at Salboni. Not much has happened since then.
Meghmala Soren, a researcher at Ranchi University, left Belpahari with her family in 2004. “We had to go because we had been branded CPI(M) supporters. Now that we have returned, we see tourist resorts. But who is benefitting from these? Not the tribal people who live here, certainly?” she says.
Residential schools define the area and are also significant grounds for drumming up political support. Adivasi hostels were set up during the Left rule in Bengal and such hostels took charge of tribal children’s food, studies and medical care. “The government would take care of this. The TMC government has in fact increased the allocation to these schools, but curiously, this money is no longer sent to schools but to the students’ accounts, directly. How will the schools run, on what money? Who will pay the teachers?” asks Binoy Baske, a teacher at such a school.
Baske notes that this system is ripe for malpractice. The Gomidanga High School, for instance, is one among 35 schools in Dharampur which has no hostel for tribal students but students of which receive money in their accounts. It is a known secret that enrolments in these schools do not mean that a student is attending it.
The All Bengal Teachers’ Association’s Gurupada Nandi tells The Wire that registration for the Class 10 board exams have gone down but the number of enrolments don’t. “The mystery is for all to see,” he adds.
On May 19, TMC general secretary and Mamata’s nephew Abhishek Banerjee said at a rally in Jhargram that “131670 people” had not been paid for work under the 100-day rural job guarantee scheme, MGNREGS. Abhishek claimed that the state government had to pay this amount because the Modi government had not. The Union and Bengal government are engaged in a back and forth over the former’s non-payment of scheme dues.
CPIM candidate Sonamoni Tudu in Jhargram. Photo: By arrangement.
In the last Lok Sabha election, BJP’s Kunar Hembram won with a margin of 0.86% votes. This time, Kunar has joined the TMC which has given a ticket to comparative newcomer and writer Kalipada Soren. Kalipada is confident of victory.
One of the main reasons for this is that BJP, which is its primary opposition force, has seen its fair share of infighting. The BJP’s candidate is Jhargram Hospital radiologist Pranat Tudu, who is the pick of heavyweight Suvendu Adhikari. Pranat has the support of the BJP high command, and even prime minister Narendra Modi has campaigned for him, but he purportedly does not have the support of Dilip Ghosh, the state’s biggest BJP leader until Suvendu arrived from the TMC.
The Left’s candidate, 29-year-old Sonamoni Tudu, meanwhile, is known in the region as the “pad woman”. Her work in ensuring access to sanitary napkins for tribal women has made her a household name. And this is also why the contest here is a triangular one.
“I may have come here only after marriage but I have and will fight to ensure that the people here get their rights. I too have lost family members to earlier violence here,” she says. Sonamoni is originally from Jharkhand’s Daldali and began work in the area under the aegis of UNICEF, when she was a student of psychology at the Ghatsila College.
Translated from the Bengali original by Soumashree Sarkar.
