What a Family in Bengal's Bankura is Trying to Tell Us
There are moments when a society that seems trapped in hatred offers a glimpse of something else. In Karishunda village in Bankura, that glimpse came from a family in mourning.
The family buried its dead and was then offered money. It refused. Instead, the dead man's son asked the government to build a school.
That is the story. The rest is context.
Sheikh Abdul Hafiz, 25, had returned after taking part in the Cockroach Janta Part’'s protests at Jantar Mantar. On August 13, as part of its School Thik Karo campaign, he visited his old government primary school and sought permission to inspect it.
Hours later, his family was attacked. His father, Sheikh Mohammad Mafik, died of his injuries on August 15. Eight men are in custody. Who attacked them and why remain under investigation. This piece is about what happened next.
Hafiz refused compensation. He asked that the money instead be used to build a good school in his father’s name, one that would serve poor children.
The script after political violence is familiar. An attack, outrage, a cheque, a photograph, then a silence that gets called closure. Too often, compensation becomes a receipt. It marks the point where loss turns private, absorbed by one household and forgotten by everyone else.
Abdul Hafiz refused to sign that receipt. He could have asked for help for his family and nobody would have blamed him. He asked for other people’s children instead.
His mother, Hasina Begum, was equally clear. She recalled the offer of compensation after the R.G. Kar Medical College and Hospital rape and murder and warned that money could not replace justice. Delay, she said, would only increase the risk of this case being pushed into cold storage too.
Abdul Hafiz's elderly grandmother, who had just lost her son, weeping as she raised the slogan Inquilab Zindabad when CJP and Left leaders visited, made it clear that her grandson would remain in the struggle. CJP spokesperson Ashutosh Ranka could think of little to do except ask someone to bring her water.
Abdul Hafiz, meanwhile, was apologising to those who had come to console him. His father, he said, had taught him to take another person’s sorrow upon himself and never cause sorrow to anyone else. He asked their forgiveness because his father’s death had made them sad.
On a video call, CJP founder Abhijeet Dipke wiped his eyes. Abdul Hafiz told him not to break down, asking how the work would continue if he did. Then he repeated his father’s advice to the man who had launched the campaign.
The incident leaves the rest of us with a question. Why does a young activist asking about a primary school become such a threat?
The answer lies in the political system’s hostility to accountability.
For over a decade now the labels have kept coming. 'Anti-national'. 'Tukde tukde gang'. 'Urban Naxal'. And now, apparently, 'dimaagi Naxal'. Each one disqualifies the person asking questions of the government, so the questions themselves need not be answered at all. The Modi-Shah government has repeatedly treated questions as acts of disloyalty to the nation.
They would rather have citizens who rely on IT-cell propaganda and accept whatever reaches them on social media without question. In Satyajit Ray’s Hirak Rajar Deshe, the king shuts the village school because knowledge weakens obedience. Released in 1980, three years after the Emergency ended, the warning has long outlived the film.
The demand for school over financial compensation, thus, is unnerving for the current political dispensation. A school in Mafik’s name would be a permanent, visible record that somebody dared to ask a question they wanted buried.
For everyone who reduces politics to an endless clash between Hindus and Muslims, Abdul Hafiz and his family are a rebuke. In a climate suffocated by religious hatred, a Muslim family in rural Bengal answered violence not with a call for revenge, but with a demand for a public school.
The investigation must establish who came to the house, why and whether the police acted quickly enough. The guilty must be punished. But Karishunda has already shown something no charge sheet will record. Abdul Hafiz turned his family’s tragedy into a public demand for dignity and accountability. He refused to let victimhood be the final word and claimed a moral authority the current system does not know how to answer.
Even in dark times, ordinary people can refuse the rules set by those who govern through fear. Sometimes that refusal begins with a slogan and sometimes with a school that has not yet been built.
This article went live on August twentieth, two thousand twenty six, at forty-two minutes past five in the evening.The Wire is now on WhatsApp. Follow our channel for sharp analysis and opinions on the latest developments.
