“Our fight will continue till land is given back to those unwilling to sell. Land acquired forcibly will have to be returned,” Mamata Banerjee, then the opposition leader, said at the height of the protest against land acquisition in Singur by the then Left Front government in West Bengal.
The long-drawn movement by Mamata Banerjee between 2006 and 2008 against “forcible” takeover of “fertile” land for Tata Motors’ ‘Rs 1 lakh car’ (Nano) project brought her back from the political wilderness.
A similar story unfolded parallelly in Nandigram, the epicentre of another farmer’s agitation against land acquisition for a chemical hub. Here too, Mamata Banerjee spearheaded the protests and sat on a 25-day hunger strike, emerging as the champion of the downtrodden.
Both the Singur and Nandigram land movements propelled the Trinamool Congress to power in West Bengal in 2011 by ending the 34-year rule of the Left.
‘Land’ became the cornerstone of Trinamool’s war cry against the Left — Maa, Maati, Manush (Mother, Land, People).
It has been 17 years since the protest against land acquisition put Singur on India’s political map. Then, the Left Front was at the receiving end of public anger.
SANDESHKHALI ON THE BOIL OVER LAND-GRAB ALLEGATIONS
Now, another agitation against land grab has put Sandeshkhali in the Sunderbans in the limelight. While the plot has remained the same, this time the cast has changed and the Trinamool Congress is facing the music, with ‘maati’ emerging to be the party’s bugbear.
While the Sandeshkhali unrest has been centred around protests by women against alleged sexual atrocities by strongman and Trinamool Congress leader Shahjahan Sheikh and his aides, the agitation had started off against forcible land grab.
Earlier this month, several farmers from 16 gram panchayats claimed that their lands were being forcefully grabbed and turned into saltwater fisheries by Sheikh and his associates.
The farmers claimed that the saga of grabbing agricultural land and turning it into fisheries started in 2019 after Sheikh was made in-charge of the district’s fishery development.
In a video that has gone viral on X, a woman said, “Our land is grabbed in the name of lease. They made fisheries on the land. For the last 3 years, they have not paid the lease money. When we demand money, they threaten us.”
The land of those who didn’t want to part with it, was rendered uncultivable by pumping salt water, another woman said.
“There were also families like ours who did not want to give up our land as there was a standing crop growing on it. We had two bighas. They just pumped salt water into our fields and damaged the crop. Once salt water enters land, it’s rendered uncultivable for years,” the woman told The Indian Express.
BJP TAKING CUE FROM MAMATA’S SINGUR AGITATION?
The allegations have prompted the BJP to try and turn Sandeshkhali into a Singur-like movement and take a leaf out of Mamata Banerjee’s playbook.
Recently, TMC MP Mahua Moitra shared an unverified audio clip in which BJP leader Agnimitra Paul is purportedly agreeing that the BJP intended to turn Sandeshkhali incident into a “mass movement” like Singur and Nandigram.
For the past two weeks, several top BJP leaders, like Sukanta Majumdar and Suvendu Adhikari, have repeatedly tried to enter Sandeshkhali and clashed with police.
Sukanta Majumdar, the state BJP chief, even got injured during one such protest, bringing back memories from 2007 when Mamata Banerjee was dragged by the police and removed from outside the office of the block development officer at Singur.
BJP leaders were also seen squatting on the highway, just as then opposition leader Mamata Banerjee did during the Singur-Nandigram agitation.
In a damage-control mode, the ruling TMC has attempted to pacify the villagers and has invited those who received land on lease in the area but were unable to record it with the government to do so.
At the heart of the move lies the demographics of Sandeshkhali, which falls under the North 24 Parganas district. Around 30% of Sandeshkhali’s population belongs to the minority community, 30% are Dalits and 26% Adivasis.
The Sandeshkhali unrest has the possibility of dealing an electoral blow to the Trinamool by alienating some voter segments.
LAND GRAB PROTESTS IN HOWRAH’S PANCHLA
Sandeshkhali isn’t the only place where the Trinamool is facing protests over land-grab. Similar protests are also erupting elsewhere in West Bengal.
Earlier this week, a large group of women took to the streets in Howrah’s Panchla town with brooms and sticks to protest alleged grabbing of land by a local Trinamool Congress leader Sheikh Khalil Ahmed and his aides.
The BJP has been quick to amplify the incident on social media, dubbing it as “Sandeshkhali 2.0”.
“Local TMC goons attempting to seize land from vulnerable individuals, particularly the poor farmers in Howrah, raises serious ethical concerns,” Tripura BJP’s state general secretary Amit Rakksshit tweeted.
As per local media, the women, mostly from the backward Taposhili community, accused Khalil Ahmed of filling sand in the town’s largest water body, spread over 360 bighas. The water body was used by the locals of Panchla town for doing everyday tasks and performing rituals.
A report in ABP Ananda also claimed that the locals protesting the alleged land grab were allegedly attacked on February 18.
It must be remembered that the Sandeshkhali and Panchla incidents are not on the same scale as the Singur and Nandigram agitations, which were an emotive issue concerning the farming community and were directed towards the state government.
However, the protests over land could certainly turn out to be headwinds for Mamata Banerjee ahead of the 2024 Lok Sabha election.