Sandeshkhali fury: Can TMC emerge unscathed with its tested 'money-back’ policy?

Over the past few years, when the landscape of Sandeshkhali in West Bengal’s North 24 Parganas district was transforming, no one batted an eyelid. However, it has triggered the biggest political crisis the Mamata Banerjee-led Trinamool Congress has faced ever since it came to power in West Bengal in 2011.

According to aggrieved villagers, it all started in 2019 when local TMC strongman Sheikh Shahjahan was put in charge of the district's fishery development. Soon, vast swathes of verdant stretches started turning into watery ponds. The change was then viewed as a mere economic shift from agriculture to pisciculture, a trend in the state’s Sunderbans, of which Sandeshkhali is a part.

Land grab complaints

Remote sensing data cited by many researchers showed Sunderbans had been annually registering a two to three percent increase in the aquaculture area for the past few years. 98 per cent of this conversion (average 821.9 hectares per year) was from agricultural land, a 2021-research had found.

Detrimental impacts of natural calamities like cyclones on agriculture production and higher profit margins in pisciculture were listed as some of the reasons for the transformation.

Little did anyone realise that beneath the land-use conversion in Sandeshkhali was also coercion. According to official sources, teams constituted by the state government to hear grievances of aggrieved villagers reportedly received over 100 complaints of land grabs.

As per the complaints, over a hundred hectares of land was forcibly acquired by absconding Shahjahan and his two associates Shib Prasad Hazra (Shibu) and Uttam Sardar. The figure could go up as the process of registering complaints is still on.

Horrific tales emerge

“They took our land on lease to make a fishery three years ago. But they have not paid the lease money. They threatened us whenever we asked for money,” said a female victim, who did not identify herself.

Another woman whose family had two bighas of land alleged that the plot was rendered uncultivable by pumping salt water as they refused to give their land on lease.

Another farmer, Arjun Mondol, said his 1.5-bigha (0.13 hectare) plot was forcefully grabbed by Shibu Hazra, though the land still belongs to him on paper. With his land gone, Mondol is now forced to run a tea stall near Sandeshkhali ferry ghat (jetty) for sustenance.

There are many such horrific tales of land grabs across the sleepy island, which is now up in protest.

‘Money-back policy’

To quell the public outrage, the party fell back on its tried and tested ‘money-back policy’. “The party will raise funds to repay the lease amount not exceeding Rs 3.5 lakh to the affected farmers. We are preparing a list based on non-payment complaints,” TMC’s MLA Sandeshkhali Sukumar Mahto told The Federal.

This is not the first time that the TMC has resorted to such repayment as a course correction after its leaders were accused of deceit. Ahead of the 2021 assembly elections, the party had forced several of its leaders to return “cut-money”, a euphemism for illegal commission, they had collected from beneficiaries of the state government’s welfare schemes.

Similarly, the party-led government had forced the “ineligible beneficiaries” of Amphan cyclone relief funds to return money following allegations of nepotism in relief distribution against the TMC leaders.

Such paybacks proved to be a political masterstroke in averting electoral backlash in the last assembly elections, which the party swept despite widespread allegations of nepotism and receiving cut-money against its local-level leaders.

“By returning the money, the TMC succeeded in creating a narrative that only some local-level leaders were involved in wrongdoings and that the party top leadership, particularly its supremo Mamata Banerjee, acted against the wrongdoers the moment she came to know about their misdeeds,” said political commentator and author Amal Sarkar.

No let-up in fury

However, the strategy has so far failed to subdue Sandehskhali's fury. Mahto and other TMC leaders from the district faced the public ire on Thursday (February 22) when they had gone to the island to mollify the public anger.

Meanwhile, the island which erupted in protests on February 7 continues to fume in anger.

On Thursday, irate villagers chased away Shahjahan Sheikh’s brother Shirajuddin when he entered the island’s Rampur area. The villagers also set a hut ablaze, built to keep a watch on a fishery belonging to Shirajuddin.

As per fresh allegations, Shirajuddin too was involved in land grabs. The reign of terror unleashed by the TMC leaders in Sandehskhali is not limited to land grabs. There are more serious allegations of sexual assault and exploitation of women against the TMC leaders.

The police until Thursday registered two rape cases against TMC leaders. The first case was registered against Uttam Sardar and Shibu Hazra.

The second FIR was registered against Hazra and his two aides – Amir Ali Gaji and Bhanu Mondol. Both Sardar and Hazra have been arrested.

Land and women's security are the core political premises of the TMC that came to power on the slogan of Maa, Maati, Manush (mother, land, people).

BJP senses opportunity

These two premises have come under attack in Sandeshkahli, much to the TMC’s concern. The BJP sensed this as a major opportunity to end the TMC’s political dominance in the state ahead of the 2024 Lok Sabha elections due in a few months.

To scale up the issue, the party has scheduled a public rally of Prime Minister Narendra Modi on March 6 in Barasat, the Lok Sabha constituency under which Sandeshkahli falls. Modi is also likely to meet “women victims” of Sandeshkhali, state BJP president Sukanta Majumdar said, minutes before he was taken into custody by the police for sitting on a ‘dharna’ near Sandeshkahli police station.

Now, it remains to be seen whether Mamata Banerjee can emerge unscathed from the present crisis and lead her party to yet another electoral victory by restricting the public’s angst to local-level leaders while maintaining her image of a benign Didi.