An island limps back to normalcy amid tensions, fears

It was around mid-day and pale wintry sun of a late January day had burnt away the morning mist over Majherpara village in Sandeshkhali island. Bending over and wading through ankle-deep water, 35-year-old Pushpita Das was busy transplanting paddy saplings in rows, in a plot in front of her hut.

- Joydeep Thakur

SANDESHKHALI:

"I am cultivating paddy on this land after a gap of four years. Uttam Sardar (the local Trinamool Congress strongman) illegally grabbed acres of village lands and introduced saline water in them to cultivate prawns. Villagers got back their land last year after violent protests broke out on the island," Das remembers, speaking in Bengali.

Sandeshkhali hit the headlines in the first week of February last year when the riverine island in West Bengal's North 24 Parganas district was rocked by violent protests, mostly led by village women, over allegations of sexual abuse and illegal land grabbing by some local TMC leaders and strongmen.

The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) made the land grab and abuse a major issue ahead of the 2024 Lok Sabha polls with top party leaders, including Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Union home minister Amit Shah, referring to the Sandeshkhali protests in almost every campaign they addressed in the state. The party even nominated one of the victims, Rekha Patra, as its candidate from the Basirhat Lok Sabha constituency in which Sandeshkhali falls. She lost; the TMC's Sk Nurul Islam won the seat.

And Sandeshkhali faded from the national headlines through the second half of the year.

In late January, HT revisited the island, around 75 km southwest of Kolkata.

Last year, after protests erupted in at least four villages-Sandeshkhali, Jeliakhali, and Bermajur I and II- in Sandeshkhali II block, TMC leader Shahjahan Sheikh and his aides Uttam Sardar and Shibaprasad Hazra were arrested (the first on February 28, and the second and the third on February 10 and February 17) on charges of land grab and sexual assault. The state's TMC government started returning the land to the actual owners on February 18.