palashbiswas

Resistance against persecution of Bengali Refugees in India
Palash Biswas
(contact: c/o Mrs Arati Roy, gosto Kanan, Sodepur, Kolata-700110, India.Phone-033-2565-9551-R)
They are partition victims and were welcome by the nation in the greatest population transfer in the history.The partition of the Indian subcontinent in 1947 was followed by the forced uprooting of an estimated 18 million people. The minority communities in East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) who were uprooted and forced to seek shelter in the Indian province of West Bengal.Jawahar Lal Nehru and his government failed to stop the carnage of minorities accross the border. Hence, the East Bengal partition victims, stripped of citizenship, human and civil rights, dislodged from history and geography and deprived of motherlanguage and employment have to pay the price after almost sixty years of Indian Independence.
They are being persecuted in every part of India just because they speak in Bengali and ninty percent of them are dalits. Speaking in Bengali has become the only criteria to identify Bangladeshi nationals outside Bengal. Because the partition victim Bengalies, even settled in foties and fifties belong to underclasses, they are unable to protect themselves agnaist atrocities including deprtation drive.
Hopefully, resistance agnaist persecution of East Bengal refugees is getting momentum. In Uttaranchal and Orrissa, the local people, political parties and media stand united with the refugees. Uttaranchal refugees have launched nonstop mass movement since they were denied Indian citizenship in 2003 by then Bjp government. The chief minister of Uttaranchal Narayan Dutta Tiwari raised the issue thrice in the parliament. In Orrissa, a farther step ahead the agitation is led by the Utkal Bangiay Surakshya Samiti. Left MPs belonging to cpim and forward block visited refugee areas in Uttaranchal and Orrissa. Left front chairman in West Bengal, comrade Biman Bose visted village to village in Uttaranchal. Basudev Acharya, cpim MP has visited Kendarapara on last 10 th October where 1575 Bengali refugees have been served quit India notice. They could not be deported because the people of Orrissa, political parties and media support them. But the notice is still live. Orrissa government of Bjp Bjd combine has alredy managed 21 Bengali refugees settled in Navrangpur. Kendra Para was targeted as second attempt which failed. In retaliation , the Orrissa government stopped no less than two hundred refugee children to sit in high school examination. Birth certificats are being denied to newborn babies. BPL card, ration Card, PAN, etc have been stalled. Names of refugees in the voters` list have been deleted enmasse.
Mulnivasi Bamcef is leading the movement to save the dalit refugees in Maharashtra, where 250 Bengali refugees have been arrested and released after paying ten thousandruppees and submitting a personal bond to prove their Indian citizenship with adequate documents within one month in Bhandara district. All Maharashtra DMs have notified the resttled partition victim Bengali refugees to submint documents to prove Indian citizenship within a month.

In Kolkata, on Friday, 27th october a seminar was organised by SAHMARMEE and Dalit Samanyaya Samiti to protest the persecution of Bengali Refugees in different parts of India. The seminar was presided over by the ex Vice Chancellor of Kalayani University and now a cpim Loksabha member Dr. Basudev Barman. Sahmarmmee general secretary Dr Nitish Biswas, deputy registrar of Calcutta university introduced the topic and gave garphic details of persecution of Bengali refugees on grounds like citizenship, human rights , civil rights, reservation, employment and mother language.
All India forward Block general secretary and rajyasabha member Debbrata Biswas was the main speaker and he gave the graphic details statewise. He Said, outside Bengal the refugees are being persecuted, deported, put behind bars and descriminated just they speak in Bengali. He also presented his experience of visits in refugee colonies in different parts of india. He said , refugees may not survive in Uttaranchal, UP, MP, Bihar, Jharkhand, Chhattisgargh, Assam, Maharashtra, Gujrat, Andhra, Tamilnadu, Rajsthanand elsewhere in these circumstances. He called for a nonstop left movemenyt in parliament and outside parliament to protect the Dalit Bengali refugees.
Ex education minister of West Bengal kanti Biswas, acpim MLA and ideologue supported the plea. He further elaboarated the issue.
Convenor of All India Refugee Coordination committee, Dr Subodh Biswas came fro Nagpur and reported the situation and updates.
JM Bhowmic and Ujjwal Biswas from dacca also particiapted in the seminar.
Indian nationalist leadership chose to hold on to this Muslim-majority state to prove that minorities could thrive in a plural, secular polity. But the government of India could not secure the saftey of Hindus and other minorities in erswhile East Pakistan and now in bangladesh either politically ordiplomatically. The situation is that the refugee influx from Bangladesh has never to stop. Any internal turmoil In Bangldesh creates waves of exodus. It is happening once againas the ruling classes fight on streets doggedly to have the riegn of power, the security and safety of minorities are once again at the stake. Government of India may not help it. West Bengal chief minister is concerned and a high alert is declare by Border Security Forces in border areas of West Bengal. Is this a solution?
In fact, a delegation of Hindu minorities recently met The Indian High Commissioner in Dacca and demanded that either the two corore Hindus still sustaing themselves in Bangladesh, should be allowed to cross over Indian border and be granted Indian citizenship enmasses - or India should ensure the saftey of life , property and respect for the Hindus there.
Population exchanges
Massive population exchanges occurred between the two newly-formed nations in the months immediately following Partition. Once the lines were established, about 14.5 million people crossed the borders to what they hoped was the relative safety of religious majority. Based on 1951 Census of displaced persons, 7.226 million Muslims went to Pakistan from India while 7.249 million Hindus and Sikhs moved to India from Pakistan immediately after partition. About 11.2 million or 78% of the population transfer took place in the west, with Punjab accounting for most of it; 5.3 million Muslims moved from India to West Punjab in Pakistan, 3.4 million Hindus and Sikhs moved from Pakistan to East Punjab in India; elsewhere in the west 1.2 million moved in each direction to and from Sind. The initial population transfer on the east involved 3.5 million Hindus moving from East Bengal to India and only 0.7 million Muslims moving the other way. [citation needed]

Massive violence and slaughter occurred on both sides of the border as the newly formed governments were completely unequipped to deal with migrations of such staggering magnitude. Estimates of the number of deaths vary from two hundred thousand to a million.[1]

[edit] The present-day religious demographics of India proper and former East and West Pakistan
Despite the huge migrations during and after Partition, secular and federal India is still home to the third largest Muslim population in the world (after Indonesia and Pakistan). The current estimates for India (see Demographics of India) are as shown below. Islamic Pakistan, the former West Pakistan, has a smaller minority population. Its religious distribution is below (see Demographics of Pakistan). As for Bangladesh, the former East Pakistan, the non-Muslim share is somewhat larger (see Demographics of Bangladesh):

India (2005 Est. 1,080 million vs. 1951 Census 361 million)

81.69% Hindu (839 million)
12.20% Muslims (135 million)
2.32% Christians (25 million)
1.85% Sikhs (20 million)
1.94% Buddhists, Jains, Parsis and others (21 million)
Pakistan (2005 Est. 162 vs. 1951 Census 34 million)

98.0% Muslims (159 million)
1.0% Christians (1.62 million)
1.0% Hindus, Sikhs and others (1.62 million)
Bangladesh (2005 Est. 144 vs. 1951 Census 42 million)

86% Muslims (124 million)
13% Hindus (18 million)
1% Christians, Buddhists and Animists (1.44 million)
We Indians, perhaps, have forgot the hard facts.

Gyanesh Kudaisya in his research article`DIVIDED LANDSCAPES, FRAGMENTED IDENTITIES: EAST BENGAL REFUGEES AND THEIR REHABILITATION IN INDIA, 1947–79 ‘ considers the responses of Indian federal and provincial governments to the challenge of refugee rehabilitation. A study is made of the Dandakaranya scheme which was undertaken after 1958 to resettle the refugees by colonising forest land: the project was sited in a peninsular region marked by plateaus and hill ranges which the refugees, originally from the riverine and deltaic landscape of Bengal, found hard to accept. Despite substantial official rehabilitation efforts, the refugees demanded to be resettled back in their "natural habitat" of Indian Bengal. However, this was resisted by the state. Notwithstanding this opposition, a large number of East Bengal refugees moved back into regions which formed a part of erstwhile undivided Bengal where, without any government aid and planning, they colonised lands and created their own habitats. Many preferred to become squatters in the slums that sprawled in and around Calcutta. The complex interplay of identity and landscape, of dependence and self-help, that informed the choices which the refugees made in rebuilding their lives is analysed in the paper.

This is an abridged version of an essay published in the volume, Partition of Memory, ed., Suvir Kaul, Permanent Black, 2001. Thanks are to the publisher and editor of the volume.
Rights or Charity?
Relief and Rehabilitation in West Bengal
In the half-century since India was partitioned, more than twenty-five million refugees have crossed the frontier between East Pakistan and the state of West Bengal in India. The migration out of East Bengal, and the way the refugees were received by India was very different from West Pakistan. Unlike those from the west, the refugees from the east did not flood into India in one huge wave; they came sometimes in surges but often in trickles over five decades of independence.

The elemental violence of partition in the Punjab explains why millions crossed its plains in 1947. By contrast, the, causes of the much larger migration out o East Bengal over a longer time span are more complex That migration was caused by many different factors minorities found their fortunes rapidly declining as avenues of advancement and livelihood were foreclosed; they also experienced social harassment, whether open and fierce or covert and subtle, usually set against a backcloth o communal hostility which, in Hindu perception at least, was sometimes banked but always burning. Another critical factor was the ups and downs in India's relationship with Pakistan which powerfully influenced why and when the refugees fled to West Bengal.

Given this context, the strikingly different way in which the Government of India viewed the refugee problem in the east and in the west is not altogether surprising. The crisis in Punjab was seen as a national emergency, to be tackled on a war footing. From the start, government accepted that a transfer of population with Pakistan was inevitable and irreversible. So it readily committed itself to the view that refugees from the west would have to be fully and permanently rehabilitated. It also quickly decided that Muslim evacuee property would be given to the refugees as the cornerstone of its programmes of rehabilitating them.

The influx of refugees into Bengal, on the other hand, was seen in a very different light. In Nehru's view, and this was typical of the Congress High Command, conditions in East Bengal did not constitute a grave danger to its Hindu minorities. Delhi regarded their flight as the product of imaginary fears and baseless rumours, rather than the consequence of palpable threats to life, limb and property. Well after it had begun, Nehru continued to believe that the exodus could be halted, even reversed, provided government in Dacca could be persuaded to deploy 'psychological measures' to restore confidence among the Hindu minorities. The Inter-Dominion Agreement of April 1948 was designed, Canute-like, to prevent the tide coming in. In the meantime, government gave relief to refugees from East Bengal as a stop-gap measure since permanent rehabilitation was thought unnecessary; indeed it was to be discouraged.

So it set itself against the redistribution of the property of Muslim evacuees from Bengal to incoming Hindu refugees; the policy was to hold it in trust for the Muslims until they too returned home. The official line was grounded in the belief that Bengali refugees crossing the border in either direction could, and indeed should, be persuaded to return home. Even after the number of refugees in Bengal had outstripped those from Punjab, such relief and rehabilitation measures as government put into place still bore the mark of its unwillingness to accept that the problem would not simply go away.

This was what led the refugees to demand that government give them what they regarded as their 'rights'. Their movement of protest embroiled refugees and government in a bitter, long-drawn-out battle over what legitimately could be expected from the state. The nub of the matter was quite simple: did the refugees have rights to relief and permanent rehabilitation, and did government have a responsibility to satisfy these rights? In examining what divided the government and the refugees, I wish to assess how far apart the positions of the refugees and the government were and how different the premises on which they were based. In the process I shall try to locate the role that marginal groups, notably the refugees, have played in creating notions of legitimacy and citizenship that came to challenge India's new orthodoxies.

The construction of relief as charity
Campaigns by refugees against government diktat were a persistent feature of political life in West Bengal well into the nineteen?sixties, but the formative period coincided with the initial wave of migration between 1947 and 1950. The issues began to crystallise after the Government of West Bengal decided td deny relief to 'able-bodied males' and to phase out relief camps. As soon as refugees demanded a say in their rehabilitation, the battle lines were drawn. Stopping free relief to able-bodied males was the first of a series of measures to limit government's liability towards the refugees. The essence of the policy was to whittle down, by one device or another, the numbers eligible for help from the state. By November 1948, as soon as the surge in migration caused largely by events in Hyderabad began to tail off, government was quick to claim that the worst was over; some officials, adding their two-annas' bit, even argued that the lure of handouts was itself attracting migrants.

In late 1948, the government began to put a new and harsher policy into place. On 25 November 1948, Cakift announced that only refugees, defined as persons ordinarily resident in East Bengal who entered West Bengal between 1 June 1947 and 25 June 1948, "on account of civil disturbances or fear of such disturbances or the partition of India, would be entitled to relief and rehabilitation. A second order in December 1948 declared that no more refugees would be registered after 15 January 1949, further cutting back the official definition of a "refugee". A month earlier, on 22 November 1948, the Government of West Bengal had decreed that no 'able-bodied male immigrant' capable of earning a living would be given gratuitous relief for himself or his family for more than a week. After that, relief would be conditional only against works.

It was all very well for government to offer relief against works, but there weren't any such "works" and government gave no assurance that it would create them. Instead, the official line was that the immigrant "through his own effort" must find suitable work. Male refugees capable of working had somehow instantly and miraculously to find for themselves jobs, sufficiently remunerative to feed, clothe and house themselves and their families, within seven days of crossing the border. Furthermore, government urged refugees go anywhere in West Bengal except Calcutta and its suburbs, where casual employment was most easily to be found.

To begin with, government had allowed camp officers discretion to make exceptions in those cases where they felt that free relief (or "doles", as they were called in terminology unattractively reminiscent of the Poor Law) was "essential for preservation of life". Put bluntly, government realised that it would not look good if people starved to death in its camps. Two months later, however, in the wake of refugee hunger strikes against its directives, it hardened its heart.

On 15 February 1949 the new national government decreed that "such able bodied immigrants as do not accept offers of employment or rehabilitation facilities without justification should be denied gratuitous relief even if they may be found starving" (Memo No. 800 (14) R.R., Secretary, Relief and Rehabilitation Department, Government of West Bengal, to all District Officers, 15 February 1949; emphasis added). This decision was reiterated towards the end of March 1949.

In a directive aimed at "soft" camp superintendents suspected of being susceptible to pressures from refugees, it laid down that free relief must not be given to anyone merely because he was found starving once, the underlying principle being that an able bodied male must earn his own living, and should not be made to feel, under any circumstances, that he can at any time be a charge on the state" (Memo No. 1745 (10) R.R.,/18R-18/49, from the Secretary, Relief and Rehabilitation Department, Government of West Bengal, to all District Officers, dated 29 March 1949).

In July 1949, Calcutta announced that all relief camps in West Bengal must be closed down by 31 October 1949, and ordered that rehabilitation of the inmates be completed by that date. From now on it would only rehabilitate those few persons it chose to define as refugees, Refugees should expect no further relief and would be entitled only to whatever crumbs by way of rehabilitation government decided to offer them. This was the first in a series of official announcements by which it was made unequivocally clear that refugees had no choice in the matter. They had to take what was offered or get nothing at all.

What government set out to do, at least in the prospectus, was to encourage refugees to be self employed. Categorised by their social background and training, refugees were to be offered soft loans of varying amounts to enable them to buy appropriate equipment, tools or supplies in order to set themselves up as entrepreneurs. Those who felt they had neither the training nor the talent for entrepreneurship but wanted 'proper jobs' instead, those who preferred to stay on in camps or 'deserted' 'rehabilitation colonies' were given no choice. They had to do as they were told or lose all claim to the meagre benefits on offer.

These directives give an insight into the government's view of its responsibilities towards the refugees. By attempting repeatedly to restrict the definition of who could claim to be a 'refugee', government showed that it had to accept, however grudgingly, that it could not altogether avoid responsibility for those displaced by partition. The fine platitude, frequently voiced in the documents of the Rehabilitation Department, was that "to succour and rehabilitate the victims of communal passion [was] an obligation the country [was] solemnly pledged to honour". (Quotation from Bhaskar Rao, The Story of Rehabilitation, p. 229)
In practice, however, government strove to limit its liability by cutting its definition of the term 'refugee' to the bone. A refugee, Calcutta declared, was a person who had migrated before the end of June 1948 and registered himself as such before January 1949 - a key device by which government sought to achieve this objective to limit its definition of "partition" itself. By its edict, partition was defined as occurrences, which began in June 1947 (or six months earlier in December 1946 if the refugee had happened to live in Noakhali or Tippera) and abruptly came to an end one year later in June 1948. That partition was a process which began in 1947, but whose impact continued to unfold long after June 1948 was obvious to everyone outside the Writers Building. But by adopting these myopic, self-serving definitions, Bengal's new rulers lost the ability to anticipate and effectively react to the ongoing problems caused by partition. Not surprisingly, they were caught off guard by each new crisis.

In a similar vein, 'the government strictly defined what could be deemed to be the effects of partition. According to its taxonomy, "civil disturbances" alone -that is communal violence or discrimination against minorities - were accepted as genuine "effects" of partition. Only those who had fled communal violence were regarded as "genuine" victims of partition and therefore as refugees entitled to protection from the Indian state.

But economic hardship in East Bengal - wfiere famine stalked the land and where food cost much more than anywhere else in India - was not accepted as a consequence of partition. It may have been obvious to others that partition had directly and disastrously affected the livelihoods of millions of people, Hindus and Muslims, in both Bengals, but migrants tossed across borders by the pitchfork of necessity were not deemed by government to be genuine victims of partition or as "true" refugees.

So it followed that they were not in any sense the responsibility of the Indian state. This helps to explain why the Government of India treated the refugees from Punjab, where communal violence came close to being genocide, so differently from the refugees from East Bengal, where the violence was never remotely on this scale. The Prime Minister justified to the Chief Minister of West Bengal the striking difference in expenditure per capita on refugees in the West and East by arguing that while 'there was something elemental' about the situation in West Pakistan, "where practically all Hindus and Sikhs have been driven out", whereas in the East it was more gradual, and many Hindus had been able to remain. (Jawaharlal Nehru to B.C. Roy, 2 December 1949, cited in Saroj Chakrabarti, With Dr. B.C. Roy, p. 143).

The official definition of the refugee as victim deserves closer scrutiny, as it provides another key to assess the tenuous morality behind government's attitude. Only bona-fide victims were entitled to relief and rehabilitation. To be eligible for relief, the victims had to register themselves. In December 1948, when government made public its decision to shut down registration offices by 15 January 1949, it justified the edict by arguing that refugees who were "genuinely interested" had been given "ample time" to register (Relief and Rehabilitation Department, Government of West Bengal, Memo, 20 December 1948, in GB IB 1838/48).

This introduced a new refinement to the horrors of partition - a "desperation index" in the procedures by which a refugee was prevented from claiming benefits. If a refugee was truly desperate, government argued, he would have found his way to a registration office by mid-January 1949. It he didn't, that was the proof positive that the person claiming refugee status could not have been sufficiently desperate to require relief. In this way, government at a stroke cut down a huge problem to a size it felt it could handle.

This had far-reaching implications for the way in which government responded to 'refugee demands once they came to be voiced in an organised way. By definition, victims are not commanders of their own destiny; victims are not agents. Rather they are the "innocent", passive, objects of persecution, casualties of fate. Significantly, the state's favourite euphemism for refugees was "displaced persons", with connotations of innocent victims dislocated by events in whose shaping they had played no part. This helped government to justify treating the refugees from West Pakistan and East Bengal with such an uneven hand.

Nehru's point was that the Punjabis had been driven out from their homes. Bengalis, by contrast, by migrating in fits and starts, proved that they had the option of staying or of leaving. According to the official line, a true refugee or victim had no choice and was not a free agent. He could therefore not be expected to exercise volition, or have any choice over how or when he was to leave the country he lived, and where, when and how he sought refuge in the country he now lived in. By defining refugees in this way, government could argue that it helped refugees not because of any obligation but voluntarily, out of the goodness of its heart. In effect, what the refugee received was charity. Since the recipient of charity has no right over how much or what he is given, so too the refugee had no moral right to relief, nor any say over what was doled out to him.

This construction of relief and rehabilitation as charity is seen most explicitly when government decided at a stroke to stop "doles" for able-bodied males and to shut down its camps. In its defence, government insisted that doles were simply a form of official charity. If able-bodied men accepted these handouts, this would erode their moral bier and get them accustomed to a culture of dependency. "Living on the permanent charity of doles" would, it was argued, make them "sink into a state of hopeless demoralisation". Camps, likewise, were seen as "symbols of permanent dependence" (The Story of Rehabilitation, p. 160).

So while the refugees survived on the barest rations, government was able to represent its relief to the refugees as "charity" (and to congratulate itself for being so charitable), and at the same time reprimand the refugees for daring to expect its charity. This double-edged policy of charity so dominated official thinking that it suggests that it was the very touchstone of rehabilitation policy. In official pronouncements, the notion that charity bred a demoralising "dependence" inconsistent with manly self-respect was seen as an obvious truth, alluding to what was considered as common currency of Indian culture.

But was this view of charity the generally accepted one in a social milieu where dana, dakshina and bhjksha had long been vital elements of religious and social life, and where the renouncer who lived on alms was venerated at least as much as the house-holder? It is by no means clear that it was. By all accounts, this view was of recent origin, even in Europe, where "in the old days, -the beggar who knocked at the rich man's door was regarded as a messenger from God, and might even be Christ in disguise". By the late eighteenth century, accepting charity had already begun to attract social odium; a century later, the wheel had come full circle and charity was seen as "injuring" those it was intended to aid. Likewise it was only in industrial Europe that 'dependency' came to denote a stigmatised condition, appropriate only for women, children and the infirm.

When England put its New Poor Law onto the statute book in 1834, this attitude informed the amendment which aimed broth to deter the poor from resorting to public assistance and to stigmatise those who did. By the early twentieth century, dependency had come to be taken as a mark of debility of character rather than a function of poverty. So an able-bodied male who came to be dependent was seen as the epitome of the 'undeserving poor', since it was not poverty, but a man's lack of self-respect, that caused his dependence. And because it was only acceptable for women and children to be dependent, an able-bodied dependent man was seen to have the perceived attributes of women and children: weakness, idleness, passivity and irresponsibility.

These imported European attitudes towards charity and dependency were deployed with such great effect by India's policy-makers because in their passage to Bengal, they assumed highly charged local inflections and particular resonances of their own. In one of the deeper ironies of Bengal's modern history, this way of thinking happened to fit neatly with a pre-existing tradition among its colonial masters about the flawed character of the Bengali Hindu male. In the nineteenth century, British officials had conventionally regarded physical weakness and lack of vigour, lethargy, effeminacy and an absence of moral backbone as the very essence of the Bengali babu's being. By the mid-twentieth century, the Bengali Hindu male was thus seen by his imperial critic as a deplorable combination of the worst feminine and childish qualities.

Writing on rehabilitation by officers in Delhi and Calcutta unconsciously aped the prejudices of their erstwhile masters, thus bringing together two borrowed traditions-one from Europe and the other from colonial India's recent past - to produce a new and potent stereotype of the Bengali refugee. This characterisation was drawn in counter-point an equally hackneyed, but far more flattering, picture of the Punjabi refugee, whose 'toughness ... sturdy sense of self-reliance... [and] pride' never let them 'submit to the indignity of living on doles and charity'.

The Punjabi refugee, heir of the material races who were the darlings of the post-Mutiny Raj, was thus held up by independent Indian officialdom as the model of the 'deserving poor'. (The outrageousness of this statement is apparent given that Government allocated many thousand acres of land to the Punjabis, disbursed Rs 11 million among them for the purchase of livestock, and a gave them a further Rs 44 million in grants, loans and advances).

The contrast drawn by the officials between the Punjabi and the Bengali refugee could hardly have been sharper. The "character of the refugees themselves" was blamed for the failings of the rehabilitation effort in West Bengal. The official view was that his very disposition rendered the Bengali male refugee prone to fall into a state f dependency and therefore incapable of breaking out of it. Whereas "in the West, the refugee matched government efforts on his behalf with an overwhelming passion to be absorbed into the normal routine of living", in Bengal, "the government had to supply the initiative as well as the motive power. To overcome the apathy, even the sullenness, of the displaced person was itself no small task. It called for patience and tact, endless sympathy joined to occasional firmness..."

Here, the thesis brought together two different lines f argument. The first was that their qualities of character included a psychological dependency amongst Bengali ales, which rendered them incapable of making rational decisions for themselves. Because they were dependent, any judgment of their own about themselves and their lives and times had no value: it was as feeble and untrustworthy s the judgment of women and children.
The second line of argument, again borrowed from the vocabulary of the Raj, was that the state's relation to this dross of humankind was that of, surrogate patar families or benevolent despot. Because the refugees had placed themselves in its care, government had a duty to decide what was best for them. Government saw itself as standing in for the male breadwinner in relation to these unfortunates and therefore entitled to assert all the moral authority over them that a male breadwinner enjoys over his dependants.

Yet the refugees never made an issue of these contradictions. One reason might be that the impact of both constructions on their rights tended to be much the same in practice. If refugees were to be seen as dependent members of the national family, they could claim rights to maintenance only by virtue of their dependent status, and as dependants they were denied any other rights. If they were represented as recipients of voluntary charity, they had no claims whatever over the source of the charity. Indeed the very fact that they took charity showed them, in the official view, to be so 'psychologically dependent' that they were not fit to determine their own destinies. So the net effect of both positions-however mutually inconsistent-on refugees rights, could

Chhath Puja:a Real Lok Utsav Exemplary for social Justice
Palash Biswas
(c/o Mrs Arti Roy , Gosto Kanan, Sodepur, Kolkata- 700110)
You have no to surrender to the Brahmin Purohit. Any one whether belonging to caste hindu or the undeclasses consisting of dalits, tribals or backwards are equal on this occassion to worship the sun God. Chhath Puja is an Indian thanksgiving festival dedicated to the Sun God. During the celebrations of Chhath Puja, people gather on the banks of the River Ganges to bathe in its sacred water, pray and make ritual offerings to the Sun God. Chhath Puja is a highly elaborate festival noted for its impressive display of colorful costumes, music, singing and extravagant rituals. There we see no untoward incident taking place during this worship without any interference of Brahmins.
As we see that Shiva and Kali never have been the Vaidiki God and Coddess. but the Aryas led by the Brahmines declared Lord Shiva, Devadidev and digested the Shiva followers. Even before some decades only Kali had been used by the underclasses Chandals, Doms and Bgdi. But now the Brahminical system declared Kali an Avtar of Goddess durga, and establishing the supremacy of Brahminical rituals.
it is rather a very joyous experience to see Chhat festival uniting all believers belonging to the faith Hinduism and there seems to be no discrimination.
Religion is a matter of Very personal and spiritual faith and phenomenon. Chhatpuja is deep rooted in folk and culture and it sustains the basic concept of worship rather a dialogue between Bhagwan and Bhakta.

It seems very strange that despite the existence of Konark sun Temple , we do not see the same Lok Utsav being celebrated in Orrissa. It further proves the noninterference of Brhminical supremacy in Chhat puja at least. It is wonderful.
Thus, Chhatpuja should be recommended to be granted a national festival to strengthen national integrity which is quite impoosible to acquire without the understanding of our cultural roots deep in day today life of the people.

Chhath Puja takes place, sometime during the months of October and November, immediately following the six-day festival of lights known as Diwali. Chhath Puja lasts for one night and one day.

Chhath Puja is celebrated mainly in the northern regions of the Indian state of Bihar. The festival takes place, on the banks of the River Ganges, in people's homes and at the Sun Temple of Baragaon, two kilometers outside Nalanda, in Bihar. Chhath Puja is also celebrated in Varanasi in the state of Uttar Pradesh.

On the day before the festival of Chhath Puja, it is customary for participants to gather on the riverbanks and cleanse themselves, briefly, in the water of the River Ganges.
After cleansing, a token amount of sacred water is retained for use as offerings during the festival of Chhath Puja.
Before Chhath Puja, people fast throughout the day and into the early evening.
The fast is followed by worship in the home. Festive fare consisting of freshly harvested rice, puris (a local bread type delicacy), and fruit such as bananas, coconuts and grapefruit are then served to the family.
On the second day of Chhath Puja a strict 24-hour fast is observed; not even water is consumed.
Cooking utensils are purified by the senior women of the household, as part of the ritual preparation of offerings for the main part of the celebration of Chhath Puja.
At sunset, worshippers proceed to the riverbank bearing their offerings in baskets held high to avoid the impure touch of human hands.
The participants then pay homage to the Sun God, at the precise moment of the setting sun.
Further celebrations take place at nightfall under temporary canopies made from sugar cane stalks where offerings are laid out as a tribute to the god of fire.
Well before sunrise, when the sky is pitch black, worshippers return to the riverbank to pray to the rising sun; this ritual is considered the focal point of the ceremony of Chhath Puja.
Following prayers and the purifying bathing ritual, the fast is ended with the offering, or prasad, to the Sun God.
Offerings are then shared with families, friends and fellow worshippers, accompanied by the chanting of the Rig Veda Gayatri Mantra to the Sun God.
Chath Puja: Useful Terms:
Surya: The sun (the Sun God is worshipped during the festival of Chhath Puja).
Chhath: In the context of Chhath Puja, Chhath refers to the number six and the importance of this date on the Indian festival calendar
Puja: Various interpretations exist of the word "puja," including worship with offerings, especially of flowers, and ritual anointment with sandalwood paste. Puja is the combination of the Sanskrit words for sin and birth.
Prasad: Ritual offerings.
Puris: This deep-fried bread, made from wheat flour, is traditionally offered at the festival of Chhath Puja.
Thekuwa: This is a wheat-based cake served during the festival of Chhath Puja.
Bihar
Bihar is a state in India and a center for Buddhist worship. Bihar is famous, worldwide, as the starting point for the "Buddhist pilgrimage circuit." The name "Bihar" derives from the word "vihara," meaning "Buddhist monastery."

Apart from the festival of Chhath Puja, Bihar is also associated with the lavish celebration of other major Indian festivals including Diwali, Ramnavami, Dussehra and Holi.

Shabana Azmi , the Activist, the Darling of Underclasses and the Actor
Palash Biswas
(c/o Mrs Arati Roy, Gosto Kanan, Sodepur, Kolkata- 700110, India. Phone: 033-25659551- R)

The news fills my heart with joy as we the Indians concerned with underclasses do love her as she is an activist who fights for the underclasses, persecuted by the ruling classes of this subcontinent. Yes,Versatile actress and noted social activist Shabana Azmi received the International Gandhi Peace Prize in London for her exemplary work for underprivileged women, especially in the slums of Mumbai through her movement 'Nivara Hakk'. The actor's struggle for slum dwellers has now resulted in the construction of 30,000 homes under a tripartite agreement among the charity, a private builder and the Maharashtra government.

Actor and social activist Vanessa Redgrave, who bestowed on Shabana the prestigious award, said Shabana was a special person and the world desperately needs people like her.

The Gandhi Foundation, presided over by Gandhi director Sir Richard Attenborough, will celebrate the 140th anniversary of the Mahatma's birth in 2009.

She is the first Indian to be honoured with this award.She was given the award for her struggle adopting Gandhian means, to ensure the rehabilitation of displaced slum dwellers in Mumbai at a time when India is rediscovering the voice and ways of the Father of the Nation. "We need to look at the model of development that we are following. It cannot progress at the cost of many, benefiting only a few," said Azmi.

It's in real life, not the movies, where SHABANA AZMI plays her biggest part—as a crusader against injustice. When I saw her in Shyam Benegal`s film `Ankur’, we knew her just as the highprofile daughter of Kaifi and shaukat Azmi. Since then she has identified with all the people`s movement in India. There may be many more great actresses in the history of Indian cinema, but the role she plays out of reel life may not be compared with others. She along with Smita Patil deglamourized the traditional female lead on screen and upheld the identity of dalit woman in general.Her passion is incontrovertible. Her ego can easily tend toward excessive. Her talent keeps her famous, and her pulchritude made her that way. In Bollywood, she tired of formulaic fare and is one of the few marquee actresses willing to risk reputation to take adventurous roles in experimental films. Her portrayal of a lonely woman who falls in love with her sister-in-law in Deepa Mehta's 1998 film Fire sparked threats of a ban by censors and violent protests by fundamentalists enraged at the depiction of lesbianism in middle-class India.

We saw her with others coming to Meerut by foot from New delhi in protest of Maliyana massacres in the later part of eighties. At that time , I was in Meerut. I may not forget the occassion as it was the last meeting with Shankar Guha Niyogi, the murdered leader of Chhattishgarh Mukti Morcha.Since then, we have seen her active everywhere whenever human and civil rights are violeted.Azmi's activism has angered both Hindu and Muslim radicals as well as a variety of vested interests. But she doesn't care. "I am a daughter, a wife, a mother, a woman, an actress, an Indian and a Muslim," she says. "Each of those identities is important to me." And she doesn't intend to let anyone forget it.

The actor who was in UK to accept the award, questioned the use of the veil by women in Islam, in a country where the veil has attracted a lot of attention in the recent weeks.The veil is debated upon as a symbol of the separateness and ghettoisation of the Muslim community.

Shabana Azmi became the first Indian recipient of the International Gandhi Peace Prize in the House of Commons, clearly a mark of the increasing recognition Indians are getting on the international stage. She is humbled by the honour whose previous recipients include the Dalai Lama and Archbishop Desmond Tutu, among others.''It is a great honour that somehow my name can be linked to Mahatma Gandhi,'' she added.

Speaking on non-violence, the actor said, ''Violence should be discarded not just on high moral ground but on the reality that it does not work. It only spirals downwards. The greatest lesson from the father of the nation is that he was capable of standing up against an adversary, while recognising his rights.''

Azmi, who was described by no less than a person Satyajit Ray, as the finest dramatic actress of India, told PTI "I am honoured at being chosen for such an outstanding award, whose previous recipients included the Dalai Lama."She said she was happy that her involvement for rehabilitation of slum dwellers had borne fruit. At least 13,000 slum dwellers have been rehabilitated owing to her effort.

She has unequivocally condemned and fought against religious fundamentalism, on hundreds of occasions from different platforms. She has never lagged behind in any endeavour to normalise matters, whenever communal amity and peace is held to ransom by anti-social elements. Shabana Azmi is always at the forefront in fight for a just cause whether it is for the cause of slum dwellers of Mumbai or for alleviation of those suffering from AIDS.
As an actress, may be Shabana is past her prime. But as a champion of progressive ideas, national integrity, peace and harmony she has many more miles to traverse. We wish her a long life so that she keeps on serving the society with the ardour, so inherently characteristic of her.

Azmi has starred in some of the greatest Indian films like Ankur, Mandi, Arth, Khandar, Paar, Sparsh, Godmother and Tehzeeb.

Azmi is already the recipient of the National Award for Best Actress five times, which includes receiving the coveted gong thrice in a row from 1983-85 for her roles in the films Arth, Khandar and Paar. Her other achievements include the Filmfare Award for Best Actress three times and the Filmfare Life Time Achievement Award.

She has also received the prestigious Crystal Award at the World Economic Forum - Davos, 2006 for her contributions in the field of culture.

But the measure of Shabana Azmi's humanity is none of those things. It is her willingness to say, simply, what others are frightened of saying. "The trouble," says Azmi, "is that I can never keep quiet." That volubility has indeed caused her problems, but it's also made the 51-year-old Indian actress an outspoken secular hero espousing tolerance in a state riven by religious conflict.

It should be very clear that it's not her movie roles that have made her a hero for modern India. She has consistently—and loudly—railed against real-world injustice. Early in her career, she took up the cause of slum dwellers in Bombay—where she lives—who had been ruthlessly evicted by municipal authorities. Since 1993, appalled by the then bloody riots between Muslims and Hindus, Azmi, a Muslim, has become a forceful critic of communalism and a tireless crusader to end religious extremism.

Azmi does not just fight for her co-religionists. In fact, her greatest battle has been against fundamentalist Islamic leaders. Post-Sept. 11, Azmi was among the first in the country to publicly criticize militant Islam. When the imam of Jama Masjid, India's largest mosque, said Indian Muslims should join the jihad in Afghanistan, Azmi urged him to go—alone. Her outburst encouraged other Muslim moderates to step forward and counsel tolerance.

Shabana Azmi is the resurgent face of feminism of modern India. It is a different matter that she is equally acclaimed for her brilliance on the celluloid. Her social activism and the courage to call a spade a spade, has made her a cut above the rest, of the usual lot of Bollywood stars. Shabana’s striking countenance that fits into a vast spectrum of roles; coupled with her unmatched prowess, to emote and empathise with versatile characters, has made her hold sway on a genre of cinema for three decades. She is the pioneer of parallel movement in the Indian cinema and is the undisputed monarch of her territory. It is highly unlikely that times shall find her an heir, to carry forward her prolific legacy.

Shabana is quoted by Hindu, "What worries me is that so many women are coming into television as directors and writers and still there is no change. It's because they are coming with a different agenda, propelled not by women's empowerment but by market forces."

A part of the article published by Hindu as follows:

`BEING AN actress, you would think, would be a self-absorbing thing, leaving little time to dwell on things outside yourself. That too if you are an actress who has set such standards of performance that no treatise on Indian cinema would be complete without a reference to you. But not so for Shabana Azmi. Parliamentarian, goodwill ambassador to the UNFPA and one of the most vocal and visible faces of activism in India, Shabana Azmi's walk from actress nonpareil to activist began more than a decade ago when she joined hands with film-maker, Anand Patwardhan, to raise her voice on behalf of the slum dwellers, who in cities like Mumbai constitute over 70 per cent of the population and yet have no rights as citizens. With Nivara Haq Samiti, Shabana fought — and continues to fight for the past 16 years. As she puts it, ``if these people ever decide to go on strike, the cities will come to a grinding halt.''

Since then, Shabana has championed many causes — some of the most visible being her fight against the suppression of creative expression and her subsequent brush with the saffron brigade when she was to star in Deepa Mehta's ``Water." (Her controversial role in Mehta's earlier film, ``Fire'' had already set the tone of that debate!)

And more recently, she became the voice of the liberal Muslim and was in the eye of a storm when she suggested that Imam Bukhari should be airdropped in Afghanistan for supporting the Taliban so that he could fight for them. The Imam's insulting rejoinder — that too on national television — evoked a shocked response across the country and in Parliament, but did not deter a dignified Shabana who said that it only went to show the Imam for what he was...

Shabana Azmi. Celebrity with a cause (several, actually). Incredibly articulate, passionately committed, with a rare felicity with sound bytes; all these combined with liberal dollops of politically correct glamour. Naturally she was one of the main draws at a recent theatre festival in Mysore. The history books controversy was just freshly hatched, the festival's theme was one dear to her heart — the state of the contemporary Indian woman — and Shabana was in full sail...

Talking to Shabana Azmi is like sailing down a river. All you can do is flow with the current, strong, sure, impatient if you interrupt or resist, taking you inexorably downstream...”

Here is an interview:

On women's empowerment, Shabana has this to say:

``We can't talk about empowering women without redefining the concept of power. To me, power is legitimate authority rather than something that you use against another section of society in order to control it and be more powerful. It is about the sharing of power.

Empowerment has to happen from within, from women themselves. If people step in from outside saying, "We will empower," they can do nothing. Empowerment is facilitating, encouraging women to articulate their needs, about which they are already very clear.

The problem with the empowerment of women in India is...

Women's empowerment without two things is impossible.

The first is education — and it's not just enough to make women literate. We have to give them education that will shape and change their outlook. Look at the kind of education that women get today — full of gender stereotyping and with a strong communal bias. This is dangerous. We need to change that and educate the woman to re-define herself and her role in society.

The second is economic independence. Again it is not enough for the woman to earn money, she must also have the right to spend it. We still have working women having to ask their mothers-in-law permission to buy a sari. Empowerment is not just the right to earn, but the right to spend as well...

So, what should be the first move?

First, we must educate the girl child. Secondly, women must have access to health care. Health is on nobody's agenda and women's health even less so. What really pains me is that 54 years after independence, we still haven't been able to provide safe motherhood in India and 70 per cent of maternal deaths are entirely preventable.

So, is the empowerment of Indian women really happening? What about places like U.P. and Bihar?

A lot is happening. Maybe not as rapidly as we'd like it to, but it's happening all the same. Obviously it's going to happen unequally because of the differences in social development between States. But that's no reason to despair at all. The wonderful part is that the women's movement in India has developed its own indigenous model where the focus is on empowering women in groups rather than individually as is the Western focus.

The ideas that are going to revolutionise women's movement...

Micro credit. It's shaking traditional family structures because suddenly it is the woman who has access to money and funding and that forces society to look again at who she is and what she stands for... That is why movements like SEWA are so powerful. They empower women not just to earn money but also to manage it themselves.

The Panchayati Raj. When women become sarpanchs, they are being placed at the centre of group development units and that becomes very empowering. It's interesting to see how different the issues are for women sarpanchs versus the male ones. The women want access to water, to firewood and schools for their children, whereas the men want to build community centres — brick and mortar things.

On the regressive stereotyping of women in prime time television serials and why they are so popular...

What worries me is that so many women are coming into television as directors and writers and still there is no change. It's because they are coming with a different agenda, propelled not by women's empowerment but by market forces.

On social change...

I truly believe that change can only occur if society's action complements government action. It's all very well to blame the State, but are you with the problem or are you with the solution? I want to be part of the solution and I'll do anything for that...

Shabana Azmi made her debut in Shayam Benegal’s Ankur (1972). The film paid her rich dividends. Ankur not only became a harbinger of the parallel cinema, but also fetched her the first National Award. Later she went on to win another four – a feat unparalleled in the annals of film industry. Eight years and fifteen films after her debut, she showcased her greatest award winning performance in Mahesh Bhatt’s Arth (1982). Arth brought her yet another National Award and her first Filmfare award. It also placed her firmly in the orbit of the galaxy of film stars. She played a castaway wife, who had the mettle to take on the world. An equally brilliant performance by her illustrious co-star, the late Smita Patil, goaded Shabana to churn out her best. The rest of the three National Awards came from Khandar (1984), Paar (1985) and Godmother (1999). In Doosri Dulhan (1982), she played a prostitute to the hilt - the typical pan chewing and curse-spewing courtesan, who tries to seduce a millionaire out in search of a womb to father his child.

In the eighties, she acted in a large number of films. In her other two most popular films, like Swami (77) and Apne Paraye (80), based upon Saratchandra Chatterjee novels, she plays “the strong, traditional woman” who gracefully overcomes the infirmities associated with womanhood. Her second Filmfare award came from Bhavana. Swami won her the third Filmfare award for Best Actress. Masoom (1983), Khamosh (1985), Krishna (1987), Ek Admi (1988), and Disha (1990) moulded her image as an intelligent, responsible and thinking actress.

In the Immaculate Conception (1992), an English trans-cultural drama of Jamil Dehlvi, she played Samira- a Pakistani lady opposite James Wilby. The Son of Pink Panther directed by Blake Edwards; Rolland Joeff’s City of Joy; Nicholas Klotz’s The Bengali Night co -starred with John Hurt and Hugh Grant and John Schlesinger’s Madame Sousatzka (1988), all won her immense International acclaim.

It stands to her credit that she can flit from art roles to a popular jean wearing Bollywood glam girl with ease. Her appreciable performances in Amar Akbar Anthony (1976) and Fakira (1978) bear ample testimony to this fact. Shabana, the adventurist came to fore, in her foray into the controversial subject like lesbianism, in Deepa Mehta’s Fire (1996). In Mrityudand (1997), she picturised a barren woman who warms up to a socially inferior partner. To add further versatility to her profile, she played a witch in Vishal Bharadwaj’s horror flick- Makdi (2002). Lately, she figured in Khalid Mohamed’s Tehzeeb and easily overshadowed the skimpily clad co- artists.

Shabana, the actress of all seasons was included in the august jury of International Film Festivals held at Cairo and Montreal.

Shabana is married to an equally famous poet-lyricist and screenwriter husband Javed Akhtar. The Government of India honoured Shabana, a veteran of over hundred films with Padam Shri award in 1998. She was nominated to the Rajya Sabha, as a Member of Parliament by the President of India, an honour bestowed upon people who have attained excellence in their respective fields. She also has the distinction of holding the coveted post of United Nations Ambassador of Goodwill on Population and Development.

Wife of Lok Kavi Vijay sarkar is No More
Palash Biswas

Pramoda Devi, the wife of Bangla Kavigaan legend Lokkavi Vijay sarkar is no More. She had her last breath on 17 th october last. His bereaved son Kajal Adhikari passed the information on telephone belatedly. He had been in Delhi for a personal work and returned by plain to find his mother dead. No news break,pardon. Pramoda Devi was eighty two years old. She had two sons Kajal and Badal and a step daughter. She was married to the poet after the death of his first wife back in 1945, In Jassore district of Bangladesh. After partition they shifted to Keutia. She died in her Keutia residence. She had been ill for some time.

I knew the lady since 1973 when after my UP board highschool exams were over, I came to visit my Cusin, himself a fpolk poet Nitai sarkar in Keutia. My sister in law, the wife of Nitai da happens to be the grand daughter of the poet. So we have a family realtion. I visted the poet and his family as I knew about his contribution to Bengali folk culture back in Naintal. My people there, the resettled partition victims from estranged East Bengal could not forget the melody.

Since then, I always met the old lady at her residence during my occassional visit to Keutia.
In 2003, we organized a Lok Utsav in Netajee Indoor Stadium to celebrate the birth centenary of the poet. In the Lok Utasav, the ailing lady was brought and honoured in presence of thousands with standing ovation. Artists foro Assam, Tripura and bengal paid tribute to the poet on the occassion.

Only on 19 th february this year, Mr Subhash Chakrabarti, the sports and transport minister of West Bengal Govt inaugruated The 104 birth anniversary of
lok kavi Vijoy sarkar who with his melodious folklyrics stregthened
the heritage of Bengali folk culture accross the border. The lata
Mangeshkar of Bangladesh, the daughter of legendary Abbasuddin,Ms
firdausi Rehman was the guest of honour. Both Mr Chakrabarti and Ms
Rehman insisted to maintain the rich folk heritage to face the
dangers of globalisation. They said that only our folk can save our
mother language. They deplored the consumer deculturisation and
refered the Bangla Matribhash Struggle.Bangladesh TV star Nishad
kamal, vetern artists Amar Paul and Sanjeet Mandal and a number of
folk artists sang the songs of Vijay sarkar and Abbasuddin.
Director of Dhaka Bangla Academy Mr Shaqurrehaman informed the
audiance about the research worksof the academy on Vijay Sarkar in
particular and Bangla folk in general.
Deputy Registrar of Kolkata Univarsity Dr Nitish Biswas, novelist Mr
Kapil krishna Thakur,Chair person of Pather Panchaly Mrs
RamalaChakrabarti,kvi manoranjan Sarkar were other dignitariespresent
on the dias in Salt Lake Yuva Bharati Stadium.
Main function was celebrated in keutia on Kalyani highway,at the
residence of lokkavi Vijay sarkar on 20th and 21st Feb.All the
artists performed there, too. Particularly, the forgotten Jari Gaan was sung by Mr rousan Ali, the son of the legendari Jaari singer Moslem, Mr saiful and party.
Where once again , Pramoda Devi have been the main attraction.

CULTURAL AND FOLKLORE HERITAGE
2002 Bangladesh Sangbad Sangstha (BSS)
CULTURAL AND FOLKLORE HERITAGE
The definition of folklore might look long and tedious if we
say "Whenever a lullaby is sung to a child; whenever a tongue twister
or a riddle or a countingout time is used in nursery or school;
whenever sayings or proverbs are told; whenever a mother shows her
daughter how to sew, spin, weave, embroider, bake an old-fashioned
pie; whenever a farmer on the ancestral plot trains his son in the
ways long familiar; whenever a village craftsman, carpenter, carver,
shoemaker, blacksmith trains his apprentice in the use of tools;
whenever in may callings the knowledge, experience, wisdom, skill,
habits and practices of the past are handed down by examples or
spoken world, by the elder to the new generation, without reference
to books or print, then that is called Folklore." However, in
Bangladesh, there is an enormous amount of influence of folklore in
our old and modern Bengali literature. Therefore, to analyse and
understand our culture and literature, we must be familiar with the
folkloric heritage of Bangladesh and how it was collected over the
years. Being a Bangladeshi, it is good to learn something about our
rich heritage.

On 19 th february Mr Subhash Chakrabarti, the sports and transport
minister of West Bengal Govt inaugruated The 104 birth anniversary of
lok kavi Vijoy sarkar who with his melodious folklyrics stregthened
the heritage of Bengali folk culture accross the border. The lata
Mangeshkar of Bangladesh, the daughter of legendary Abbasuddin,Ms
firdausi Rehman was the guest of honour. Both Mr Chakrabarti and Ms
Rehman insisted to maintain the rich folk heritage to face the
dangers of globalisation. They said that only our folk can save our
mother language. They deplored the consumer deculturisation and
refered the Bangla Matribhash Struggle.Bangladesh TV star Nishad
kamal, vetern artists Amar Paul and Sanjeet Mandal and a number of
folk artists sang the songs of Vijay sarkar and Abbasuddin.
Director of Dhaka Bangla Academy Mr Shaqurrehaman informed the
audiance about the research worksof the academy on Vijay Sarkar in
particular and Bangla folk in general.
Deputy Registrar of Kolkata Univarsity Dr Nitish Biswas, novelist Mr
Kapil krishna Thakur,Chair person of Pather Panchaly Mrs
RamalaChakrabarti,kvi manoranjan Sarkar were other dignitariespresent
on the dias in Salt Lake Yuva Bharati Stadium.
Main function was celebrated in keutia on Kalyani highway,at the
residence of lokkavi Vijay sarkar on 20th and 21st Feb.All the
artists performed there, too.
Prticularly, the forgotten Jari Gaan was sung by Mr rousan Ali, the
son of thelegendari Jaari singer Moslem, Mr saiful and party.
Where ,once again , Pramoda Devi was the centre of all activities.

CULTURAL AND FOLKLORE HERITAGE
2002 Bangladesh Sangbad Sangstha (BSS)
CULTURAL AND FOLKLORE HERITAGE
The definition of folklore might look long and tedious if we
say "Whenever a lullaby is sung to a child; whenever a tongue twister
or a riddle or a countingout time is used in nursery or school;
whenever sayings or proverbs are told; whenever a mother shows her
daughter how to sew, spin, weave, embroider, bake an old-fashioned
pie; whenever a farmer on the ancestral plot trains his son in the
ways long familiar; whenever a village craftsman, carpenter, carver,
shoemaker, blacksmith trains his apprentice in the use of tools;
whenever in may callings the knowledge, experience, wisdom, skill,
habits and practices of the past are handed down by examples or
spoken world, by the elder to the new generation, without reference
to books or print, then that is called Folklore." However, in
Bangladesh, there is an enormous amount of influence of folklore in
our old and modern Bengali literature. Therefore, to analyse and
understand our culture and literature, we must be familiar with the
folkloric heritage of Bangladesh and how it was collected over the
years. Being a Bangladeshi, it is good to learn something about our
rich heritage.

If one is to make a historical survey of Bengali folklore,
covering all branches of formalised folklore, such as tales, songs,
ballads, proverbs, riddles, charms, superstitions, myths, legends and
similar traditional materials, he must be acquainted with social and
ethnic conditions of the country.
The folklore of Bangladesh is heavily influenced by different races
which were present years ago. The abundant folklore of the present-
day Bangladesh, therefore, contains a variety of elements, which is
partly to be explained by the historical forces.

From the third century AD onwards, the Mouryas, the Guptas, the
Palas, the Senas and the Muslims came one after another to rule the
land. As a result, they grafted their ways of life and cultural
traits on the indigenous population. Subsequently, Portuguese, French
and English ships anchored in the harbours of Bengal. They left not
only their merchandise but also their customs. Of these foreign
traders, the British became the most powerful. They were able to
consolidate their authority at the expense of the fading empire of
the Mughal rulers. The battle of Plassy in 1757 ended with the defeat
of the Nawab of Bengal. The British victory ensured the supremacy of
the British East India Company over the entire sub-continent, which
included Bangladesh, for nearly 200 years. As a result, the folklore
of Bangladesh presents an interesting variety, both anthropological
and sociological.

Since a number of races established in Bengal, it only naturally
follows that each race left its own mark and it was not only physical
but also cultural, which collectively formed the basis of the future
higher culture. There is no denying the fact that the first phase of
folklore collecting was started by the British rulers of India,
though the purpose behind it was obviously political and
administrative. As soon as the British East India Company became
ruler of Bengal it requested the British civil officers to learn
about the people of the land through their culture and customs.
Consequently, under the directive of the Company, scholars like
William Jones, a judge of the old Supreme Court, Calcutta,
established the Royal Asiatic Society of Bengal in the year 1784.
This Society promoted the study of the humanities, including the
materials later recognised as folklore.

Under the British initiative, the study of folklore was advanced
primarily by the British civil officers and European missionaries.

After the Sepoy Revolution of 1857, there followed more
congenial atmosphere to investigate folklore. In 1858, by a
proclamation of Queen Victoria, the administration was transferred
from the East India Company to a Viceroy, the representative of the
Queen of England. From then on, the English officials before leaving
England, were instructed to mix with the Indian people to try to gain
their confidence, and also to respect their religions, culture and
customs. The officials who came to India were clearly familiar with
the anthropology, ethnology and of course, folklore. The officials
launched many journals and publications, which richly contained
enormous quality of folklore materials.

Along with the civil servants, the missionaries of Great
Britain, Europe and the United States made important contribution to
the folklore collection and publication. Since their aim was to
preach Christianity among the natives, it was incumbent on them to
know the native customs. Among the missionaries, William Carey was
remarkable. He served in Fort William College from 1800-1831 and with
the help of native munshis he published a series of Bengali books,
edited newspapers and encouraged the translations of Sanskrit
folktales known in oral traditions.

Other missionaries, such as Caleb Wright and Right Rev.
Reginald, on the other hand, were causal travellers who kept
excellent information in their books about the customs and traditions
of our country. The missionaries were followed by the ontique
collectors such as Kanailal Ghosal, Rajendranath Benarjee and many
more.

The second phase of the folklore movement was introduced by
Bengali scholars of nationalistic tendencies. Rabindranath Tagore was
the pioneer during the period. From 1885 to 1899, he published four
essays showing the importance of Bengali folk literature. 'These four
essays were compiled in his book Loka-Sahitya (Folk Literature) in
1907. Tagore patronised others and he himself collected a large
number of folklore materials from his vast estate of East Bengal,
including Bangladesh. He himself wrote : "When I was at Selaidah, I
would always keep close contact with the Bauls (mystic folk singers)
and have discussion with them, and it was fact that I infused tunes
of Baul songs into many of my own songs". Many people say
that 'Tagore used numerous folklore themes in many of his poems,
songs, dramas, novels and short stories. Other scholars, who made
important contribution to folklore were Upendra Kishore Roy
Choudhury : Toontooni Pal (1910 Book on Toontooni) and Mitra Majumder
Takore: Thakur Mar Jhuli (1906 Grandmother Stories), Monsur Uddin
(collector of Baul songs), Jashim Uddin (who was famous for his
folklore themes in dramas and poetries) and Abbas Uddin(who made
folksongs popular).
The third phase of folklore movement began in Dhaka, then East
Bengal, in the year 1938, when the Eastern Mymensingh Literary
Society was established. This promoted the collection and study of
folklore. Folklore activities were, however, much accelerated when
the then government established the Bangla Academy in Dhaka in 1955
to promote research work on Bengali language and literature and
collected, preserved and published folklore materials. Folklore
candidates, appointed by the academy, worked in regions rich in
folklore. As a result, folklore materials of high quality poured in
on an unending stream. So far, the Bangla Academy has published many
books on folklore.

Bengali ballads which are called Gatha or Geetika in Bengali are
one of the earliest variety of folksongs. The dates of origin of
Bengali ballads will safely go to up to the Middle Ages, if not
earlier. Divergent opinions have been expressed as to the origin of
ballads. There are two contending groups : (1) communalistic, and (2)
individualistic.

The first group saw in ballads a continuing traditions from the
primitive ages and thought that these were made by a kind of communal
improvisations for communal recreation. Later, critic suggested that
people were too indefinite, too disorganised for such concerted
efforts, and that ballads were composed under the direction of a
leader who brought the necessary discipline in songs and who
functioned as the main organiser and guide. According to the critics,
after an individual ballad was composed, it passed on from people to
people, community to community through oral traditions. In the
process some were changed, improved and sometimes even deteriorated.
This individualistic theory has been accepted by the scholars at both
home and abroad.

Behind ever art is a man, behind the man is the race and behind
the race is the social and natural environment and these influences
are sure to be reflected on folklore. Bengali ballads give us an idea
of the Bengali society in the Middle Ages, its joy and sorrows,
laughter and tears. Bangladesh is the land of rivers -- almost all
villages are linked with rivers. There is a proverb which
says, "There is not a single village without a river or a rivulet and
a folk poet or a minstrel".

The struggle for existence was not as hard in Middle Ages as it
is today and the minstrels and folk poets had ample opportunity to
enjoy nature and pass care-free-time in composing songs and stories.
Moreover, they were always patronised by the local feudal lords.

It was, of course, Islam that gave the highest acceleration to
the development of the Bengali ballads. The Turks conquered Bengal at
the beginning of the 13th century. Muslims brought with them a huge
store of Persian literature. The low-caste Hindus for the first time
in their life had the opportunity to talk and mix with the conquering
race. They saw that there were no barriers to caste and creed among
Muslims and that all men were equal in Islam. In due course, the
influence of the Persian romances reached the remote corner of the
country. Gradually, the Hindu society also came to know of this and
humanism like the south wind blew over the literature of Bengal. Even
though these stories and songs were composed earlier, they were
unfortunately collected from the oral tradition only by the second
decade of the 20th century. It is quite obvious that these stories
underwent a great change. Earlier the poets were patronised by the
feudal lords, but in the later period probably when the poets lost
their patrons in the British period, they became the "property of the
masses rather than the classes". May be, for this reason the quality
of the folk stories and songs, composed in the later period,
deteriorated.

Many stories and songs have been collected till now. The ballads
are usually sung in accompaniment with tabors, drums, and other folk
instruments. Ballad stories are sung by a leader who is
called "Gayen' and he has a group of associate singers called 'Paile'
who join in the chorus in illustrating the episodes.

There are innumerable varieties of folk songs in the riverine
Bangladesh which are sung by different cultural groups in different
parts of the country. The most popular variety of songs can be
divided into many different classes.

The first class of songs can be divided into "Work songs"
or "Occupational songs". These songs include harvest songs, which are
sung at the time of harvest or cultivation; songs of the bullockcart
drivers or palan-quin-bearers sung at the time of carrying passengers
from one place to another; songs sung by labourers when they built
roofs of a house; 'sari-gaan', sung by boatmen in the month of
monsoon, at the time of boat race, etc.

Kavi, however, bases mostly Hindu myths and legends and is also
sung by two rival singers. They are usually sung at the time of Hindu
festivals. Kavi, like Jari, may also be sung throughout the year for
pure entertainment.

Both Kavi and Jari sometimes go beyond the limit of their
particular subject and in the course of singing introduces modern
topics or amusing national and local events. Sometimes when ritual
singers indulge in personal attacks through the exchange of sharp
wits, the audience bursts into laughter. We see that all the folk
songs and stories of Bangladesh inform us about the then society. It
depicts clearly how the people used to think, their customs, and what
the principles they used to follow. Through all the folk materials
collected over the years we can learn more about our country's
history and tradition. We learn that Bangladesh has rich cultural and
folklore heritage, which may be compared with any other country of
the world rich in folklore. Since folklore has already been accepted
as a social, cultural and ethnic study, Bangladeshi Folklore will
also have a distinct place in the study.

Pl Publish if you chose

Anil Sarkar Demands to Identify Caste Hindu Creamy Layer, too

Plash Biswas

(contact: Palash Biswas, c/o Mrs arati roy, gosto kanan, Sodepur, kolkata-700110, India. Phone:033-25659551-r)
The Supreme Court upheld the constitutional validity of the amendment providing reservations for Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes for promotion in government jobs. But it said that the creamy layer has to be excluded from its benefits. A five-judge constitution bench, headed by Chief Justice Y K Sabharwal said, the overall limit of 50 per cent reservation cannot be exceeded under any circumstances. The court said that while providing reservation for promotion in government jobs, the state has to justify that the SCs and STs are not adequately represented and that administrative efficiencies are not impelled.The leftists led by cpim has opined that the apex court decision is unfortunate. Cpim dalit leader, poet and socil welfare minister of Tripura Anil Sarkar was present in the core group meeting held in New delhi on 20 th October.On way returning to Agartala, on a stopover in Kolkata Mr sarkar told that he has demanded to deduct the opportunities of promotion of caste Hindu creamy layer , too. Giving the details of the meeting he calaimed that the central HRD minister Arjun singh also supported his demand.
Sarkar also demanded a constitutional amendment to overcome the fifty percent bar fixed by the apex court so that not only OBC, but dalit christians and dalit muslims may be accomodated.
Representing the chief minister of Tripura, Manik sarkar, the minister alleged despite the given fifty percent quota dalits have only ten percent of jobs available as ninety percent job is captured by caste Hindus. According to him, policy making posts are never meant for Sc, St or Obc.
A meeting of Chief Ministers and Education Ministers of states and the core group of ministers looking after implementation of 27 percent reservation for OBC students in unaided institutions, held in New Delhi ton 20 th Oct. This meeting held in a bid to evolve a consensus on the issue of OBC quota in unaided institutions. It came in the wake of the Supreme Court's unhappiness over government's lack of data on the subject. A Core Group of Ministers headed by Defence Minister Mr. Pranab Mukherjee interacted with the state leaders on the issue after the introduction of the bill in Parliament concerning aided institutions. The exercise comes at a time when the apex court has taken a serious note of the proposal for the extension of reservation without any specific data in place. The court has observed that the Centre had preferred not to mention the important issue of "creamy layer" in its affidavit which, according to the Indra Sawhney judgement in the Mandal case, was to be kept away from the scope of reservation. The two-day meeting aimed at evolving a political consensus on quota in unaided educational institutions. Finance minister P chaidambaram was also present in the meeting.

The Supreme Court laid down general guidelines for holding timely elections to panchayats and municipalities. A five-judge Constitution Bench, headed by Chief Justice Y K Sabharwal said, the Election Commision should try to complete the elections before the expiry of the five-year term and only in exceptional circumstances like calamities or breakdown of law and order, the delay will be justified. The court said, under no circumstances, elections to panchayats and municipalities should be extended as a regular feature. It said, any revision of the electoral rolls should be carried out in time and if it cannot not be done in reasonable time, elections have to be conducted on the then existing rolls. Expressing confidence that the Election Commission will take steps to prepare the electoral rolls on time, the Bench said that under no circumstance, it shall be delayed in violation of the Constitution.

The Supreme Court has modified its order on the OBC reservation bill and said that the report of the parliamentary standing committee on the bill will be placed before it after being tabled in the House. The court’s directive on Monday had triggered a controversy with political parties coming out strongly against it. Most had pointed out that the parliamentary committees were accountable to only the Parliament.

Taking note of additional solicitor-general Gopal Subramanian’s point that the bill was under examination of the committee, the court, in its order signed on Tuesday has observed that “in all probability, it is submitted that the report, if received from the Parliament (committee), will be placed before the Parliament in the Winter Session which is likely to commence from November 27. Assurance is given by him (ASG) that a copy of the standing committee’s report shall be placed in a sealed cover before this court.”

In fact, the Supreme Court’s directive seeking a parliamentary report on the OBC reservation bill came up at the meeting of the HRD ministry’s standing committee on Wednesday. The issue is believed to have been mentioned at the meeting but not discussed in detail. What is, however, believed to have been discussed is the implementation process of the OBC reservation.
“Creamy Layer” introduced in OBC Quota

Children of the President, the Vice-President, Judges of the Supreme Court and High Courts will come under “Creamy Layer”- a special criteria fixed to exclude them from the benefit of OBC quota in government services and institutes.

Under this criteria persons having a gross annual income of Rs 2.5 lakh or above for three consecutive years will fall in the same category and their children would not get the reservation that are provided to OBC classes. Detailing the criteria, an official note said that children of officers holding equivalent or comparable posts in public sector units, banks, insurance companies, universities fall under this category.

The note has also clarified that children of doctors, lawyers, engineers, chartered accountants, management consultants, dental surgeon, architects, computer professionals, film artists, sports and media professionals or any other related persons will be excluded from the benefit. The criterion is introduced due to a recent “issue” on the 27% reservation for Other Backward Caste (OBC) in IIMs and IITs.

Arjun pitches for more funds to SC, ST, OBC students

On the eve of crucial meeting of Chief Ministers and Education Ministers of states here in a bid to evolve a consensus on the issue of OBC quota in unaided institutions, Human Resource Development Minister Arjun Singh on made a strong plea for Central assistance to children from SC, ST, OBCs and minorities and other weaker sections in the Eleventh Plan.

"The 11th Plan must come out boldly in favour of giving Central assistance for pre-matric as well as post-matric scholarships to children of SC, ST as well as OBCs/minorities (subject to a means test) and other weaker sections and at adequate rates," he said in a note at the full Planning Commission meeting chaired by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh.

Singh reminded the Plan panel that the commitments made by Congress party through its manifesto especially the National Common Minimum Programme need to be "articulated with greater stress" in the Approach Paper to the Plan. These included the need for removing agrarian distress, promoting employment-oriented growth and achieving food and nutrition security.

Report on quota bill in Parliament: Standing Committee : In the midst of a judiciary-versus-legislature debate, a Parliamentary committee on Wednesday asserted that its report on the OBC reservation in Central educational institutions would be tabled in Parliament.

"The Committee will submit its report to Parliament", senior Congress MP Janardan Dwivedi, Chairman of Parliamentary Standing Committee of the HRD Ministry, told PTI after a meeting in which the issue of the Supreme Court order seeking a report on the quota Bill came up. (Agencies)

BANGALORE: In a major setback to oversight committee's move to implement 27% OBC quota at the premier Indian Institutes of Management from 2007-'08, directors of six IIMs have thrown up their hands saying it would be practically impossible to implement the quota in one go.

The directors of all IIMs who met twice -- in Chennai and Bangalore -- on the quota issue have told the core group on management institutions chairman Samuel Paul that their plates are full and it would be unrealistic to launch reservation for OBCs on full scale from next June.

"To implement 27% reservations, IIMs will have to increase the intake by 54%. Given the shortage of faculty and inadequate infrastructure, none of the IIMs can handle this extent of expansion in just one year.We must stagger the implementation if quality is not to be compromised.

The preferred option would be to implement it in a modest way," Paul, former IIM-A director,who heads the core group on management schools, told The Times of India. If IIM-A has no land to even build a shed, IIM-Kozhikode has a peculiar problem. The IIM-K director has told the core group that as the institute is located in a hilly region, finding a contractor is difficult. The situation is grim even on the faculty front.

While the premier B-schools are struggling to fill even the sanctioned posts due to lack of qualified faculty, each IIM will have to recruit 23 additional faculty if the quota will have to be implemented.

"This scale of recruitment has never happened in any of the IIMs. Each institute recruits only about 5-6 faculty every year, but finding 23 professors will not only result in intense competition among the IIMs but may also lead to poaching," Paul said.

All IIM directors want the Centre to relax various norms to overcome limitations in implementing the quota plan. IIMs have suggested that their respective Board of Governors should be authorised to take final decisions on matters relating to recruitment, faculty compensation and capacity building to beat delay in getting government clearances.

"To attract good faculty you need to offer attractive salary. IIMs have not been able to offer good compensation since they are bound by the Pay Commission. The directors have suggested that the retirement age should be relaxed from 62 to 65 years.

Even during recruitment, the existing rules insist that the faculty has to be a Ph.D.

"In the areas of accounting, finance and marketing it is difficult to find a faculty with a Ph.D. In these areas a good chartered accountant may be appointed," Paul said.

Though a final meeting of IIM directors to finalise their recommendations is scheduled for next week, Paul feels the entire exercise would be futile if the Brand IIM suffers due to quota.

"There is immense pressure on IIMs to implement quota because the intake is limited and pay packets are the best in the country. The government has to ensure that the brand is not destroyed while implementing reservations. If there is no brand, nobody gains -- including the OBC.

'

You may publish the matter if you likeit.
Imaginary Lines and Manipur
Palash Biswas
(Contact: c/o Mrs Arati Roy, Gosto Kanan, Sodepur, Kolkata-700110, India.Phone: 033-25659551)
IMPHAL, 17 October, 2006
The city observed a total bandh as President A P J Abdul Kalam arrived on a day-long visit on Monday. The nine-hour strike was called by the Apunba Lup, an umbrella organisation of various bodies, in protest against continuing imposition of the Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA). Kalam is the supreme commander of the armed forces. Three student organisations and the underground Revolutionary People's Front also boycotted Kalam's visit citing different reasons. The strike disrupted life in Imphal. Educational institutions and business establishments were closed and the streets wore a deserted look. Except for ceremonial and emergency services, no vehicles plied on the city. Life was affected in other parts of the state as well. Strike supporters burnt tyres on the streets and women staged a demonstration on Imphal Airport Road demanding repeal of the AFSPA. Manipur is undoubtedly the only State in India besieged by nearly 30 militant organizations. The power of the State administration does not run beyond a few kilometers from the capital. The situation in Manipur has become one of the most serious threats to national security today.
Over 58 years of Indian Independence, nobody in India realized that the country's integrity was so threatened until a dozen Manipuri women shed their clothes in front of an Army garrison in the heart of the Imphal and taunted the soldiers to rape them. Only then the nation woke up and asked itself what was wrong in Manipur and why these otherwise conservative Manipuri ladies had taken such a desperate and extreme step.
Pardon Mr President, Your visits reminds me my experience in Manipur in 2001. On April 8th we landed on Imphul airport to shoot `Imaginary Lines’, a feature film directed by `A day with the Hangman fame’ three tiimes national award winning director Joshy Joseph. I wrote the dialogue of the film. We firsttimers were stunned to see around as if we were suddenly in a battlefield. We spent alittle more than two weeks in Manipur and shot in Morem kullain in district Senapati just Three KM away from Kohima. Experiencing the heat and dust of Manipur Morem Kulain to Loktak lake , we found the state people bleeding evrywhere and public were dead agnaist the repressive military measures adopted by the centre. They had banned Hindi in Manipur as they see Hindi a tool of Delhi`s imperialism. but we shot the Hindi film with full cooperation by local tribal Naga as well as the Maity people.
The story dealt with Delhi`s outlook towards northeast. The protaganist, played by Bengali famous artist Gautam Haldar, was semi drunk dreamer who knows Manipur as a state of classical Manipuri dances and martial art. He comes to Manipur to direct a docu film with development angle for the ministery and finds everything negative. His dilemma roots in his Delhi base so far from Manipur. i could write soliloquies for our hero, but I may not write just one for you. I belong to Uttaranchal, a Himalayan state and I know well the treatment of Delhi to all Himalayan states including Northeast. All roads run vertically in the Hills to get rich resources and manpower for army and serventry , and prostitution,too. We the hill people hardly have any way to go through our one people.
Mr President, we also tasted the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act as our heroin Ms Smita Ghate was harrassed by army in Imphul in full daylight despite she introduced herself as she is an IAS officer, now a district collector. Our local unit support Ibachoba was beaten when he was returning to outdoor shooting wth lunchpackets from the Hotel. He cried, `You Indians treat us like this.’
This is Manipur unknown by rest of India. The mood of Mnipur is well represented by Irom Sharmila, a Manipuri woman who has been on hunger strike for six years against human rights abuses in Manipur who shifted her fight unsuccessfully to New delhi on October 5 th this year only. Delhi Police have forcibly admitted Irom Sharmila Chanu into a hospital here after she refused to call off her six-year-long hunger strike."Sharmila was arrested and charged with attempted suicide soon after she began her fast. Before being brought to the capital, she was being force-fed through a nasal tube at a government-run hospital in Imphal, Manipur's capital.
Thirty-four-year-old, Sharmila, who walked to Raj Ghat said that she will fast until the government repeals the Armed Forces Act, which gives soldiers sweeping powers to kill suspected rebels. "Today, I come here for the first, perhaps the last time in my life and tomorrow. I come here simply to pay floral tribute to Mahatma Gandhi - my idol," she said.
Sharmila has become an iconic figure for the people of Manipur since she launched her hunger strike in late 2000 after soldiers shot 10 young men at a bus stop in a small town in Manipur.
She said the government had betrayed Gandhi's memory in its reaction to her peaceful protest and its treatment of the people of Manipur.Shortly after beginning her fast, Sharmila was arrested and charged with attempted suicide. Since then, authorities have been force-feeding her through a nasal tube in the government-run hospital in Imphal.The maximum term for her offence is one year and police have been in the habit of releasing her every year, only to re-arrest her the following day.
IThe Armed Forces Act only applies in Kashmir and insurgency-affected northeastern part of India. Human rights groups allege that the Act has given the army licence to kill, torture and rape with impunity.

It is to be remineded that Prime Minister Manmohan Singh ended a three-day visit to Manipur and Assam on 22 November last year with a clear message that the UPA Government in New Delhi could talk peace with insurgent groups, but would not let terror hold development initiatives to ransom. The Prime Minister succeeded in demonstrating that he was a leader with a difference by refusing to describe whatever projects he has conceded or funds he has allocated to the two states as part of a 'package'.Manmohan Singh offered unconditional peace talks to all separatist groups in the northeast to bring an end to decades of insurgency in the region."I want peace to prevail and so appeal to all to shun the path of violence and hold discussions. Our doors for discussion are open to all. You have a prime minister from Assam and the northeast to solve your problems," Singh said at a press conference here after his arrival.Singh, who is a Rajya Sabha member from Assam,was on a two-day visit to campaign for his Congress party in the last state assembly elections.By not referring to rebel groups like the ULFA or the frontline Meitei outfits in Manipur even once by name during his dozen-odd public speeches and appearances, the Prime Minister sought to send out a signal that insurgency was not the only thing high on his agenda.He did succeed in this endeavour when he handed over the Kangla Fort in Imphal, the symbol of Manipuri pride and nationalism, to the people of Manipur. Ever since the British defeated the local ruler in 1891, the Kangla Fort had been under occupation, first by the British, and then by the Assam Rifles. He also reiterated his promise to see whether the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act could be replaced by a more 'humane law.' In Assam, the Prime Minister called upon the "youths of the State" to help their "own Prime Minister" in building a new and resurgent Assam and promised to look into all their "legitimate grievances".

The northeastern region of India covering a total area of about 2,55,000 sq km is surrounded by Bangladesh, Bhutan, China and Myanmar. Less than one percent of the external boundaries of the region are contiguous with rest of India while remaining 99 percent form international borders. There is not only geographical isolation of this region but also absence of cultural and psychological integration with the mainstream. Many ethnic groups in the region especially in the areas bordering the international boundaries have more in common with the population living across the boundary than with the rest of India. Bangladesh has been active in exploiting the situation in the Northeastern region and this has had impact on the overall security in the region.
The Government of India seems to depend on military science to crush the nationality movements in North East. Constant repression has become the limitation of democratic peace process and the people in northeast, in reaction ,isolated themselves from the mainstream of the nation. They seem to be out of history and geography.

Greater Nagaland agitation is opposed most violently in Manipur.Although the media pays considerable attention to the Army's role in tackling militancy in the State, the Government of India's casual handling of the situation created a flutter. The revelation made by Union Defense Minister, Pranab Mukherji, during his recent visit to a Leimakhong Army base, near Imphal, that the Center had already signed ceasefire agreements with eight militant organizations, mostly Kuki militant outfits, in Manipur, has clearly proved that it wants to play safe while the State remains in a chaotic condition. State Chief Minister, O Ibobi Singh has denied that truce arrangements, which became effective on 1st August, 2005, were done with his knowledge. This shows that the State was in the dark for nearly two months about these covert truce deals with the militant groups.

The NSCN, fighting for an independent homeland for the Naga tribes
in Nagaland, is the oldest and the most powerful of the nearly 30-odd
rebel armies operating in the region.The NSCN is stressing on the need for creation of a Greater
Nagaland by carving slices off the neighbouring states of Arunachal
Pradesh, Assam, and Manipur -- all of which have sizeable Naga
populations. "Without the unification of the Naga homeland (Greater Nagaland),
there can be no permanent solution," the NSCN leader said.
The demand for a Greater Nagaland is, however, not acceptable to
the other regional states in the northeast. "There would be more
turmoil than peace in the region if New Delhi tries to appease the
NSCN by agreeing for a Greater Nagaland," Manipur Chief Minister
Okram Ibobi Singh said. But amid the controversies, NSCN leaders are hopeful for a
settlement.
The huge deployment of the Security Forces personnel in the State keeps reminding everyone that the insurgency problem is far from over, and that the political will to control the overall situation is perhaps not visible. Joint Task Force (JTF) operations are required to be planned by the police and the Para Military Force personnel and the Army should continue with its intelligence based operations. What is most important is the need for adopting a synergised surgical strike capability, which demands highly trained and motivated personnel with a thrust on jointmanship. Intelligence acquisition and processed intelligence must be disseminated and acted upon at the earliest and the hierarchical pattern of looking for shabash must be ostracised. For in today’s operational environment there is no time for such innuendos and decisions have to be given without wasting time, because information on either side is highly mobile and the flow uncontrollable, and a delayed response due to a delay in decision making will most certainly result in failure, which will impact on the morale of the Security Forces personnel. Hence there is a need to create Information Warriors (IW) from the environment and develop sources at the grass root levels to ensure speed in operations. For it is only in timely and accurate information that immediate actions can be taken with immense restraint and calibration and operations launched with precision. For it is in such confidence building measures that will facilitate in bringing back normalcy in the State and the people can once again be part of a free and fair society.

Manipur bordering Nagaland in the North East, Myanmar in the East and Mizoram in the South West has been in the lime light for perhaps for wrong reasons. The State having been created over 33 years ago, has a very high level of insurgency and the happenings keep reminding the country that the problems are huge, and the peoples’ support for Mr. Okram Ibobi Singh’s Secular Progressive Front (SPF) is on the decline.

Soon after the Chief Minister was handed over the mantle, the infamous Manorama rape incident took place, which brought disgrace to the State and to the Security Force personnel. The crisis was resolved to some extent, although momentarily, with the Security Forces vacating the Manipur Fort and certain strictures being put into effect. However, the problems continued and the recent 52 days economic blockade enforced by ANSAM, who demanded the withdrawal of the Government orders for making 18th June a State holiday, did cause great inconvenience to the people of the State. Other grave concerns in the past year were the kidnappings of students by an underground outfit, the State wide bandhs, looting on the Imphal – Moreh national highway, kneecapping of the erring teachers and principals of schools and colleges by the KYKL, storming the police stations and so on. These acts are nothing but reflections of the current conditions prevailing in the State. The bandhs are huge revenue losses which amount to over Rs 9 crores everyday.

In the year 1999, the government had banned all State bandhs, yet various groups continue to organise bandhs and target public and private property. One of the worst kind of activities in recent times was the burning of the State library by the Mayek activists during its agitation against the non – implementation of the Meetei Mayek. The Government had come down heavily on the Mayek activists by booking them under the critical National Security Act (NSA). However, due to public pressures, the Government had to rescind its orders and withdrew the charges against the activists. Such withdrawal of charges soon after invoking the Act is a cause of concern, because the Government has succumbed to the environmental pressures, giving a fillip to the movement. This has made it more difficult for the Centre and the State Governments and the extremist movement has become a bigger challenge. The Government has to adopt different means of combating the problem and making social security a major platform to launch human development operations. Efforts must be made in ‘Winning the hearts and minds of the people’ and giving peace a chance.
Violation of (basic) human rights in Manipur
Submitted by naba on Wed, 2004-08-04 21:54.
I have been closely monitoring the news for happenings in Manipur. Unlike a few days ago, it seems like we are getting some attention from top indian media. Things are moving forward and central leaders are evaluating possible solutions for the troubles in Manipur. However, there doesn't seem to be any indication of central leaders agreeing to remove AFSP act yet.

Especially enlightening among the news is this one. Apparently, a women has come forward as eye witness to give her account on what happened at the time of murder. According to her report, she saw some army persons in uniform taking a body of a woman towards the scene of crime and she heard some 5 to 6 gun shots about a fews minutes later.

Notice the emphasis above. This makes one thing very clear. The original statement given by Assam Riffles that the woman was shot while she tried to escape is a lie. Either she was dead before they brought her there or she was severly injured. And one does not need 5-6 shots to prevent near-dead someone escaping, assuming she indeed tried to escape.

I found this interesting and comprehensive article on Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSP Act) describing everything about this draconian legislation. Some of the flaws in the act, which make this act rather inhuman and violate basic human rights, are quoted below from the article. Particularly disheartening is section 6 which protects them against legal procecutions.

The army can shoot to kill, under the powers of section 4(a), for the commission or suspicion of the commission of the following offenses: acting in contravention of any law or order for the time being in force in the disturbed area prohibiting the assembly of five or more persons, carrying weapons, or carrying anything which is capable of being used as a fire-arm or ammunition. To justify the invocation of this provision, the officer need only be "of the opinion that it is necessary to do so for the maintenance of public order" and only give "such due warning as he may consider necessary".

The army can destroy property under section 4(b) if it is an arms dump, a fortified position or shelter from where armed attacks are made or are suspected of being made, if the structure is used as a training camp, or as a hide-out by armed gangs or absconders.
The army can arrest anyone without a warrant under section 4(c) who has committed, is suspected of having committed or of being about to commit, a cognisable offense and use any amount of force "necessary to effect the arrest".
Under section 4(d), the army can enter and search without a warrant to make an arrest or to recover any property, arms, ammunition or explosives which are believed to be unlawfully kept on the premises. This section also allows the use of force necessary for the search.
Section 5 states that after the military has arrested someone under the AFSPA, they must hand that person over to the nearest police station with the "least possible delay". There is no definition in the act of what constitutes the least possible delay.
Section 6 establishes that no legal proceeding can be brought against any member of the armed forces acting under the AFSPA, without the permission of the Central Government. This section leaves the victims of the armed forces abuses without a remedy.
So much of law and order situation being bad in Manipur, there is no proper law in the first place *sigh*. This is not the first time such crime by army has happened. Many such incidents have happend before at alarming density and they have gone unnoticed by the media. Manorama's brutal murder was just the last straw.

History
Manipur and Assam became involved in the disputes between Thailand and Burma, and Manipur took advantage of a Burmese invasion of Thailand to raid deep into its western frontier. This triggered the Burmese invasion of Manipur and Assam, which pulled in the British, ruling neighbouring Bengal. The British, to safeguard their position against the Burmese, intervened, defeated Burma and took over Assam, and brought Manipur under British paramountcy in 1891.

During the Second World War, Manipur was the scene of many fierce battles between the Japanese and Allied forces. The Japanese swept over East Asia and came up to Manipur. They and fractions of Indian National Army under command of Subhas C. Bose were beaten back before they could enter Imphal and this proved to be one of the turning points of the War.

There are two cemeteries maintained by the British War Graves Commission in Manipur, which are the final resting places of several Indian and allied soldiers who died here.

In 1947, with British Parliament's repeal of British Paramountcy, in preparation for Indian independence, Manipur became an independent kingdom once again.

The King, Maharaja Budhachandra, began a process of democratisation of the state, enacting the Manipur Constitution Act, 1947, which established a democratic form of government with the Maharaja as the Executive Head and an elected legislature.

In 1949, the King Budhachandra was invited to Shillong, capital of the Indian province of Assam, where he signed an agreement for annexed the kingdom into India. The King had already signed the Instrument of Accession with the Indian Dominion in 1947.

Once Manipur became part of the Indian Union, India dissolved the State's Constitution Assembly in October, 1949, and made it into a part C state. Lateron it was further degraded to the status of the union territory from 1956 onwards.

In 1972, Manipur was elevated to the status of a state (or province).

According to the 1991 census report, the total population of Manipur was 1,826,000 (18.26 lakhs) but in the 2000 census, it is expected to reach over 2.2 million (22 lakhs). The people of Manipur are grouped into three main ethnic communities -- Meiteis those inhabiting the valley and 29 major tribes in the hills dividing into two main ethno-denominations, namely Nagas and Kuki-Chins. Under the Meiteis, Bamon and Meitei Pangans are also included. All speak Meiteilon or otherwise known as Manipuri to the outsiders. In addition to Meiteis, the valley is also inhabited by Nepalis, Bengalis, Marwaris and people from other Indian communities. At present several people from the hill have also migrated and settled in the valley. The Naga group consists of Zeliangrong (composed of three related tribes, namely, Rongmei or Kabui, and Liangmei and Zemei or Kacha Nagas), Tangkhul, Mao, Maram, Maring and Tarao. The Chin-Kuki group consists of Tedim Chin (officially recognised by the Indian Union as Sukte) Gangte, Hmar, Paite, Thadou, Vaiphei, Zou, Aimol, Chiru, Koireng, Kom, Anal, Chothe, Lamgang, Koirao, Thangal, Moyon and Monsang. In recent times, several Chin-Kuki communities have identified themselves as Nagas e.g. Anal, Kom, Thangal, etc. depending on socio-economic and geo-political advantages to the tribes. The term Chin is used for the people in the neighboring Chin state of Myanmar whereas Chins are called Kukis in the Indian side. Other groups like Paite, Zou, Gangte, and Vaiphei identify themselves as Zomi and have distanced themselves from the name, Kuki. Thadous remain the major Kuki population in this Chin-Kuki group while Hmar identify closer to the Mizo or Lushei group.

The legends of all tribes including that of Meiteis claim that they originated somewhere in the north from a cave. The difference came only in later parts of the history after Meiteis were converted to Vaishnavism and the hill inhabitants became Christians.

Manipur is a part of India both from the point of view of geography and culture. It never lost its basic link with the mainstream of the Indian culture. The culture of Manipur has been a part of Indian culture. It accepted aspects of Indian culture and transmitted them to Burma, China and other lands of East Asia. On political grounds Manipur can hardly be separated from India. We find the invaders from Cachar, Tripura, etc., during the successive periods of it's history. The religious movement of Manipur in the 18th century conveys the spirit of universality and strengthen the bounds of unity. It asserts that Manipur is a part of Bharatavarsa.

Origin of the Name of Manipur

There are different names commonly used in discussing Manipur by different neighbouring people. To quote W. McCulloch, “The country inhabited by the Muneepoorees is by the inhabitants of Cachar it is named Moglei ; by those of Assam Mekhlee and by the Shans or those who inhabit the country east of Ningthee or Khyendwen river it is known as Cassay of which term the Burmese word Kathe is a corruption.”(2) The narrative of Symes and the maps of that period give the name “Cassay” to this country.(3) In Rennell’s Memoir and maps of India it is mentioned as “Meklee.” Other popular names by which it is known are Manipur and Meithei Leibak. The Mahabharata, the Bhagavata and Jaimini’s Mahabharata and Kalidas’s work used it by the name of Manipur. The name “Mekhele” as used for Manipur is mentioned in the Mahabharata and Skanda-Purana. This is found in the treaty of king Gourayam and the British East India Company in 1,800 A.D.(4) According to Kalika. Purana it is the place where the waist of Devi fell at the time of Daksa-Yajna. Another account declares that the outer garment, i,e., Mekhela fell to the ground in her dance in this land, Siva called it “Mekheli”.

Various meanings are given to the word “Manipur.” According to Atombapu Sharma Manipur means “naval circle on earth.” Another argument is given by some to show that Arjuna was restored to life by the Moni (gem) from the nether world and the land came to be known as Manipur.(5)

Another variation of the same theme that the Manipur Valley was full of water. Lord Siva, in emulation of a Rasa style was in search of a place for His devine Dance. He, in course of His search, saw this valley aand drained the excess water from it. The Imphal river with its branches, Kongba, Iril, Nambul flows towards the south. Entering into an underground canal the water gets it way out through the three big holes of the mountain “Chingnunghut” and falls into the river Chindwin which flows to the Irawadi in Burma. The Work of creation is attributed to Lord Siva. It is suggested that this arrangement cannot be an accident. There are underground and underwater passages, each 64 which has the effect of justifying the legend.(6) According to the will of Visnu the beautiful Valley came into existence. Various gods and goddesses took part in a dance along with Siva and Durga. This is called Lai-haraoba. It is said that Ananta was so enamoured of the dance that he brought the jewels to this country and the land is called Manipur meaning the land of jewels as it is lighted up by the splendour of the excellent gems gracing the hoods.”(7)

According to T.C. Hodson the land was at one time Mohendrapura. But subsequently it came to be known as Manipura after Vabhruvahana’s coming into possession of the jewel. Another tradition about the name of Manipur makes out that, near Nungoibi and between Taibang- Thong there is a stone with supernatural power known as Mani or precious stone on account of which the place is known as Manipur.(8)

Most orthodox Bishnupriya Manipuris and some section of Meiteis believe that they are the people traced their ancestry with the Arjuna Chitrangada Babhrubahana episode of the Mahabharata and claiming to be the Kshatriyas as described in the Epic Mahabharata. (9)
On the other hand there are number of folk stories and legends regarding human inhabitation in Manipur valley. One of them holds that there was a stable kingdom with Imphal as its capital under Pakhangba, the first king of Manipur, in the first century. (10)

In the reign of Khagemba (15th century) Shri Vishnu was worshiped in Manipur. After this period, at the end of the 17th century and at the advent of the 18th century, great force of the Neo-Vaisnavism came and spread in this land. After the king Charairongba, Vaisnavism was highly developed, in the middle of the 18th century, in the reign of king Garibniwaj Pamheiba. In his time, Shantidas Goswami from Sylhet came to Manipur and he initiated the king with his subjects into Ramandi sect.

In 1826, Manipur was brought into India by the treaty of Yandavo by Raja Jai Singh with the British at the end of the Indo-Burmese war. This followed a dispute in accession to the throne. With the intervention of the British the dispute was settled. In 1891 Churachand was nominated the Raja and it came under British rule as a princely state. During World War II Imphal was occupied by the Japanese. After Indian independence Manipur became a Union Territory and subsequently achieved statehood in January 21,1972.
Besides, there are numerous genealogy prevailing in Manipur relating the lands as reclaimed from water by Lord Siva’s Trisul, while another lined makes it the place illuminated by the jewel on the crown of Shesh Nag for Lord Shiva and Goddess Parvati to play Rasleela
The evidences of KurmaPurana show that Chitrangada pleases Lord Siva through her worship. And the place where she worshiped Lord Siva, became a holy place where Vyasa himself paid a visit.

after sunset. Spurred by the example of Lord Krishna and Srimati Radhika immersed in Rasleela, their privacy guaranteed by Lord Siva as the gatekeeper, Goddess Parvati had requested Lord Siva dance with her.(13)
Apart from folk stories and legends, there is historical evidences of some Aryan migration in the valley took part in the remote past. The myth and lore of Manipur refers to the supreme deity or Dau Seidaba rubbing hands to create from the Gods and Goddesses the human being to people the new land Manipur.

Now in Maharashtra,EvictionDrive agnaist the Bengali Dalit Refugees, termed As Bangladeshi
Palash Biswas
(contact: Palash Biswas, c/o Mrs Arti Roy Gosto Kanan, Sodepur, Kolkata -700110, India. Phone: 033-2565-9551

A major misinformation campaign aganaist partition victim Bengali refugees is launched and promoted by castehindu ruling classes in India. We have seen that the then ruling Bjp Government of Uttaranchal denied domicile certifictes to settled bengali Hindu refugees of erly fifties in Uttaranchal in 2001. The nation witnessed the mass movement agnaist this with full local support. In Orrissa, twenty one Bengli partion victim resettlers were deported from Navrangpur district in 2004 and more than fifteen hundred others were served deportation notices in Kendrapara district by Naveen Patnaik government of BJP- BJd combine.Once again the local people protected the refugees. Utkal Bagiya Surakshya Committee led the resistance movement and the administrative action postponed for the time. The next pahase of eviction is to be tried in Malkangiri, wher no less than 215 villages of resettled Bengali refugees exist under Dandkaranya project launched by Mrs Indira Gandhi and the builder of modern Orrissa, Biju Patnaik.
Now it seem to be the turn of Maharashtra where Mulnivasi Bamcef has taken a strong stand and Vaman Meshram raised the issue on international forums. In last September 2005, Mulnivasi Bamcef organised a three day national convention in Maharashtra heart Nagpur aganaist the new citizenship amendment Bill which is used to evict Bengali refugees.
Fiftytwo persons of 15 Bengali Hindu refugee families have been recently arrested from village number sixty one under Arsha Tehseel in Bhandara district. The arrested persons were later released after paying Rs Five thosand Zurmana each and personal bond to submit all documents relating citizenship. Chandrapur and Gadchirauli districts, Naxaliteprone areas of Maharashtra, have the most number of Bengali refugees resettled besides Bhandara. All collectors of Maharashtra Districts have directed the Bengali refugees to submit citizenship documents within a month .
Unlike Punjabi and Tamilrefugees , the Bengali refugees even settled just after partition have not been given Indian citizenship.
Now, it seems Maharashtra ruling classes is prepared to launch a massive Bengali Hindu Dalit refugees eviction drive sooner or later.

The solgan of the misinformation campaign seems to be: Bangla refugees now plague Maharashtra. Mind you Bangla, not Bengali. It denies the hard fact of partition and population transfer thenceforth.It is said, after West Bengal, it is now Ma­harashtra's turn to acknowledge that the continuing illegal influx of Bangladeshi migrants is a serious problem. The Congress-NCP coalition has asked the Centre to vest officers of the rank of deputy commissioner of po­lice and superintendent of police with powers to arrest and deport illegal Bangladeshi refugees.This was announced, according to an agency report from Mumbai, by deputy chief minister, Chhagan Bhujbal, in the state legislative council.

The decision comes in the wake of ev­idence of an increasing number of illegal Bangla migrants moving out of their tra­ditional safe havens of Assam, West Bengal and Bihar towards Mumbai and nearby in­dustrial clusters. Mr Bhujbal said the agency report acknowl­edged that Bangladeshis had settled down at Mira Road in the Thane district. He made a strong case to toughen laws to deal with illegal immigrants, saying the existing ones were a handicap rather than a help for law-en­forcement authorities.

The Maharashtra government's new ap­proach comes on the heels of the CPM 's volte-face on the issue of illegal Bangla immigrants.

It is alleged that jettisoning its traditional refusal even to acknowledge the problem, the CPM lead­ership and West Ben­gal -CM, Buddhadeb Bhattacharya, have confessed not just its existence but also the crisis-like dimensions it has acquired. Chief minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharya has vested district magistrates with the power to deal with the problem which has al­tered the demog­raphy of the districts sharing bor­ders with Bangladesh, transforming them into Muslim-majority ones.

The chief minister, who was forced to take a hard look at the situation because of the post-9/11 security situation, has even asked for the introduction of iden­tity cards in a clear rebuff to the pro-Left intellectual establishment which rou­tinely discovers Orwellian designs in similar proposals of the Centre.

Mr Bhattacharya, who attracted the wrath of minority representatives and upset his pragmatic colleagues when he asked for surveillance of the madrasas, has also asked for the verification of ra­tion cards in the border districts. As per the new rules, only the district magis­trates will have the power to distribute the cards which are illegally procured by the Bangla migrants to flaunt their Indi­an 'citizenship'.

CCAPT. SIDDHARTH BARVE (barves@bharatpetroleum.com) leads the Mulnivasi Bamcef movement agnaist prosecution of Hindu Bengali Dalit refugees. He wrote:

`This is on the conspiracy hatched by the Manuvadi political parties against our Bengali brethren so that they become aware of the mischief and come together to fight the same.

I went through the Parliament site and collected the Citizenship Amendment Bill. After going through the same and our historical background I have written this article. I then started communicating/writing on the subject to our Bengali writers and editors in Calcutta and I felt ashamed that even most of our Bengali brethren were not aware of the Bill and its contents. But after getting information most of them started publishing articles on this.

You must be aware of a very unfortunate and Black Bill that has been passed by the Indian Parliament in 2003: Citizenship Amendment Bill. In 1955, the Bill was passed by Parliament which stated that all the citizens who migrated to India and who were effected by the partition could be entitled to become citizens of India and their children born on the Indian soil would be natural citizens of this country. The Bill says that the former citizens of India who have surrendered their citizenship and settled abroad shall not be liable for the citizenship of India.

After the partition of East Pakistan, all our Mulnivasi Bengali brethren were residing in Kolna, Jassor, Barisal, Dhaka and Faridpur from where Jogendranath Mandal had got Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar elected to the Constituent Assembly.The Brahmanvadi Congress handed over this part of the country to East Pakistan to punish them for getting Babasaheb elected to the Assembly. Due to the treatment and difficulties many Bengali Mulnivasis came back to India as refugees.

Hate theory: The refugees who had come from Pakistan, particularly the Punjabis and Sindhis who belonged to the upper castes, were given huge amount of money, property, land at low rate and settled to their comfort in big cities and one place. But our brethren were settled in places like Kalahandi and forest and dirty locations where they had to face the miseries and poverty. That is why they were always on the move and did not have any documentary evidence to prove. The Brahmanvadi Congress, BJP and the Hindu nazi parties knew full well that the Bengali refugees were "low castes" but deliberately they spread the lies that the Bangladeshi refugees were Muslims.

So much so even our people (SC/ST of this country) have started hating them thinking them to be outsiders and nothing to do with them. The upper caste Hindus were successful in creating a hate theory against the refugees. We in Maharashtra are not even aware of the plight of our Bengali brethren leave aside fighting for them.

To make the life of our Bengali brethren still worse the then Home Minister Advani, the CM of Assam and the ASU got together in Delhi on March 19, 1999 and hatched a conspiracy declaring the Bengali refugees illegal. It was decided that the children of the Bengali refugees who were born between 1971 and 1986 will be treated as illegal migrants of this country and very harsh and strong action will be taken against them including extraditing them outside India and under no circumstance they will be given citizenship of this country even if they wish to register as citizens of this country.

Congress & CPM support: From this day the conspiracy started in the Home Ministry and they started working on the Amendment of the Citizenship Bill, 1955.

The Amendment Bill was introduced in the Rajya Sabha on May 9, 2003 and it was sent to Pranab Mukherjee for his response so that the same can be passed. On Jan.9, 2004, BJP got the Bill passed with the help and full support of the Congress and the Left parties.

This Bill destroying the future of our Bengali Mulnivasis says that under no circumstance the refugees from Bangladesh can get citizenship of this country and strict legal action will be initiated against them by the government.

With this over two crore Bengali refugees will be affected. The BJP, Congress and the Left parties did not stop there. They wanted to put salt on our wounds and hence in the same Bill they gave dual citizenship (double citizenship) to the upper castes who are staying in 16 different countries so that they never face any problem, and send money to India so that the Hindu nazi parties use them and kill us and vote in the election for the Brahmanwadi BJP or Congress and get elected easily on their votes. This is the biggest conspiracy against our people but not even our educated Bengali SC/ST/BC brothers are aware of this fact — not to speak of our uneducated and poor Bengalis who are going to be thrown out of the country. We are trying to make our people aware of this development so that concrete steps are taken to stop this mass genocide. They have only projected in the media that by this Amendment Bill dual citizenship is granted to people of Indian origin but no where they are saying that the Bill is basically against the Bengali refugees.”

Continued Hindu-Muslim-Sikh Antagonisms.

The termination of British rule in India was greeted enthusiastically by Indians of every religious faith and political persuasion. On Aug. 15, 1947, officially designated Indian Independence Day, celebration ceremonies were held in all parts of the subcontinent and in Indian communities abroad. These ceremonies took place, however, against an ominous background of Hindu-Muslim and Sikh-Muslim antagonisms, which were particularly acute in regions equally or almost equally shared by members of the different faiths.

Population shifts.

In anticipation of border disputes in such regions, notably Bengal and Punjab, a boundary commission with a neutral (British) chairperson was established prior to partition. The recommendations of this commission occasioned little active disagreement with respect to the division of Bengal. In that region, largely because of Gandhi's moderating influence, little communal strife developed. In the Punjab, however, where the line of demarcation brought nearly 2 million Sikhs, traditionally anti-Muslim, under the jurisdiction of Pakistan, the decisions of the boundary commission precipitated bitter fighting. A mass exodus of Muslims from Union territory into Pakistan and of Sikhs and Hindus from Pakistan into Union territory took place. In the course of the initial migrations, which involved more than 4 million persons in the month of September 1947 alone, convoys of refugees were frequently attacked and massacred by fanatical partisans. Coreligionists of the victims resorted to reprisals against minorities in other sections of the Union and Pakistan. Indian and Pakistani authorities brought the strife under control during October, but the shift of populations in the Punjab and other border areas continued until the end of the year. Relations between the two states grew worse in October when the Indian armed forces surrounded Junagadh, a princely state on the Kathiawar Peninsula. This action was taken because the nawab of the state, which had a large majority of Hindus, had previously announced that he would affiliate with Pakistan. The Indian military authorities subsequently assumed control of the state, pending a plebiscite.

Operation Pushback": Sangh Parivar, State, Slums And Surreptitious Bangladeshis In New Delhi
Sujata Ramachandran has written a detailed story in Economic and Political Weekly. She wrote: `The remarkable ease with which the xenophobic tenor of the Hindu Right nationalist organizations or Sangh Parivar found favour with many privileged Indians in the early 1990s cannot be easily or comfortably discounted. Indeed, it even perniciously swayed a moderate secular central government led by the long dominant Congress Party. By mid–1992, when Sangh Parivar made the manifold dangers of the unsanctioned immigration by growing numbers of poverty–stricken Bangladeshi Muslim peasants their rallying cry, the lenient attitude of the Indian state towards these immigrants had hardened with astonishing rapidity. Unsettled by this sweeping tide of Hindu chauvinism, a hurriedly enforced "Action Plan" to locate and identify these undocumented immigrants was followed by brisk efforts under "Operation Pushback" to deport them from New Delhi — India's capital city and locus of bureaucratic, political and financial power. Haphazard and sporadic in implementation, Operation Pushback, while unmasking partisan dispositions coursing through the Indian bureaucracy, also exemplified Congress' belated attempts at redeeming its enervated standing. It is also worth noting that the highly circumscribed material realities of the Bangladeshi immigrants residing in Delhi's numerous slums made them easy targets of these perverse politics, and that subsequent opposition, internally and from neighbouring Bangladesh, to the gratuitous brutality displayed towards the first groups of deportees contributed to the Operation's abrupt truncation.’

In Uttaranchal, an agitation against eviction of Bengali refugees is going on. Some moneylenders turned land mafia have grabbed the land of the poor with the help of police and officials. The lands, which cannot be sold legally, were occupied by the moneylenders. The Kisan Sabha organised demonstrations and the government reluctantly started the negotiation. The demonstrations were conducted on April 16 and 26 against the moneylenders attacking the peasants who participated in demonstrations, when a terror like situation was created. After continuous struggle, some arrests were made and some officials dismissed.

'Operation Pushback'
Sujata Ramchandran Writes,`When the Sangh parivar made unsanctioned immigration by growing numbers of poor Bangladeshi Muslims their new political strategy, the lenient attitude of the ruling Congress government towards the immigrants hardened with astonishing rapidity. Mid-1992 saw brisk efforts made under Operation Pushback to deport them from New Delhi. But the Congress government's easy capitulation to the parivar's rallying cry against unauthorised immigration would become a precursor to its final surrender to the parivar's demolition of the Babri masjid just three months later.

Sujata Ramachandran

I
Introduction
The dramatic shift of Hindu nationalist organisations; the Sangh parivar, from the margins to centre stage of Indian society and politics in the past decade and a half has already been addressed by a fertile and burgeoning literature [Hansen 1999; Jaffrelot 1996; Ludden 1996; Lele 1995; Basu et al 1993]. During this period, the heightened prominence of these saffron forces of Hindu chauvinism in India also drew appreciable attention towards the seemingly unfamiliar, largely unregulated, and surreptitious population flows from neighbouring Bangladesh. That is, their xenophobic discourses characterised these undocumented immigrants, not so much or even commonly as ‘aliens’ or ‘illegal immigrants’, but rather as ‘infiltrators’ representing a visible threat to the long-term existence of an enfeebled Hindu-Indian nation [Ramachandran 1999; Navlakha 1997].1 A substantial body of propaganda texts drafted by the parivar’s ideologues or supporters outside the fold chillingly, solidly, and in great detail outlined the supposed manifold dangers of ‘infiltration’ [Bharatiya Janata Party 1994; Joshi 1994; B Rai 1992, 1993]. The apparition of impoverished, illiterate and bigoted Muslim Bangladeshis migrating en masse as a ‘silent, invisible invasion’ and ‘demographic aggression’ on India began to loom large [Joshi 1994; B Rai 1992, 1993].

An arresting feature of this new development quite clearly was the fervent acceptance, by many respectable Indians, of the anti-Muslim and highly prejudiced discourses zealously promoted by these organisations. But unfortunately, even the Indian state, bureaucracy and other political parties would not remain unaffected for long by its pervasive influence. It would therefore not be an exaggeration to state that in 1992, the situation of undocumented Bangladeshi immigrants living in this country, markedly Muslim ones, began to deteriorate speedily. It is significant to note that many of these undocumented immigrants had been living in several different parts of India for many years as de facto citizens. It was, however, no remarkable coincidence that the central and provincial governments’ overdue recognition of covert population flows into this country materialised exactly at a time when the Sangh parivar made ‘Infiltrators, Quit India’ one of their prominent political and ideological slogans [Ray 1992; Hindustan, October 19, September 29, 1992]. My contention is that it is precisely the saffron surge in India that provided a powerful incentive to the Congress-led government to laggardly attempt to tackle it head-on partly by expelling undocumented Bangladeshis from the capital city [Sonwalkar 1992c].2

Drawing on extensive media coverage and interviews conducted in New Delhi, a textured and hitherto unattempted chronicle of these exclusionary albeit highly rancorous exercises has been provided in this article. The time line of these state-sponsored activities against unauthorised immigrants synchronises with a tumultuous period in recent Indian history, inscribed by large-scale communal riots in various parts of the country [see, for example, Chakravarti et al 1992; Datta et al 1990]. While the adroit collusion by the parivar’s ranks in these exclusionary rituals cannot be overlooked, ‘Operation Pushback’ exemplified a hasty yet haphazard attempt by the long dominant and then ruling Congress at salvaging its own authority in the face of the rising tide of Hindu nationalism. Additionally, ‘Operation Pushback’ was a vulgar manifestation of those partisan tendencies ordinarily camouflaged by the massive Indian bureaucracy. This remarkable narrative also tells us of the more or less willing collaboration between different agencies and departments associated with central and provincial governments in New Delhi and West Bengal. Ultimately, these social evictions signified a less than serious attempt on the part of the Indian state to engage with ‘illegal’ migratory flows from a neighbouring country. A final argument being submitted here is that in addition to political upheaval within this country, activities on the other side of the border – in Bangladesh – substantially influenced the character and duration of these evictions.

Indifference, Impotance, Intolerance

The appearance of undocumented Bangladeshi immigrants in New Delhi’s slums or ‘bastis’ was definitely not a new-sprung occurrence. Evidence gleaned from various sources strongly suggests that small numbers of Bangladeshis lived in several bastis as early as the beginning years of the 1970s [Paul and Lin 1995; The Indian Express, September 23 1992].2 It is also true that for the most part, and for many years, their presence and gradually increasing numbers continued to be tolerated by the Congress backed power-brokers operating through many slums. An early feature on undocumented immigrants in this city corroborates this consequential point [Dutt 1990]. While acknowledging that the Foreigners’ Regional Registration Office (FRRO) had sponsored a study of Bangladeshi settlements in this metropolis as far back as 1988, the mostly disinterested demeanour of the administrative machinery towards these immigrants was recorded:

Apart from occasional raids on their settlements when their shacks are dismantled, official action is rarely initiated against them. It is the FRRO and special branch of the Delhi police that may sometimes decide to do something about the problem. Then, a few people might be taken into custody for a while…But, generally, the police leave them alone (ibid, p 55, emphasis mine).

Anand Prakash, a sub-inspector of the Kotwali police station was quoted in the same report: “We took about 30 people who did not have passports into custody. Twelve men were sentenced to four months’ imprisonment” (ibid, p 57). However, such decisive and draconian action remained fairly uncommon until much later. Also striking is that many of the undocumented immigrants interviewed for this feature in January 1990 were “not bothered about their status as foreigners. Their immediate concern (at that point was) survival” (ibid).

Nevertheless, media reports strongly indicated that in government circles, concern over undocumented Bangladeshis was growing in the late 1980s, even among interest groups well known for supporting these immigrants. One illustration will perhaps be suitable here. More than three years before the first expatriations took place and a formal strategy was instituted, Jyoti Basu, the long-standing chief minister of West Bengal and now retired from the political scene, had sent a letter on irregular migration to then prime minister Rajiv Gandhi (Hindustan, February 27, 1989). Bengal has received substantial numbers of undocumented Bangladeshis in recent years [Samaddar 1999]. In this official communication, he appealed to the central government to focus its attention on the relentless inflow of unauthorised immigrants from across the border. It was alluded that the state government had notified the centre several times of the acutely large numbers of Muslim Bangladeshis entering India through its borders (see also Hindustan, February 28, 1989 and Ghosh Chowdhury 1992).

At first, the Congress government opted to put aside this aggravating issue, partly for the sake of convenience combined with immense constraints posed by the forthcoming general elections. A few months later, its inability to command a majority of Lok Sabha seats in the countrywide elections and the formation after that of a left and centre coalition government that included the Bharatiya Janata Party, further postponed any official-level decision on irregular Bangladeshis [Malik and Singh 1994]. Consequently, when more than a year had expired after Basu’s initial missive to the prime minister, the National Front government publicly proclaimed that it was going to take stern action against undocumented Bangladeshis in West Bengal (Hindustan, May 13, 1990). Notably, the newspaper article exposing this anticipated decision pointed out that the Bharatiya Janata Party had been making an identical demand for a long time. The minister and deputy minister for home affairs were to visit Kolkata for in-depth consultations on various methods to curb ‘illegal’ flows. It is believed that the decision to issue photo-identity documents to Indian residents in border districts was given prominence. Attention was now directed towards stronger border controls to block such migrations [Rakesh 1990].

Ultimately however, it was an Indian government led by the Congress Party under the leadership of Narasimha Rao that after 1991 instated the harshest measures against undocumented immigrants. Highly troubled by uncontrolled violence concomitant with the Sangh-inspired Ramjanmabhumi movement, his regime also suffered from the arduous task of eliminating irregular Bangladeshis. It must be also mentioned that a good year or so would lapse before the Congress-Rao government finally launched their notorious ‘Action Plan’ against Bangladeshis. Documentary evidence apprises us of the government’s willingness finally to own up to the growing presence of Bangladeshi immigrants, yet it continued to waver in its decision to firmly rein in their numbers. As a case in point, consider the statements made by the home minister at the end of 1991. Shankar Rao Chavan had candidly conceded in parliament that the exceedingly generous attitude rife among provincial-level authorities towards undocumented immigrants had mostly contributed to the vast increase in foreign nationals immigrating to India (Hindustan, December 3, 1991). The desperate circumstances in India due to these immigrants, he avowed, had prompted the central government to forthwith grant provincial bureaucracies the legal authority to initiate stern proceedings directed at them (ibid; see also National Herald, September 30, 1992).

Nevertheless, a different source seriously disputed the veracity of the minister’s articulations, making the centre’s lengthened vacillation even more conspicuous. A report published out of Indore in Madhya Pradesh advised that a recently issued order to all Indian provinces to identify foreign citizens living in their areas was proving to be a ‘gigantic crisis’ for this government (Nai Duniya, January 25, 1992). It proceeded to provide us with this rather vital insight:

It is widely believed that following these directives the Uttar Pradesh government had identified 10,000 Bangladeshis in different locations and arrested them for allegedly entering the country without passports. It is also broadly accepted that despite repeatedly inviting input from the central government on how to deal with these ‘uninvited guests’, a prolonged silence from this quarter had forced Uttar Pradesh to eventually release (the detainees) after they had furnished personal bonds (ibid, translation mine).

A final article would lay completely bare the reasons for this extended inactivity in prior years, dubbed scathingly by an editorial as the state’s ‘ostrich-like policy’ (Hindustan Times, October 13, 1992). Curiously, it quoted an unidentifiable though obviously disgruntled individual highly-placed in government circles: ‘No one wanted to rock the boat. (Earlier) there was a lot of buck-passing by government agencies. Besides, there were vested interests – political parties wanted to use them as a vote-bank’ (Indian Express, September 23, 1992; see also September 28, 1992).

I will return to this question of ‘vote-banks’ a bit later on. Suffice it to say, for the longest time, the Indian government and many major Indian political parties remained deeply ambivalent about undocumented Bangladeshi immigrants. But by mid 1992 a turning point had been reached when the heretofore largely ostentatious albeit empty show of official dealings on unsanctioned immigration gave way to brusque displays of coercion. In this detailed elaboration of ‘Operation Pushback’ and the ‘Action Plan’ against Bangladeshis discharged in its premier metropolis, of vital importance is the burgeoning encumbrance of jingoistic sentiments, a difficult burden that had to be encountered intensely on even terms by governments in India and Bangladesh. Bangladesh’s shrill and swift backlash will be examined later, but in India, a moderately secular state that had succumbed sporadically to ethnic and religious tensions in the past, here and now completely shed its thin veneer of neutrality. Narasimha Rao’s rule marked its high point when the state actively embraced a soft sensibility towards the forces of Hindu chauvinism, characterised apropos by Frontline’s editor as a ‘disgraceful and highly risky surrender to the forces of Hindu communalism’ [Ram 1993:9]. The final eye-catching indication for this disturbing trend was that the Indian state now unofficially assigned the unsavory labels of ‘illegal’ immigrant or ‘infiltrator’ almost exclusively to Muslim Bangladeshi immigrants.4

It must be reiterated here that highly alarmed by its considerably weakened political position, the Rao-Congress government suddenly swung into action by launching its ‘Action Plan’ to curb clandestine migration. Although efforts were undertaken in many parts of the country, maximum exertions were actually expended against Bangladeshi immigrants in New Delhi. On initial scrutiny, the decision to concentrate on this city may seem surprising and somewhat unusual. Our astonishment is only compounded when we learn that even the questionable government estimates on undocumented Bangladeshis in this city, between 2,00,000-3,00,000 migrants in most accounts, is miniscule compared to aggregates for other places in north-eastern India closer to the Bangladesh border [Srinivas 1992]. Surely an effective and certainly practical strategy to restrict unauthorised immigrants would have converged, at least in the beginning, on geographical areas in proximity to Bangladesh, namely in provinces like Assam and West Bengal.5

As a sign, however, favouring New Delhi for ‘Operation Pushback’ was much more tactical. This metropolis is the capital city of India and much financial power resides here. More importantly, it is the seat of centralised political power while functioning as the headquarters of the massive Indian administrative machinery that runs the country. At the end though, it was the forthcoming assembly elections for New Delhi held in January 1993 that would dramatically set the stage for the unrestrained aggression towards unauthorised Bangladeshis. Previous election results had already indicated that several prominent Congress leaders, who had exerted considerable influence in the city in the past, were experiencing a noticeable decline in authority. This trend was conspicuous moreover in ‘bastis’ and ‘jhuggi-jhonpris’ (slums and squatters) that had backed these politicians for an extended period by voting en masse for this party, known somewhat sardonically in popular parlance as its ‘vote bank’ [Tiwari 1993; The Indian Express, September 10, 1992].

For our purposes, the term denotes the exploitative system of patronage operating between high-ranking leaders, their agents or powerbrokers within these marginal spaces, and basti or slum residents. Since many slums are unauthorised encroachments on public space or government lands, their permanence plus the occasional additional dispensation of basic benefits to poor urbanites are significantly rooted in these power arrangements. Like other Indian residents, Bangladeshis living in these bastis had also enjoyed the benefits of these meagre disbursements. It had also extraordinarily meant that most Bangladeshis had received the identical treatment as other impoverished Indians. A great majority of them had been issued ration-cards for obtaining subsidised food rations under the government’s public distribution scheme, given identification tokens for their individual jhuggis or squatters, and their names had been recorded in the voting registers (Punjabi 1992). The erosion of Congress power signalled that these informal though weighty arrangements between this party’s politicians and slum residents had been unsettled. And the unhappy outcome was grave for many squatters and especially undocumented Muslim Bangladeshis, who had to forfeit the support that had been previously extended to them by Delhi-level Congress leaders. It is precisely at this precarious juncture that the ‘Action Plan’ and ‘Operation Pushback’ commenced in this city.

II
‘Action Plan’ of Detection, Identification, Deportation

In September 1992, shortly after ‘Operation Pushback’ began, an official spokesperson for the government of India confirmed that the expulsion of several hundred thousand Bangladeshis living ‘illegally’ in border provinces was imminent (Patriot, September 29, 1992b). The state had recently established three steps to deal with unauthorised immigrants: detection, identification, and finally deportation (ibid). Having already detected locations where Bangladeshis existed in large numbers, this spokesperson indicated that the central and state governments were now vigorously involved in identifying Bangladeshis from these Indian areas (ibid).

Accounts quoting home ministry informants reported that the New Delhi administration had set up a special ‘Action Plan’ to identify the undocumented Banglade

Somnath Hore: He Made wounds His Tools and inherited Guernica
Palash Biswas
(Contact: Palash Biswas, Gostokanan, Sodepur, Kolkata- 700110, India. Phone: 033-25659551-r)
He was excellent.He was outstanding in style and aesthetics.He did not believe in abstract.He lived in a real world and sustained his survival with full commitment to his roots, the real india suffering from famine, poverty and imperialism. He began drawing the misery he saw around him, and eventually he was encouraged to make sketches and posters for the Communist Party of India. He returned to Calcutta, where he joined the Government School of Art. He provides an interesting outlook on the definition of artistic originality: "In art nothing is completely original. Heritage, both national and international, is bound to influence an artist either consciously or subconsciously. Art activity mirrors the visible world. Intuitively the artist introduces technical perceptions and innovations which create new forms. These are in turn enriched with fresh concepts. He experimented in a variety of media, including woodcuts, modern gravure, lithography, and extensively in bronze sculpture. He hated famine and poverty. He was not religious .Nor he used religious myths, moods and images in his art. He was dead agaist war and atomic race. He voiced Vietnam. He bore the wounds and at the same time he successfully transformed those wounds in his tools.
The communist, the artist somnath Hore is no more. Let us mourn.
Noted sculptor and winner of Kalidas Samman Somnath Hore died in the night of Navami in Durgotasav after prolonged illness.This timing of his demise is in itself a symbol of his deeprooted existence in Indian soil and its culture. Durgotasav is the greatest cultural and public festival in Bengal across the border. He had been suffering from respiratory problems.
Governor Gopal Krishna Gandhi, also the Visva-Bharati rector, met ailing sculptor Somnath Hore at his Aban Pally house in shantinikatan much before the destined day.Somanth worked for the communist party. He got admission in the art college complying with the suggestion of then Comminst party General secretary PC Joshi. He was a reporter in the communist newspapers. He made posters for the Party. He roamed village after village during Tebhaga movement, the strength of communist movement in Bengal. He was active while the party was banned. He had been in jail. One time, comrade Jyoti Basu was with him in the jail.But it is unfortunate while the rightist Governor had all the time in this world to see the committed ailing artist, the poet Chief Minister of West bengal Bddhadev Bhattacharya, his government and his party never showed any interest unless the time to express condolence hightened.
He is survived by his wife and painter-daughter.

The artist was suffering from lung infection for quite sometime. He was admitted to a local hospital on Friday. He was released from Bolpur hospital on Navami afternoon. But his condition deteriorated at home and he breathed last at 2110 hrs, family sources said.

Somnath Hore is one of the pioneers of the 20th century modern art movement in India. He is respected not only as an important artist but also as a political activist, who has, over the years, boldly used his talents as a graphic artist and sculptor, to express his own personal angst against a socio-political system which breeds acts of violence. The most poignant and powerful statement made by Somnath Hore as an artist, is his pulp print series called “Wounds”. It was the cataclysmic decade of the 1940’s, especially the Bengal Famine of 1943 which shaped and moulded his consciousness as an artist. Somnath has often expressed concern over man’s inhumanity against man and blatant violation of human values—whether it be casteism, communalism, the frightful fallout from nuclear blasts and society’s inability to preserve human dignity.

Born at Srihatta in Chattagram (now in Bangladesh) in undivided Bengal, the sculptor took part in land reform movement. His art basically carried messages of hungry people of the country.
Communist Party of India-Marxist patriarch Jyoti Basu, Lok Sabha speaker Somnath Chatterjee and West Bengal Chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharya mourned the death of the noted sculptor, who started making posters for the Communist party from an early age. They offered condolences to the wife, daughter and other members of Hore's family.
Hore's figures have always reflected the anguished human body, but the imprint of the hand of the creator is more startlingly manifest in his sculptures. The torn and rugged surfaces, rough planes with slits and holes, subtle modelling and axial shifts, exposed channels, all make for exciting visual and tactile sculptures.

Between the years 1954 to 1967, Hore handled a number of jobs in various capacities. From 1954 to 1958 he was a lecturer at the Indian College of Art and Draughtsmanship in Calcutta. Thereafter, till 1967, he held posts like the "in-charge of the Graphic section" at the Delhi College of Art, visiting faculty at the MS University in Baroda and the head of the Graphic Art department of Kala Bhavan, Visva Bharati. In 1960, he became a member of the Society of Contemporary Artists.

Exceptional talent is able to create great art with these tools; and great art is unequivocally original." The Artist: "Wounds", Somnath Hore. 1991.The anguished human form has widely been reflected in Hore's figuration. The visual appeal of his work is increased by the rough surfaces, slits, holes and exposed channels.From 1974, Hore began doing bronze sculptures. "Mother with Child", a large sculpture that paid homage to the people's struggle in Vietnam, was stolen from the Kala Bhavan soon after it was done and has never been traced since. The stealing of Rabidra`s Nobel prize medal and recitation is not the first incident in Shantiniketan. Not at all. Ramkinkar, though had the bless of no less a person than the Gurudev, Ravindra Nath Tagore, had to face all the troubled water as he belonged to lower caste barber. Somnath Hore also did not belong to the elite ruling class of Bengal. Along with Chitto Prasasd and his teacher in the Art College Jainal Abedeen he differed from the much talked Bengal School of Art. His experiments with truth and his commitment alienated him in shantiniketan itself. He enhanced the graphic department of Kalabhavan but it was agnaist the tradition of Shantiniketan. The dominating presence of an artist, a commited one like Somnath Hore was not liked by many. He never bothered with myths and images of gods and godesses. All these things went against him. His works, his colourful simple dresses and his personality , every thing seemed to be agnaist the tradition and environment of Shantiniketan.

He bore the wounds lifelong losing the stolen image of Mother Vietnam , he created. He did not see Vietnam. But no one knew vietnam better than him, not all those who chanted in the procession- AAMAR NAAM TOMAAR NAAM VIETNAM. Somnath faced Japanese Bombing in Patia, Chittagang , his native place. He witnessed and suffered Fmaine of 1943. His visual reportig had been assets of commist party organs Janyudha and People`s Warin those pre independence turmoildays of history. Heis heart bled while Noakhali and Chittagang with and along all the riot torn parts of divided Bengal became killing fields. The refugee influx was his experience. He himself was a refugee in the field of Indian Art, never granted his bonafied citizenship.
Somanth did have no way to be aquainted with Pablo Pccasso and his classic mural Guernica, its style and form. But he sketched all his famine creations in white background with dark black ink creating the same impact of Guernica. His sculpture Holocaust agnaist atomic explosion in Hirosam a and Nagasaki makes us remember nothing but Guernica which is modern art's most powerful antiwar statement... created by the twentieth century's most well-known and least understood artist. But the mural called Guernica is not at all what Pablo Picasso has in mind when he agrees to paint the centerpiece for the Spanish Pavilion of the 1937 World's Fair. Remember those days friends, on April 27th, 1937, unprecedented atrocities are perpetrated on behalf of Franco against the civilian population of a little Basque village in northern Spain. Chosen for bombing practice by Hitler's burgeoning war machine, the hamlet is pounded with high-explosive and incendiary bombs for over three hours. Townspeople are cut down as they run from the crumbling buildings. Guernica burns for three days. Sixteen hundred civilians are killed or wounded.By May 1st, news of the massacre at Guernica reaches Paris, where more than a million protesters flood the streets to voice their outrage in the largest May Day demonstration the city has ever seen. Eyewitness reports fill the front pages of Paris papers. Picasso is stunned by the stark black and white photographs. Appalled and enraged, Picasso rushes through the crowded streets to his studio, where he quickly sketches the first images for the mural he will call Guernica. His search for inspiration is over.

From the beginning, Picasso chooses not to represent the horror of Guernica in realist or romantic terms. Key figures - a woman with outstretched arms, a bull, an agonized horse - are refined in sketch after sketch, then transferred to the capacious canvas, which he also reworks several times. "A painting is not thought out and settled in advance," said Picasso. "While it is being done, it changes as one's thoughts change. And when it's finished, it goes on changing, according to the state of mind of whoever is looking at Three months later, Guernica is delivered to the Spanish Pavilion, where the Paris Exposition is already in progress. Located out of the way, and grouped with the pavilions of smaller countries some distance from the Eiffel Tower, the Spanish Pavilion stood in the shadow of Albert Speer's monolith to Nazi Germany. The Spanish Pavilion's main attraction, Picasso's Guernica, is a sober reminder of the tragic events in Spain.

Somnath Hore, the doyen of Indian printmaking, had a long and illustrious career as an activist, artist, and academic. He deliberately chose to adopt printmaking as his medium. Works like Wounds amply illustrate how he wielded the burin or used the acid on his plates—his was a passionate protest against the wanton violence and devastation that marked his times. Unlike many early printmakers from Santiniketan, it was not merely the novelty of the medium that attracted Hore: he explored it to realise very specific artistic goals. This sense of purpose and passion had not been seen in Indian printmaking, perhaps with the exception of Chittaprosad, who was attracted to the medium because of its reproducibility-quotient, which made it a convenient, wide-reaching vehicle of communication. Hore wanted to bring about a revolution in artistic thought, and not merely explore a new medium. In the 1970s, Hore truly stretched the medium to its limits with his white-on-white pulp prints. He explored new approaches to the medium, liberating it from its traditional technological limits. No longer would printmaking be seen merely as a narrative/illustrative medium/form meant to create works meant for popular circulation. While Hore’s versatility is indeed unparalleled, there were others in the early post-Independence years who contributed significantly to the shaping of the graphic art movement in India. In the 1950s, Delhi seems to have been the fountainhead of pioneering printmaking efforts and initiatives. Not only Hore, but veteran printmakers like Kanwal Krishna and Jagmohan Chopra lived and worked there at that time. Chopra, who was a dedicated teacher, was always open to experimentation—he fostered a generation of printmakers who have been greatly indebted to him. Some of his contemporaries include Gunen Ganguli, Jeevan Adalja, and Zarina Hashmi.

Somnath Hore was born in 1921 in the village of Barama in Chittagong, now in Bangladesh. As a youth, his singular passion was drawing. With a box of watercolors given as a gift, he would try to reproduce images from books and magazines. One day out on the fringes of the village, he saw a pair of painters painting pictures on the inner wall of a room inside a small mud hut. He was fascinated, both by the realism of the images as well as the idea of being able to draw from one's imagination as opposed to copying, as he had been doing. Their ability, he says, "was supernatural to me." Personal and societal circumstances would play a significant role in Somnath's work. His father died when Somnath was but 13; his widowed mother was left to raise 5 children. The great famine of 1943 gave rise to mass starvation and disease.
In the 1950's Somnath Hore was involved, successively, with the Calcutta Corporation as an assistant teacher; with the Indian School of Art; and as a lecturer at the Government College of Art in Delhi. In the decades that followed,
Although contemporary art has used bronze in unconventional ways relevant to the time, the technique is still primarily associated with academic skills and public monuments on a large scale. Its capacity for evoking bodily sensuousness and grandeur was subverted in an intimate manner towards an expression of helpless vulnerability by Somnath Hore in his small images of poverty and suffering. Under the hands of less socially committed artists the classical medium is often used for exercises in Modernistic formalism and token empathy.

A lifetime of inventive experiments with etching, intaglio and lithographs culminated in the abstract while on while Wounds series in 1971. Dramatized with a spot of red, the white on white prints reflected the political turbulence of the times. Prints were taken with paper pulp pressed on molded cement matiices. The moulds were made from originals done in clay.Hore began doing bronze sculptures from 1974 onwards. One of his largest sculptures Mother with Child that paid homage to the spirit of the people's struggle in Vietnam was stolen from the Kala Bhavan soon after it was fmished and disappeared without a trace.

Hore's figuration has always reflected the anguished human body. His sculpture is no different but the imprint of the hand of the creator is more startlingly manifest in his sculptures. The torn and rugged surfaces, rough planes with slits and holes, subtle modeling and axial shifts, exposed channels, all make for exciting visual and tactile sculptures.

The beginning of the 20th century witnessed the rise of the nationalist art ‘movement’—there was a marked shift in the aesthetic preferences of the Indian public at large, leading to the gradual emergence of a group of painters engaged in evolving a fresh, ‘new’ Indian aesthetic. Slowly, distinctions began to arise between ‘committed’ artists and ‘professional’, commercial artists. Soon, artists like Raja Ravi Varma and Bamapada Banerjee began to give way to artists like Abanindranath Tagore and Nandalal Bose.

Gaganendranath Tagore. Metamorphoses. Lithograph from Adbhut Lok. Printed at the Bichitra Studio, Calcutta, by Haricharan Mondal. 1917.
While this transition occurred most evidently in approaches to painting, and later, in approaches to sculpture, printmaking was by no means unaffected. The implications of the distinction between ‘printing’ and ‘printmaking’ slowly began to become clearer, and printmaking as a mode of artistic expression finally began to come into its own. It was only after half a century, that ‘printmakers’ were spoken of as being distinct from painters and sculptors. The beginning of the 20th century saw the emergence of printmaking as an independent art form with a multitude of aesthetic possibilities and an identity of its own.

Moreover, at the beginning of the 20th century, ‘art’ and ‘applied art’ came to be considered, not as two separate spheres, but as two aspects of the same profession. A successful artist was one who had acquired formal training and had inculcated ‘high’ Western aesthetic sensibilities (which would bring him important commissions and employment opportunities).

As more and more Indians began entering art schools, printmaking began to make gradual inroads into the aesthetic consciousness of the educated and intellectual elite at the forefront of the artistic revolution. The greatest thrust, however, came from the Tagore family in Calcutta. The three brothers, Abanindranath, Gaganendranath, and Samarendranath (nephews of Rabindranath Tagore) transformed the south veranda of their Jorasanko residence into an art mecca. They began to host regular art salons and their home became the meeting venue for members of the informal Bichitra Club: this was where new styles of painting and printmaking were explored. Works from the Bichitra Studio (despite the Club’s informal and liberal profile) were highly respected by the educated Bengali middle classes who were increasingly attracted to art as a possible vocation. For the first time, artists such as Gaganendranath Tagore and Nandalal Bose began to practise printmaking as an interventionist activity. Around this time, the art centre set up at Rabindranath Tagore’s new university at Santiniketan began to attract the attention of a new breed of nationalist artists. Abanindranath’s students chose to teach art at the ashram school at Santiniketan, at the Bichitra Studio, and at the Society of Oriental Art, over and above similar jobs at government art schools. In 1920-21, Nandalal Bose became the Principal of the newly founded Kala Bhavana, Santiniketan. It was from here that the graphic art movement in India truly began. By the first quarter of the 20th century, Nandalal Bose had introduced graphic art into the Kala Bhavana curriculum. From 1920-30, he experimented ceaselessly with printmaking practices, seeking a new spontaneous language that was concise, simple, and uncluttered. He understood well the futility of trying to translate Occidentally styled imagery into a traditional Oriental format—the resultant vocabulary would undoubtedly be hybrid and confused. Bose rejected the Western mode of representing three-dimensional space on a flat surface using linear perspective: he developed a personal style that employed a relatively flat perspective (i.e. a two-dimensional view) by evenly distributing positive and negative areas. His prints were crisp, the lines were swift and taut, and the blacks and whites balanced each other perfectly. One could say that Bose’s graphic work bordered on abstraction. Though he had absorbed many influences while developing his unique vocabulary (Far Eastern imagery, classical Indian art, for instance), he broke free of their static conventions. Instead, he developed a highly original syntax – his prints were always lively.

SOMNATH HORE: AN APPRECIATION , Gopal Krishna Gandhi wrote in the Kolkata Daily from
The Nehru Centre, London on June 1995 much before the demise of the artist. The appreciation portrays very weel Somnath Hore. The Governor wrote:
`Chief minister Jyoti Basu is coming to unveil a bust of Tagore sculpted by Somnath Hore and being gifted to the Nehru Centre by the Government of West Bengal. I open the crate that has brought the consignment from Calcutta, with excited anticipation. But when I see the piece, I gasp. We have received a tangle of metal scrap. My colleagues move away from the scene of the de-crating so as not to add their disappointment to their director’s despair.

“There is nothing we can do about it,” I sigh.

We will have to put up the piece and go ahead with the function and ask a colleague to finish the unpacking. An hour or so later, as I happen to walk across the lobby where the opened bronze is now placed on a pedestal, I gasp again — in utter amazement. Tagore stands there, in the perfection of his compassionate intensity.

Tongues of bronze have been inter-folded to form the handsome head. The gently patinated bronze head exudes an inner calm, the hollowed eyes a pain and an understanding of pain. This is a true Tagore head and yet very different. How different? There is such a thing as being true to a subject. There is such a thing as being the subject.

At the function on 7 July, 1995, Jyotibabu unveils the masterpiece (not ‘the piece’ any more) by directing a ray of light on it through the darkened hall. The entire audience draws a collective breath of astonished admiration. All those present have known the Tagore ‘presence’ and yet have not. Not in this aspect.

I was to meet Somnath Hore — for the first time — on 7 November, 1998, in his spartan home tucked behind the foliage that covers the laterite grounds between Santiniketan and Sriniketan. I had accompanied President Narayanan as his secretary on a visit to Visva-Bharati for the birth centenary of Professor Tan Yun-Shan. The function over, I sought and got the President’s permission to deviate from his itinerary to call on the sculptor.

Somnathbabu was at the door to meet me, standing tall like a Painted Stork on stilt-like legs, stooped and lost to thought. Rebadi stood just behind him. He was wearing a sweater though it was not cold, and had his head covered in a hand-knitted woollen affair. There were half-finished clay and wax forms placed on the floor and tables, besides books and plants. As he asked me to take a seat, I was struck by his fingers — unusually long and, strangely, as thoughtful as their owner. They moulded the air while he spoke. I reduced our conversation to writing later that very evening on the back of a sheaf of white paper which I now see was the text of the speech of the then vice-chancellor on Professor Tan.

“When Buddhadeb asked me to do the Tagore bust for your Centre in London, I was hesitant,” he said. “You see, my style is different… I was not sure how people would respond to it….” I told him how right he was about the difference factor and also of how people in London had responded.

In the few minutes available to me in my borrowed time, I asked him about his life, his work. “I started as a printmaker in Kala Bhavan,” he said, reminiscing from a past that seemed not some years old, but a century or more so. I could see that detail mattered to him when to “Kala Bhavan” he added “in the graphics department”.

There was nostalgia but no self-validation, recollecting but no romanticizing. “It is only later that I took to this art form. You see, I first do a wax maquette and then there is a person here who casts it for me in bronze.”

Showing me a specimen, he said: “I do these wax sheets and use these ‘channels’ for the hands and legs….” I understood then how ‘sheets’ and ‘channels’ had gone into the making of the London Tagore.

I asked Somnathbabu whether he had ever met Gandhi or sculpted him. “In 1946, when Gandhiji had come at the time of the riots, I made it a point to follow him wherever he went. Even though I was — and am — not a believer, I attended his prayer meetings because I was fascinated by his personality. I did an engraving but did not sculpt him.”

He then told me of the engraving he had done of Gandhi addressing a Hindu-Muslim congregation in August 1947 at the Mohammedan Sporting Club galleries in Calcutta. This is a remarkable work, showing MKG in the distance, standing like a little matchstick on a far platform, with a multitude of Hindus and Muslims in telltale attire, listening rapt. One listener has a child — his future world — perched on his shoulder, as another in a fez sits with a combination of awe and hope. Difference, again. Somnath Hore was showing MKG not as an iconic superman but as the masses saw him through the hectic jostle of their fears, hopes and emotions.

Somnathbabu seemed at that meeting not just frail but afflicted with a controlled anxiety. He spoke with difficulty, straining at every breath. “I am 77 and a half,” he said. “Some years ago I was afflicted by a bronchial ailment. I have had the only allopathic treatment that is possible: antibiotics. But they have been of little avail. I am now taking some homoeopathic medicines. There is some relief. But an attack can come without notice and can be fatal. After dusk, I do not — cannot — step outdoors,” And yet he did precisely that, to bid me goodbye.

Time rolled on and I lost direct contact with Somnathbabu but the Calcutta-based social economist and my friend of many years V.K. Ramachandran kept my interest in Hore strengthened by sending me from time to time news of him and — electronic impressions of the Master’s woodcuts as reproduced in Tebhaga: An Artist’s Diary and Sketchbook. Each was greater than the other — two labourers talking animatedly over a chillum, farmhands at a threshing floor with a pair of sickles, perhaps making, and perhaps not, a political point, a bearded chasi bent over at work, his biceps and calves in comfortable tension, two huts in the smoky hush of dusk, a phenomenally attractive Jamshed Ali at 35, a woman — not Mother Teresa but an archetypal woman anticipating the gift of Albania to India and of India to human conscience — simply called Night, a mufflered Monida listening to something or someone intently, a woman standing with her child on her waist who could be Bengali, Indian, African, a bemused ‘volunteer’ leaning on a staff… each a living document.

Several years were to elapse before I was to see Somnathbabu and Rebadi again. My wife Tara and I were visiting Santiniketan for the first time after I had taken over my present assignment. My diary entry for 22 January 2005 reads: ‘Call on Somnath Hore. At 84, he is frail but clear of mind and speech. He shows us a piece of sculpture in black bronze inspired by Pokhran II. It depicts a human, a dog, a tree and a bird — all dead — killed in a nuclear winter. It is powerful beyond words, a masterpiece. Who am I to compare the Greats but I feel the composition is ahead of Picasso’s Guernica. I feel that piece must be acquired by the United Nations. Talking of nuclear plans, he says “we are mad”. And then he gives us a rare gift — another sculpture by him — a Hindu and a Muslim united in death. I cannot check my tears at his generosity. I say to him “I do not deserve this”, to which his daughter says “How do you know?” I cannot respond to that.’

Calling on Somnathbabu on subsequent visits to Santiniketan became a habit. On one such, when I went to his home with members of a team that the Visitor of Visva-Bharati had appointed to suggest plans for the university’s future health, he said with infinite sadness: “Everything is changing, everything, everywhere….” He was on a plane that seemed new, philosophical. There was no recrimination, no sense of the new generation being unkind to the earlier one and the mood suggested a Buddhist understanding of decay.

Somnath Hore was more than an artist. He was a witness of the human drama but a witness with a skill that translated his witnessing into art. In an age when secularism, socialism and peace can be seen — or rubbished — as shibboleths, he knew them to be vital needs. In times when art can become a plaything of drawing rooms and auction halls, he kept it close to its springs — his very human sensibility.’

Please publish if you take the issue seriously.

Rescued By Bapu, Resettled Noakhali Victims Face Prosecution in Orrissa
Palash Biswas
(contact: Palash Biswas,c/o Mrs Arti Roy, Gosto Kanan, Sodepur, Kolkata-700110, Phone:033-25659551r)
Rescued by Bapu, the resettled Noakhali victims face prosecution in Independent India, in the coastal areas of Orrissa.Though The birth anniversary of Mahatma Gandhi, the father of the nation, is celebrated with reverence all over the country. He is the man who played a significant role in achiveing independence for India from the British Empire with his simplicity and strong will power.We have forgot the life and ideology of Bapu, thus the son of Biju Patnaik, a national leader himself, the Orrissa chief minister Naveen Patnaik sees to have no symapathy with the partition victims. I visited the cosatal area situated in the coastal area of Orrissa nearby Paradip, a dreamproject of Biju and sawthe agony which was shared by the father of the nation at the time when Punjab and Bengal was bleeding and New delhi celebrated with glittering the new found power for the caste Hindu Ruling classes.
The prime minister Dr Manmohan singh inaugruated the centenarycelebration of Bapu`s styagrah in South Afrika forgetting the partition victims and their plight. Gujrat leaders enjoyed Munnabhai Lage raho and Gandhigiri has overtaken Indian Politics as well as the ideology of Mohan Das Karam Chand Gandhi.
Lage Raho Munnabhai, the Bollywood blockbuster has reinvented Mahatma Gandhi for an entirely new generation of Indians. Munnabhai shows the way on screen, but can Gandhigiri work in real life.CNN-IBN Editor-in-Chief Rajdeep Sardesai, engaged the audience in a debate on Gandhi and Gandhigiri. A poll conducted some time ago found that 68 per cent said Gandhi’s ideals can work in real life India today, 19 per cent said they can’t work and 16 per cent were undecided.Gandhi was no emperor, not a military general, not a president nor a prime minister. He was neither pacifist nor a cult guru. Who was Gandhi ? If anything, Mohandas K. Gandhi was a constant experimenter. Spirituality, religion, self-reliance, health, education, clothing, drinks, medicine, child care, status of women, no field escaped his search for truth. His thoughts when appeared in the form of talk or article became official words of action with the masses of India. He was a man who did what he said and led an exemplary and a transparent life. Not many people can claim "My life is an open book". What the ruling classes do, it is quite evident if you care enough to understand the psyche of Noakhali victims residing in Kendrapara district of orrissa.
Gandhi's work in the Noakhali District of Bengal during 1946 and 1947 provides a good example of the Mahatma's delicate balance between despair and the faith of a saint. As he began his stay in Noakhali, he told a prayer meeting that "today I am going through the greatest test of my life. I am now to find if the road I follow is really the true road for the people of this country."40 The test of Noakhali brought Gandhi a combination of comfort and despair, for even as he realized the failure of the people to practice Ahimsa, he recognized the truth and power of non-violence.

It’s all very well for the Indian government to be hospitable and generous to refugees from Bangladesh and Sri Lanka, but the ground reality is different. Settled in Orissa, the preferential treatment meted out to them by the government has become the cause of much resentment and bitterness among the locals. Partition victim all refugees from Punjab have not only rehabiliated , but they got Indian citizenship one and all. Most of the Bengali refugees, particularli who settled outside Bengal, are dalits, the lowest communities of Hindus in Bengal society. Bengal caste Hindu leadership had not been interested ever for their rehabiltiation or citizenship. Contrarily, the locals in different states have been much more sympathetic and helpful. As it is proved once again in Orrissa.The partition victim dalit refugees settled in Orrissa are being targetted and implicated most unlawfully and arbitrarily. Their sole offence is that they do spek in their mother tongue and that is Bengali. Majority of them possessed Voter`s Identity Card, Ration Card, Pand Card, Land reciept and most importantly Migration dispersal slipissued by Refugee Rehabilitation Directorate, Government of west Bengal dating back in 1956-57. These peole have availed benefits under various states and centre sponsored schemes erlier on the basis of refugee policy for partition victims in compliance with assurances given by the nationalleaders like Bapu, Nehru, Patel and Dr Rajendra Prasad. They are bonifide citizens in accordance with the citizenship Act of India, 1955, of a sovereign country. Most of them had to flee from Erswhile East Pakistan due to independence of two dominions called India and Pakistan, created by dividing Bengal and Punjab on the basis of two nation theory. The influx continued as population transfer on religious lines failed and minorities chose to stay on their motherland across the border., but political and religious prosecution continued.These Bengali refugees settled in the coastal areas of Orrissa are in possession of refugee resettlement documents issued by then labour ministery , Government of India. Hence, all dates of their migration and resettlement are clearly indiacated that they settled much before the cutt off date 16 December, 1971 fixed by government of India, erlier in 1956 to 1958. Most importantly the Oria speaking population, political parties and media stand united with them and support their claim for citizenship.

The road to Ramnagar begins from the link bridge on Kendrapara-Paradeep national highway.The road itself is the symbol of the backwardness of Mahakalpara Block which comprises of old Oria, Santhal and refugee colonies.I had to travel the route on a scooter, driven by a social activist, Ravindra Nath Sarkar. Kendrapara had experienced heavy floods some days ago. The national highway was damaged and it is still under repairing. Paddy fields were affected badly. It was raining interminnently for some days.There was no shelter in between.You have to take extra sets of clothes lest getting wet, you may not change. The route was quite dangerous for driving and I had to be careful to save my hanging leg which tended to get hurt anywhere.
Mind you, This entire population of Oria, Bengali and santhals have to face a common threat very soon as Mahakalpara is proposed to consist of Special Economic Zone to get oil for an American Multi National. Iron Ore Mines refugees are not settled as yet and further desettlement is imminent.Provided all refugees, the partition victims and the victims of industrialisation unite, what may come. Rmangar is a very old settlement which have Two Cyclone Shelters built after the super cyclone, 2004 among other things. It has got Bnak, Post Office, Highschool and local market ,too. The people are independent economically as they practice fishing on large scale. The river flowing side by side Rmanagra connects it to Bay of bengal. Even the Ramnagar people get Hilsa here. Paradeep is only six KM away in air distance.

I was amazed to discover all sixty familes settled and rehabiliated in adjoing BB colony are from Noakhali, the riot victims of 1946 and onwards. No less a personality, Bapu rushed to Noakhali to stop the riots.Saved by Bapu, the partition victims of Noakhali are once again prosecuted in Orrissa. Wonderful. I met some of the eyewitnesses of the Noakhali riots and have details of the nightmare. All the sixty families belong to Debnath community which is recognised in Orrissa as Debnath. Most of the Refugees settled in Ramnagar, Kharinasi, Baulakani, Batghara, Jamboo and other gram panchayats ogf Mahakal Para Block belong to Orrissa recognised scheduled caste Namoshudra. Others belong to another dalit community as per as namoshudra, the Pod Or apundras.Apart from Noakhali, they root in Jassore, Khulna, Barisal, Faridpur, all well known for the main base of Dalit Movement in undivided India.
Bengal had one of the worst records of communal riots before the Partition of the country. It was only in Bengal that the MuslimLeague succeeded in forming ``relatively'' stable ministries in
the two decades before the British quit in 1947. The refugee infux continued as the minority prosecution in Bangladesh never stopped. Continuous influx of refugees made the life of settled and rehabiliated refugees out of Bengal very miserable as they have not got citizenship as yet and the administration knows no way to distinguish an Indian citizen refugee and a bangladeshi National.In Ramnagar itself a lady migrated in 1957 have been served eviction notice.

None of the South Asian countries are party to the 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees which currently is ratified by 134 nations. This may reflect the unwillingness of South Asian governments to submit to international scrutiny. Though India is not a party to the Refugee Convention, the general principle prohibiting forced repatriation called non- refoulement has risen to the level of customary law, such that they bind even non-signatories.
Since the matter (entry and regulation of aliens) falls under the Union List(3), the Central Government is empowered to deal with refugees. Traditionally, the Union Cabinet has made reactive decisions with each particular refugee influx, often taking action only when the particular refugee influx went beyond the control of the Border Security Force, and the matter became political. India thus lacks a cohesive national policy for handling refugee inflows. The lack of a national Indian policy limits the ability of the State governments and Border Security Force to deal with refugees instantly, resulting in mass rejections at the frontier while policy directions are awaited or non-recognition of refugees sneaking into Indian territory.
“Refugees should not be dealt with like outsiders; they should be treated like human beings,” said Mohammad Amin, chief of Adhikar, a state level NGO. Wherever they go, they adopt the norms of the local society, its culture and lifestyle. But Utkal Bangeeya Surakshya Samiti spokesman Vijoy Shukla told me at Ramnagar under Mahakalpara Block of Kendrapara district on 24th September, 2006, that all those persons served eviction notice and noted as bangladeshi nationals, have been omitted from the voters list for the coming Pnchayat elections. Besides many others have found their names deleted. He alleged that the Bengali refugges are being deprived of human rights as birth certificate, caste certificates, ration card, bpl card, domicile card are being denied. Shukla told that the samiti is planning to launch a fresh agitation.
A former sarpanch of Ramnagar, Bijoy Shukla, who witnessed the scene, found it really cruel and inhuman. With an uncertain future in store for the students on the deportation list, attendance at the school has also thinned.
It is not verylate, last year only, the bengali settlers in Orrissa from fifties began to get the notice to evict India within seven days.Mr Shukla said, the local Oria people, political parties and media stand united with the partion victims, but the ouster axe is likely to fall soon on more than 1,500 socalled illegal Bangladeshi migrants in Kendrapara district only.
The district administration claimed to have identified them in 2003 and sent a report to the government seeking permission for their deportation, said Kendrapara superintendent of police Dayal Gangwar in 12 th January , 2005, adding that most of the 1,551 illegal settlers are concentrated in Mahakalpada block of the district. We will issue eviction notices to all of them . We will forcibly deport them if they don`t leave on their own, Gangwar said. But Gangwar and the administration had to retreat on the face of stiff resistance from all quarters in Orrissa.Notices will be served on the illegal migrants by the respective block development officers, tehsildars and the police, he added.
The eviction notice was actually a government of Orrissa, home department order, dated 18.12.2004 issued from Bhuvneshwar. A copy of the eviction notice read as follows: ``In exercise of power conferred by clause (c) of sub Clause(2) of Section -3 of the Foreigners Act- 1946 (Act No.31 of 1946) read with notification No. 413/56(1) FI Dt 19.4.1958 of the government of India Ministery of Home affairs, New Delhi, the state government do hereby direct that Deepak sarkar s/o Paritosh, a Bangladeshi national at present residing in the District of Kendrapara, should quit India within 30 (thirty) days from date of service of this order on him ., failing which steps will be taken to deport him from India.
address: village -kharinasi, Tahsil- Mahakalpara, Dist- Kendrapara.
Signed by Deputy secretary to Government.
The act is used for the eviction is the Foreigners Act- 1946. At the time of the enactment of the Act neither India was independent nor divided. All persons divided in three soverein nations India, Pakistan and Bangldesh were the citizens of undivided India. How does the government use The British law which was passed without the actual event of partion, population transfer and refugee influx , refugee and rehabilitation policy of India, not to mention the assuarances by national leaders and its spirit.
Utkal Bangiya Surakshya samiti spokesman Shukla rightly said, `` the government had not any idea of the odd situation. Now they want to stip of all documents possesed by the refugees before any fresh action.
The initial survey, conducted in 2001, had revealed that more than 3,500 Bangladeshi nationals had settled in several coastal and interior districts of Orissa. Kendrapara alone accounts for than 2,300 migrants. In 2002, 25 Bangladeshi nationals were repatriated from Navrangpur district.The state has divided Bangladeshi nationals living into three categories. Those who came to Orissa before March 25, 1971 will not be deported. The cases of those who came between March 25, 1971 and December 16, 1971 have been referred to the central government for a decision, Gangwar said that time.We have initiated the deportation of those who arrived after December 16, 1971, he added. The government has deported 103 infiltrators between 1973 and 1993.

Kendrapara district collector Hemant Sharma said the administration will have to forcibly evict the migrants if they fail to comply with the state order.

In December 2004, the Supreme Court had issued notices to the Centre on the unchecked flow of Bangladeshi immigrants into the country after a public interest litigation by the India Image Foundation alleged that over 3 lakh migrants were entering India every year.The petition listed West Bengal as a major recipient of such immigrants. It also said the Assamese faced the danger of being reduced to a minority in their home state as Bangladeshi immigrants would soon outnumber them.
While the immediate reason for the current round of deportation drive seems to be the xenophobia sweeping through coastal Kendrapara, state government officials plead helplessness, citing repeated directives from the Union home ministry to deport illegal immigrants. Orissa`s home secretary, Santosh Kumar, who is supervising the cleansing process, denies any immediate provocation. Although these deportations are unlikely to solve the problem of illegal settlement, it has ensured cheap political dividends for the chief minister, Naveen Patnaik. Apart from endearing himself to the local people, he has managed to corner Congress legislator from Rajnagar, Nalini Mohanti. Traditionally, the Bengali-speaking majority here have been supporters of Mohanti.But even as the state government claims to be deporting illegal settlers, the fact remains that all the 1,551 who have been served eviction notice, are Hindu.

Mrityunjay Mandal is a third generation youngman, born and brought up in Orrissa. He is the Panchayat Pradhan for consecutively three terms. Mandal said, `` All registered refugees settled in the coastal areas of Orrissa, particularly in Kendrapara, migrated to India in 1950, 1953, 1954 and 1957. They were in the Charbetia Refugee camp near Cuttuck before resettlement.
Mandal added, ` Apart from agririan settlement, Bengali refugees were settled by government as small traders inBhuvneshwar, Puri, Cuttack, Baripada, Balasore, sambalpur, Brahmpur, Dhenkanel Anugul. The Charbetia refugees got settlment in Malkan Giri under dandyakaranya Project. Some of them got rehabilitation in different districts of Undivided UP and MP. Some got rehbilitation in Bhushandipur in six colonies adjoining the famous Chilka lake.
Mandal`s house is situated opposite the cyclone centre in Ramnagar. An idol of durga was in making and children were playing there unaware of their fate. I saw anothor cyclone centre near chhapauli where a school was run by lady teachers in the ground floor.
Pushpa, an aunt of Mandal has also been served eviction notice while she belonged to an alotee regitered resettler family which was shifted in Ramnagar from charbetia camp on 5th May , 1957, as the dispersal certificate from Charbetia Relief camp shows.. They migrated in 1956. She was married to a resident of west Bengal, an Indian citizen. She has got every document to support her claim for citizenship.
Mandal is grateful to the local people and political parties and media in general. He said, `All media people supported our genuine cause. All political parties and local people helped us to resist. Thus we stay here even today. Nalinikanti Mahanti, an ex minister and MLA for 25 years led us from front, he added. He organised a deputation to Prime minister Manmohan Singh, Congress President Mrs Sonia Gandhi , Home Minister in centre Shivraj Patil and Loksabha Speaker somnath Chatterjee.President of Utkal Pradesh congress committee Jaidev Jena, ex minister Srikant Jena and Malkangiri MLA Nimai sarkar met the netionalleaders. Chairman of Mahakalpara Panchayat Samiti Balram Pareeda led the local support.

I met Sanatan Debnath(90), Narayan Debnath(75), Sridam debnath(85), Rasmohan Debnath(80), Harendra Debnath(80),Lokmohan debnath(80),Nanibala Debnath w/o Krishnabandhu Debnath and others. Sanatan Debnath has lost his memory but walks himself, still bearing the injuries in his bleeding heart. I tried to talk to him in vain.His mother was seriously injured in Noakhali riots. All these persons belong to Sandeep island area of then Noakhali. Sandeep was later included in Chittagang after 1956. All these persons are eyewitnesses of Noakhali Riots in sandeep area. They recall Bapu`s visit in Noahkali but could not meet him as he did not visit Sndeep. ``In Sandeep riots my grandmother got a cut on her throat. She was absconding for several days but was found by fishermenand survived,’’ said the son of Sanatan Debnath, a teacher in the local highschool Dinesh Chandra Debnath. `` My parents fled from sandeep and took shelter in a safer place nearby Rahmatpur Village, in my maternal home which was under a different union area and protected by secular muslims. My mother was very beautiful.The riots broke in sandeep fair on Shiv Chaturdashi where a large number of females and children gathered. The rumours of riots in Kolkata and massacre of Muslims spred by seamen coming to the area agitated Muslims. They attacked the Hindus and chopped off many of the in the fair.”

Narhari debnath remembers everything with full details.`The riots was aftermath of direct action and following riots in kolkata, he said. Sailors returning from Kokata spred the rumour of Muslim Massacre and Noakhali was burnt’, He said. `It was a saturday. The miscreants attacked the Tiner badee of Dr Harinath and chopped him on the spot.In Kachhiapar he became the first victim. He was a resourceful and reputed man and his house was famous as godam Badee. It triggered the panic button as wanted. Then the secular Muslims reached the Sener Hat, the local Hat in sandeep and warned Hindus to flee to safer places. it worked.The Hat was immidiately deserted.Meanwhile the sky was lit up by large scale arson. The elder brother of Harinath Doctor escaped and he told the fleeing Hindus that petrol was used in the arson.Entire Sandeep area was burnt. Sandeep was victimised just for nothing.”`Lalmohan sen, a freedomfighter who particiapted in Chittagang revolt under the leadership of Master Surya sen, another reputed personality of sandeep was killed immidiately. His brother Bhushan was also assasinated. Bhushan was a piolot and he had to fly Kolkata next day. locals deserted sandeep and escaped to nearby Jungle. They reached Another union area Rahamatpur., ‘ he added.Now Sreedam Debnath told that the chairman of Rahmatpur Union area, Batam sardar was very powerful and secular, too. He challanged the rioters not to touch Hindus in his union area. He deployed his supporter Muslim youths to protect the Hindus.
Both the oldman said that Fazlul Haq visited sandeep before the riots.
Describing the atmosphere of Noakhali then, The old men said,` rioters were crying Zihad with the slogan- Alla Ho Akbar. The Batam Sardar supporters and Hindus answed with vande Mataram.Tension prevailed , but altogether Hindus were safe in Batam`s den. Hindus were not so fortunate in other areas. And Bapu had to go for rescue.Gandhi stayed for about four months in the riot stricken areas. He started moving around the villages and motivated the people towards his peaceful coexistence and non-violence philosophy. When Gandhiji came to Jayag on 29th January 1947 all sections of the local community extended him whole-hearted support.

At that time, Barrister Hemanta Kumar Ghosh of the village donated all his resources to Mahatma for the development and peace of the area and "Ambika Kaliganga Charitable Trust" was formed. The office of the Gandhi Peace Mission, formerly known as Gandhi Camp, was shifted to the present campus of Jayag. The Gandhi Camp started working for both peace and charitable functions and it continued till partition of India.
In Azimpur criminallawyer Presh Moktar was killed.
Shocked by Lalmohan and harinath`s death the people began singing a song remembering them since the very next days: RABIBARE DASHTAAR PARE AAMAARE GELI BACHHA CHHARIYAA
KAAL SHAMANE NILO RE KAARIAA
RAASTAYA CHHILO JATO BAAREE DEKHE KAANDE TATO NAAREE
KAATE KHANDO KHAND KARI MUKHE BALE HARI HARI
They were weeping while singing the old song with frail rythm and sound.I felt my heart wet wet, though it was not raining anywhere.

Till he lived, Kartik Manna, an unlettered Bengali fisherman in the Ramnagar village of Kendrapara`s Mahakalpada block, was never a cause for worry for the Orissa administration.
Now dead for the last ten years, Manna must leave for Bangladesh. Or so believe the mandarins in the Orissa police and state administration who have zeroed in on 1,551 people in Mahakalpada block for deportation. On January 16, a local police team knocked on the rickety doors of Manna?s hut and shoved a small piece of paper into his son Bhanu Manna?s grimy hands, asking him to ?quit India? within 30 days or face police arrest and subsequent handing over to the Border Security Force.Bhanu, 60, would have perhaps laughed off the notice as a cruel joke had it not been a deportation notice from the Kendrapara district administration. The police did not forget to give another notice for Bhanu`s dead wife, Surati.

What`s my fault? I am not a Bangaldeshi. I came from Midnapore district after the 1971 cyclone,? protests Bhanu. But in the sleepy fishing village of Ramnagar, Bhanu and his deceased family members are not the only ones who have been randomly selected for deportation. Over 600 toddlers, men and women in the area have been slapped such notices by the Kendrapara district administration since January 16, when the deportation move started.

Like several of his neighbours, Bhanu was not among the thousands of Hindu refugees who escaped Bangladesh during the liberation war and arrived in India before December 16, 1971. The people who came in after this date were branded illegal immigrants. There were others who crossed into India before December 16 but hung around other relief camps and trickled into the settlement camps only after the cut-off date. It is these people who have been targeted by the government from time to time.

Rani Haldar belongs to Goda village of Orissa’s Jagatasinghpur district, which was the worst hit by the killer super-cyclone in October 2000. She lost her husband, children and home. She is yet to recover from the trauma. She claims her forefathers have been staying in the village since 1943. They are not infiltrators. They belong to the area.

Kamini Khan (Roy) belongs to Raighar area of Nabarangpur district. His wife is a panchayat sarpanch. Although he came here as a refugee, he has now become a landlord and is reportedly the kingpin in clashes between local tribals and refugees of the area.

Aurobindo Dhali, Orissa’s then co-operation minister, hails from south Orissa’s tribal dominated Malkangiri district. He was in the centre of controversy consequent to his meeting with the West Bengal chief minister, who was seeking support for the cause of at least 400,000 Bengali settlers in Orissa, for the revival of their lost language. Dhali is reportedly a Bengali refugee, elected to the state assembly on a Bhartiya Janata Party ticket, and is allegedly fighting more for the cause of refugees than in the interest of the state.

Rani Haldar, Kamini Khan (Roy) and Aurobindo Dhali have created a furore over Orissa in the last two years because of their links with the refugee problem in the state. While no official figure is available, it is estimated that more than 700,000 refugees are living in various parts of Orissa. A majority of them are Bengali refugees, the rest are from Tibet, Tamil Nadu and Sri Lanka.

The Bengali refugees have their own story to tell. After the formation of East Pakistan in 1948, thousands of Bengalis had left their homes to settle in India. After the formation of Bangladesh, in 1971, more Bengalis (both Hindu and Muslim) sought refuge in India. Some of them were rehabilitated in Dandakaranya forest range of South Orissa by the government of India in collaboration with the government of Orissa.

Apart from this, a large-scale influx of Bengali refugees, who have subsequently settled in coastal areas of the state, has raised many eyebrows. Besides engaging in marine and inland fishing and allied trades, they have illegally occupied coastal forestland and are responsible for the destruction of the coastal eco-system, complain some local residents of Jagatasinghpur district. The interception of illegal radio stations and the arrest of a few suspects in the Rajnagar block of Kendrapara district in May 2002 have brought to light the activities of infiltrators from Bangladesh and security breaches made in the vicinity of sensitive defence installations. It is suspected that ISI and other foreign intelligence networks have installed some transmission centres near Wheeler Island in the Bay of Bengal to get information regarding Chandipur missile testing range.

Orissa’s home department has identified for deportation 2,867 Bangladeshis in six districts – from Kendrapara, Malkangiri, Bhadrak, Nowrangpur, Jagatasinghpur and Sambalpur. 392 have been issued “Quit India” notices; 21 from Nowrangpur district were recently handed over to the border security forces in neighbouring West Bengal for deportation. The rest will be deported in a phased manner as the process of identification is still under way with several districts yet to submit their final lists. State home department sources said that in the past too, the state government has taken steps to deport illegal immigrants. About 102 Bangladeshi infiltrators were deported from 1973 to 1993. Meanwhile, the state director general of police, NC Padhi, recently said in Malkangiri that the list of the settlers has been submitted to the government and deportation will be undertaken only after a government decision.

Of late, a tug of war over immigrants between the ruling Biju Janta Dal (BJD) and Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP) has become sharper. BJP alleges that the identification for deportation is being made on communal lines, because Hindu refugees have not voted in favour of BJD and Congress. Dismissing this charge, a senior state government official said that all has been done as per a central government circular issued on 16 September 1997. The circular states: “Any Bangladeshi found to have settled in the state after 16 December 1971, will be deported after due inquiry and issue of “Quit India” notice as per Foreigner Act, 1946. While those who have entered the state between 25 March 1971 and 16 December 1971, will be referred to the government of India for a decision. The state government will not disturb any Bangladeshi, who had landed in India before 25 March 1971”.

Meanwhile, Dhali says that the state government has neglected the refugees’ lot. Refugees from Bangladesh who are now living in Malkangiri, Raighar and Umerkote areas should not be treated as infiltrators as they all came to India before December 1971. They have been here for the last 40 years and should be able to avail of all facilities and services, according to him. Dhali clarified further that following the announcement of the government of India through All India Radio, most Hindu refugees came here from East Pakistan after the partition and were rehabilitated by the union government in consultation with the state government in Malkangiri, Raighar, Umerkote, Kendrapara and Puri districts. In those days, the government had provided land, agriculture equipment and citizenship certificates in the names of the heads of their families. Now their families have expanded and they are facing a problem of citizenship, because teenagers were not issued with this certificate at that time. They have now been short-listed for deportations.

Interestingly, local politics has also taken an ugly shape -- those who were fighting against refugee ouster have now politically settled into various parties. As a result, the conflict owing to the refugee issue is gaining momentum, and both refugees and the tribal are victims of their ugly game. The “development” of refugees has concentrated on settled agriculture and their exposure to the market economy. The local tribal population’s shifting cultivation practices and lack of education has made them subservient to the refugee population, feels Dhirendra Tripathy, a Bhubaneswar-based social activist. The other issues, according to him, are large-scale deforestation of forest land and encroachment of tribal land. Local legislator Mamata Padhi charged that some Bengali refugee men are allegedly involved in false marriages with girls from local tribal and backward communities; later, these men desert the women they have married.

The deportation drive may be well-meaning, but its arbitrariness and utter cruelty have brought the process under a cloud of suspicion. Several of those on the deportation list have voter identity cards, PAN cards and BPL cards that prove their citizenship. Some of them even work in government offices. But the most absurd has been deportation notices to children, who should have been Indian citizens by birth. Sampad Sarkar, 35, who runs a small shop in Ramnagar has been served a notice while his wife, Jyotsna, and three-year-old son have been spared.

Similar despair has descended on other households. As men and women are erratically selected for deportation, families are disintegrating and hurtling towards penury. Gokul Bera, 34, along with his 74-year-old father, 58-year-old mother and 34-year-old wife, Arati have been asked to leave. And so their six children aged between two and 12, who were all born in Ramnagar. Gokul?s childhood friend, Krishnapada Mandal, says the notice is arbitrary: How did he become a Bangla national suddenly? Why should he go to a place which he has never seen, he asks.

It`s a question that resonates in almost all households of the village. The arbitrariness is all the more evident in the case of Arabinda Kayal, a Class-IV employee of the Paradip Port Trust. The entire Kayal household, including his son, daughter-in-law and daughter, have been marked out for deportation though their names figure in the voters? list and Kayal holds a PAN card as well.