After the BJP came to power following its win in the West Bengal assembly election, Chief Minister Suvendu Adhikari announced the acquisition of land for India’s Border Security Force (BSF) along the border with Bangladesh. He had said more than 500 acres would be acquired and handed over to the BSF. But in trying to begin the acquisition, the state administration has run into resistance from farmers in Murshidabad district.
According to a report by the rights group APDR, on 3 June members of its Murshidabad district committee surveyed the Bhutgari field at Ghoshpara Sarbapalli in Domkal block. The field has about 15,000 bigha of three-crop land, on which farmers from five villages depend. The five villages are South Ghoshpara, Sarbapalli, Farazipara, Muradpur and North Ghoshpara. Jute, wheat, kolai, lentils, garlic, onion and various vegetables are grown on the land.
Nine district-committee members spoke with the farmers. The farmers told the APDR team that none of them held much land — each family had one, one and a half or two bigha; that is, they were small farmers.
The APDR report says: “The farmers here have cultivated this land since their fathers’ and grandfathers’ time. Severe erosion of the Jalangi river has swallowed much fertile land, so the area’s farmers depend on this land for their survival. All the farmland in the field is recorded in government records, and the land is quite fertile. About 600 families from five villages depend on it.”
To build barbed-wire fencing along a 27-km stretch of the border, the Adhikari government has moved to give the BSF land. The report says that if this land is lost, about 3,000 people will be left destitute, and that they will not sell it under any circumstances. The farmers feel the small compensation amount is nothing compared with the land, which has fed their families for years, while the small sum would soon be exhausted amid the financial strain of poor families.
The APDR report adds that on 31 May the BSF went to acquire land in this border area of Murshidabad’s Domkal subdivision by planting red boundary flags, and the farmers began protesting. When a large number of farmers took position on the road beside the Bhutgari field, traffic was halted. When Jalangi police and the BSF came together to disperse the gathering, an altercation broke out with the farmers.
The report further says the farmers told the APDR team they had no objection if the BSF left their farmland and built its camp elsewhere. In this area of Domkal subdivision, Hindus and Muslims farm together, and farmers from the neighbouring Hindu village will not give up the land either.
The report says many from the neighbouring Hindu village also spoke with APDR. They said they had brought in a new government, exhausted by the previous government’s oppression — yet after the new government took office, an attempt was under way to take farmers’ border-area land for the BSF. They said they would not accept it, that the BSF and police were increasingly standing against the area’s farmers, and that they would fight to protect the land.
The farmers also told APDR that the BSF had measured the land twice over the past two years, but had not come to take it then either because of the farmers’ resistance. Now efforts to take the land had begun again. No statement has yet come publicly from the state government or the BSF on the matter.
বাংলায় মূল প্রতিবেদন পড়ুন · Read the original Bengali report