Election In Pincodes: Climate, caste shadow over delta
Perched on the southernmost tip of Bengal, the Sundarbans mangrove archipelago is a collection of 102 islands that form a crucial carbon sink.
Lakshmi Soren’s girlhood was spangled with vivid dreams about the sea. In her straw hut where a pockmarked curtain bestowed only a semblance of privacy, water was all around her. The slushy expanse of the Hoogly river delta stretched out in front, and every night, she would swim amid lucid images about becoming a mermaid, a jolpori in Bengali, a queen ruling the deep blue underworld. “The water was my friend, it was our playground and life giver. My father would catch fish in the shallow water and my mother would skin crabs and sell it in the village market. We didn’t have much but we had the sea,” she said.
Last week, the sea returned to her as a nightmare. As gales pummelled her island of Mousuni in the southern fringes of West Bengal, Soren scurried to a storm relief centre at the edge of her village, clutching to her chest a small jute bag – a bundle of notes, her bank passbook, a photograph of her son, and a small idol of the local deity.
Two nights later, she trudged back on Wednesday morning to find that only a skeleton of her house standing and saline water seeped into the small parcel of land she tilled for a rent, rendering it uncultivable. Worryingly, the Bay of Bengal appeared to have advanced deeper into the island. Menacing waves crashed against what was once an embankment. Tears obscuring her vision, Soren looked around in helplessness as the water slowly encircled her dwelling. “I didn’t know the sea could be so hungry. How long can we keep rebuilding our lives?” she asked in agony.
Upending Soren’s life is Cyclone Remal, which battered the coasts of Bengal and Bangladesh over the weekend, displacing nearly a million people across the two countries and killing four people in Bengal, including one in Mousuni. For people such as Soren – roughly half of the island’s 34,000 people are either from the Scheduled Castes or Scheduled Tribes – subsisting with a vengeful climate is now a part of life. But the devastation of Remal has come against the backdrop of the most fiercely fought Lok Sabha elections in Bengal in a generation. “We have got more visits than relief because of these polls,” she said.
Both sides are desperately wooing women such as Soren – marginal, poor, rural – because it is this class that will make the difference in the battleground region of south Bengal, which holds 25 of the 42 seats in the eastern state. For the first time, discussions around a changing climate are part of roadside adda and tea-stall gossip. Playing a central role are people such as Soren, among India’s most vulnerable climate refugees.
Climate’s victims
Perched on the southernmost tip of Bengal, the Sundarbans mangrove archipelago is a collection of 102 islands – 54 of which are inhabited – that form a crucial carbon sink and eastern India’s biggest protection against coastal flooding and cyclones.
The islands have had human settlements since the 1830s but the population started swelling at the turn of the century and then exploded in the decades following the partition of Bengal when hundreds of thousands of people – many of them SC/ST refugees – cleared forests and settled in the islands. Many of them started building embankments to keep the saline water out of the low-lying islands, and began farming.
Today, roughly a third of the population of the South 24 Parganas district – under which the largest chunk of population falls – is SC. “Dalits and Adivasis dominate the islands where agriculture remains the mainstay. Even the Muslims are largely people who converted from lower castes due to discrimination,” said Asim Mondal, a professor at Ramakrishna Mission College, Narendrapur. “And these communities face the brunt of the unpredictable climate.”
Ringed by rivers and battered repeatedly by cyclones – five have pounded the Bengal coast since 2019 – conversations on the climate crisis have slowly seeped into Mousuni, barely 100km from Kolkata but accessible only by a rickety boat fastened to a makeshift jetty.
Only the centre of the island is now suitable for paddy cultivation as waves crashing on the southern and western shores have left scores of houses marooned and mangled, gobbling up land at the rate of 1 sq km every year. A patchwork of barely motorable brick alleys thread the island together, the roads turning into dust and mud as one approaches the adivasi colonies. In the middle of a parched field now too saline to cultivate stands Raju Hembram’s house. Before Remal clobbered it to pieces, it was one of the few pucca houses in the area. “People are scared of when the next squall will come. Bamboo stilts stapled together and a straw roof overhead is all they can afford,” he said.
There is just one borewell in this settlement, and no schools nearby. Women prefer the long queues to the abuses sometimes hurled at them if they fill up their brightly painted plastic jugs from more affluent neighbourhoods. The local primary health centre is on the other side of the island and a doctor sits there between 9am and 11am. Any emergency necessitates a perilous ride across the river.
The divide
Not everyone lives in such precarity. The northern edge is marked by a jumble of mushrooming resorts and budget hotels, each offering a package tour of the unspoilt river beach to the Kolkata tourist. At last count, 84 of them have sprung up over the last five years, selling rooms for anything between ₹2,000 to ₹5,000 a night. But for the Dalit and adivasi residents, the sight of tourists waddling through muddy beaches that were once their homes has brought little economic bounty. “Nobody from our settlement is given employment there; we are only employed as temporary servants and cleaners,” said Hembram.
Each cyclone – Aila, Yaas, Amphan, Bulbul and now Remal – has mauled Susanta Kayal’s life and property. The embankment in front of his shop has collapsed thrice even as the beach in front has shrunk to half its size in five years. “There is no buffer. Each gust of wind makes me think the shop will collapse on me. I’ll leave by the end of the year,” he said.
His son, Prasanta, is a manager at one of the resorts nearby, Golden Ground. But Susanta is clear that the haphazard construction has only brought more instability to their lives. “He is paid just ₹12,000 a month. It is not worth the labour.”
Down the embankment lives Savitri Das. The woman, in her sixties, has no resources to repair her home wrecked by Yaas in 2021, and subsists on the meagre sales from her shop selling biscuits, tea and bottles of water. A frayed white cotton sari draped around her frail frame, Das is hunched by worry of the next high tide as she sat down for a humble meal of rice and potato curry in May. “I live here alone because my son is in Kerala. In my youth, we would earn from dish and crab catches. Now, I am counting the days till the waves claim this small shop,” she said. “I have neither money nor the power to move away.”
The perils
In her 23 years on earth, Rimli Sardar has lived in three homes; the first her father’s house in Ghoramara, a sliver of an island on the Muriganga that lost half of its land in the last three decades to the river; the second in Sagar, the largest island in the Sunderbans delta, the main hub for supplies ranging from fish to petrol and where her family fled in panic as water surged through the embankment one night; and the third in Canning town that sat at the head of the myriad tributaries of the Matla river. In this cramped town, she shares a three-room house with her husband and two children.
One May morning, Sardar scampered past shuttered shops and sleepy bus stands in her attempt to make the 5.17am local train to Sealdah. Streaks of red were yet to tint the eastern sky when she jumped into the women’s compartment, one of hundreds of women who make the tiring journey every day to Kolkata to work as helps in highrises and colonies. “My husband is a labourer and an alcoholic. The money from this job is what runs my home and feeds my children,” she said.
The hour-and-15 minute canter to Sealdah is replete with wares. In an orange sari with thin gold hoops in her ears and hair tied in a bun with a rubber band, Sardar stuffs a shiny looking “leather” purse for ₹60, packets of muri for ₹10 and safety pins for any emergency. Pleased with her bargaining, she drifts off into a snooze before the wail of the train horn alerted her that Sealdah was approaching. “I may be poor but I am lucky that I escaped. In my old village, not every woman was as lucky,” she said.
She is hinting at trafficking of women that has burgeoned as the pandemic, lockdown and the climate crisis have dealt a triple whammy on the local population. In 2022, local police busted a gang of five men who trafficked roughly 2,000 minor girls over several years through Canning, for as little as ₹5,000. “In my village too, every time there was a cyclone, girls would disappear from the class, and we’d hear rumours,” said Sardar.
Despite punitive action, activists say the menace cannot be eradicated by legal action because of its roots in social distress. “The problem is socioeconomic, and therefore the answer has to be social – things such as public awareness, poverty alleviation and education,” said Rishi Kant of the NGO Shakti Vahini.
The Hazi Desarat College in Pathakhali island is an example. Established in 1961 and affiliated to Calcutta University, the institution of 46 professors and 2,300 students is the largest in the region. “Most of the students are scheduled caste, and roughly 70% are women. We get pupils from the most interior islands,” said Tarun Mondal, the college principal.
Ratna Mondal is one of them. The 20-year-old resident of Amtali village has to change three ferries everyday and traverse four Sundarbans islands before she can make it to class, a journey of 3.5 hours on a good day that costs ₹400, an unthinkable sum for her marginal family. “We’d hear about girls disappearing. Without this college, I could have never imagined getting out of my village,” she said.
Mondal now wants to become a primary school teacher, the first in her village of fishermen and beekeepers. “And I want to speak English,” she said.
The politics
The islands of Sunderbans straddle the North 24 and South 24 Parganas districts, where roughly a third of the population is below the poverty line. It is a bastion of the ruling Trinamool Congress that benefits from chief minister Mamata Banerjee’s grassroots popularity and her connection with local women, who outnumber men at the polling booths.
For the first time in these elections, though, Bharatiya Janata Party flags have appeared even in remote islands such as Mousuni. The twin flower poll symbol of the TMC is sharing space on walls and festoons with the lotus flower of the BJP, a telltale sign that deep in this TMC citadel, the national party has finally found a smattering of local workers.
The Mathurapur Lok Sabha constituency, a reserved seat under which islands such as Mousuni fall, was held by the Left between 1967 and 2009 (with only one small interruption during a national Congress wave in 1984), when the TMC breached this bastion. The TMC’s senior leader Choudhury Mohan Jatua won the seat three consecutive times, winning in 2019 by 200,000 votes.
This time, the incumbent has stepped back and the party has nominated its local youth wing leader, Bapi Haldar, an acolyte of party general secretary Abhishek Banerjee. In that sense, Mathurapur is also critical for the tussle in the TMC between the old guard loyal to Mamata and the new entrants tied to Abhishek. The BJP sensed an opportunity in this churn, nominating Bharatiya Janata Yuva Morcha leader Ashok Purkait in an attempt to cleave the Dalit vote, roughly a third of the constituency, from the Muslim vote, another third.
For the first time, the BJP has campaigned aggressively across the Sunderbans, even getting Prime Minister Narendra Modi to address a rally in Mathurapur. “Reservations were looted in West Bengal and false OBC certificates were issued to Muslims,” he said, referring to a controversial decision by the Calcutta high court that scrapped OBC certificates to 77 groups last week.
For shopkeeper Arun Bor, OBC reservation is not an issue but local corruption surely is. He pointed to the controversy around the appointment of 26,000 teachers but admitted that many in the village still leaned towards the TMC. “They will vote for what they know because many fear they won’t get cyclone relief otherwise,” he said.
Shyamali Mondal had a more emphatic reason. A domestic worker, Mondal first benefited from the government’s Kanyashree Prakalpa, a flagship initiative that accords cash transfers to keep girls in school and has a beneficiary list of roughly seven million. “And now, we’re getting ₹1,000 under Lokhhir Bhandar. It might not be much to you, but for poor people like us, it’s the difference between a meal of rice and one of salt and water,” she said.
In rally after rally, Banerjee has said that if the BJP came to power, it will scrap the direct cash transfer scheme. “I don’t know if it’s true but I won’t take the risk,” Shyamoli said.
Unsaid but wafting in the wind is also a more cynical reason – southern Bengal is among the most violent regions that regularly witnesses political clashes and killings. Here, having a robust network of workers is imperative if voters are to feel reassured on polling day. “The BJP still doesn’t have enough of an organisation here. The margins may be lower but that’s about it,” said a 30-year-old teacher, requesting anonymity.
The future
Back in Mousuni, Soren has an uphill task in rebuilding her life. Her son is in Kerala, as are most men in the village who have migrated due to a lack of jobs, and comes back once every six months. She is worried for him, and cannot imagine asking him for more money to repair the roof or build new walls. “I’ll live in this house for now,” she said, struggling to stretch a scrap of blue tarpaulin to cover the holes.
It’s a difficult decision. After Remal, her neighbours are fleeing Mousuni. But Soren feels she has no choice. “This is the home I grew up in, where I dreamt about my future, my marriage, my family. Others can afford to leave, but where will people like me go?” she asked. “We have to live with the sea.”