The Bitterest Fruit

A Number Four For India?

• South Malda, on the India-Bangladesh border, is a centre of poppy cultivation and smuggling

• The recent Kaliachak violence is possibly a criminal backlash against a recent crackdown on poppy

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The Gour Road from Malda into Sona Bazar in Bangla­desh is choked by trucks awa­­iting clearance at the BSF-­manned border crossing. A track off the cemented road just before the checkpost leads past Gour, which was a pre-Mughal capital of Bengal. The villages are like any other in Bengal—dirt roads capering through fields with crops awaiting maturity. Even the appearance of a car with a long camera lens peeking curiously out of the window doesn’t invite interest. Instead, the farmers get up and shuffle away. Hundreds of acres of farmland here in south Malda are given over to poppy, ask no questions about its legality.

A few youth pedal past on bicycles with blue seats—distributed recently by the Trinamool government—throwing ugly glares. Nobody is willing to be photographed because, three weeks ago, a mob in nearby Kaliachak brought them unwanted notoriety.

On January 3, after a week of pamphlets and fiery  speeches raining down, a Muslim crowd gathered at Kaliachak’s main crossing across NH-34, which connects Calcutta to the Northeast. The provocation: allegedly insulting statements about the Prophet made by Hindu Mahasabha’s Kamlesh Tiwari in UP. A section of the crowd turned into a rampaging mob, ransacking and burning the Kaliachak police station and vehicles.

The mob numbered between 25,000 and 2.5 lakh, depending on the versions of  the state government or the BJP. In this season of pre-election meetings, talk  of a Congress-CPI(M) tie-up and the BJP lurking aro­und for an opening, the media waded into the debate on whether it was a communal ruckus or a punitive shake-­­­­up of a racket in drugs and false currency. Mamata Ban­­erjee denied the communal angle angrily, saying it was people’s anger at the BSF.

A ground zero probe reveals that while religious sentiment mustered a crowd, the actual mob that set the police station on fire numbered less than a hundred. It was led by criminals armed with guns and bombs.

After the act of arson, the mob went on a rampage in the Hindu locality of Beliadanga, behind the Kaliachak police station. “Aro­und 30 men vandalised a temple, threw brickbats and bombs and fired from handmade pistols at us. They beat up a girl who protested as they set fire to her father’s motorcycle. When we couldn’t deal with them, we fled,” says a grievously wounded Tanmoy Tiwari (19), a Hindu priest. While fleeing, Tiwari took a bullet that fractured his calf bone in two places. Two weeks later, they still haven’t heard from the police.

Malda is a Muslim-dominated district. “Officially the Muslim population is 54 per cent, but in reality it may be around 65 per cent,” says Ujjwal Pandey, a state-level leader of the BJP’s Bharatiya Janata Yuva Morcha and RSS volunteer. Whether that, or the attendant charge of Hindus being forced out of Muslim-dominated vil­lages under the indulgent eye of a Trinamool government, is true, it falls into place with a general picture of official ‘minority app­easement’. The pol­ice arres­ted 10 people after the violence, but are yet to make much headway. But they blocked the entry of two BJP ‘fact-finding’ delegations, on Jan­u­­ary 6 and 11, to Kaliachak, to stop the situation from getting communalised.

Khaki Watch Volunteers linked to the RSS during a meet in Malda. (Photograph by Sandipan Chatterjee)

The RSS and VHP have a few members across Malda, mostly restricted to urban and semi-urban areas, where supporters are dismayed that Union home minister Rajnath Singh did not visit them. Instead, the BJP arranged a quick rally by Union minister Nitin Gadkari in neighbouring West Dinajpur district on January 18. Gadkari was there for 20 minutes; he spoke for five minutes. The crowd didn’t seem to mind. It seemed like an extension of the sankranti mela; peo­ple were more interested in selfies with BJP leader and actress Roopa Gan­­guly. Besides, an ex-state BJP chief had confused them by calling, “Modi lao, Mamata hatao.” Asked a bewildered man: “Isn’t Modi already the PM? Does he want to be Bengal’s CM ?”

In reality, the BJP charge of Muslims ruthlessly bullying the Hindu minority and the TMC counter of communalisation effectively papers over the economics of flourishing illegality.

Malda, particularly south Malda, is a haven of arms and ammunition manufacturing and smuggling, poppy cultivation for opium extraction, fake Indian currency notes (FICN) and violent gang wars to mark territories. Sounds like any other border area, except it now has three heroin labs, where the latex of the poppy is processed into the addictive drug. Locally produced brown sugar is available in Malda town and Siliguri. Each bigha (around half an acre) of land yields about 4 kg of the opium latex, which sells at about Rs 1.5-2 lakh per kilo. The cost of production is around Rs 50,000 per bigha.

In the 1990s, local goons smuggled marijuana and bottles of the cough syrup Phensedyl into Bangladesh. There was also some arms smuggling. Around a decade ago, the Union home ministry extended the border fencing with barbed wire, with increased deployment of the BSF. Faced with this, the fields around Muslim-dominated Moazumpur and Narangpur villages were devoted to poppy; small amounts of opium were sent to other states or smuggled to Bangladesh. The money helped to buy machinery from Munger (in Bihar) to make ‘one-shotter’ pistols, .303 bullets and bombs, which was discovered during police raids. As the money stakes piled up, so did gang violence—a political worker claims at least 250 people were killed in the last decade.

As demand for opium shot up, the gangs forced farmers of neighbouring villages to grow poppy. The money, higher than what they would have made for the vegetables they grew, was enormous. After the Trinamool victory in 2011, entire villages, hitherto affiliated with the CPI(M) or the Congress, went over to the Trinamool. This reporter saw the result—entire villages in the zone grow only poppy across hundreds of acres of  multi-crop land. Since Muslims control the cross-border trade, they are the ones who wield power, obviously in connivance with the Trinamool.

Except when a zealous officer takes over, the police doesn’t poke around much  into these areas. Yet the violence doesn’t stop some policemen from seeking continuous extensions for a posting at Kaliachak. Sub-inspectors Ram Saha and Pradeep Sarkar stayed well beyond the usual three years. They were transferred only after the January 3 mob violence around Kaliachak.

The crime network helped south Malda become a hub for FICN distribution as well, leading to a NIA investigation. This, in turn, drew attention to Malda’s poppy fields, and the Narcotics Control Bureau was asked to look at the drug trade. It is believed that the motive for the January 3 attack was to des­troy evidence and documents related to several cases filed against local goons.

On the day this reporter was near Moazumpur, the state excise dep­artment was destroying opium crops with security cover from the BSF, which, curiously, appeared clueless about it till recently. An illusory innocence perhaps; some farmers have also been growing poppy on the no man’s land between the barbed-wire fencing that delineates the India-Bangladesh border.

The farmers skulked in small groups, watching their illicit crops being destr­oyed. Some complained that ‘powerful people’ had promised them of minimal  disturbance in an election year. Auth­orities have also started making arrests for poppy cultivation—mostly those who own the land and not farmers who were actually growing poppy on the land taken on lease. Even so, excise and Narcotics Control Bureau action seems to take place on the mere periphery of hundreds of acres given over to poppy.

The act of a mob burning down the Kal­­i­achak police station brought unw­e­­­­lcome national attention, but rum­our, sus­­picion and flickers of communal tension—and the attendant debates that besiege TV channels—has diverted public opi­­­nion away from Malda’s acres dedica­ted to plants that spread evil and easy money.

By Ushinor Majumdar in Malda