Family reservoir dipping, Malda churns

- Liquor flows where water is needed and traditional loyalties are under strain in pocket borough of Khan Chowdhurys

CHANDRIMA S. BHATTACHARYA

Women fill water from the submersible pump at Debipur in Malda. Picture by Surajit Roy

Malda, July 21: The villagers of Malda cannot decide whether too much partying is good or bad.

"Kaamer kaam hoyechhe," says a bare-bodied middle-aged man, slightly drunk at 9 in the morning.

He is a resident of Sahapur, about a 10-minute drive from Malda town. Glorious nothing has been achieved, says he, part of a group that has collected at a tea stall.

"Khaali mod aar murgi, mod aar murgi (only chicken and booze, chicken and booze)," he says.

"All the parties are feeding us," he says. "If it's one party today, it's another the next day and the third the next. This has been going on for one and a half months as the panchayat polls have been postponed. We are becoming fat," he adds.

As Malda emerges slowly from the shadow of Abu Barkat Ataur Ghani Khan Chowdhury ("Barkatda"), the patriarch, debates rage about cracks appearing within the Congress citadel, the CPM looming large on the horizon and the Trinamul trying to strike at the Congress' base here.

At the national level, Malda is clearly with the Congress. Both its MPs, Abu Hasem Khan Chowdhury and Mausam Noor, are from the Ghani Khan family and the Congress. Seven of Malda's MLAs are from the Congress, three from the Left and two from Trinamul.

But at the local level, the picture is more complex, with the CPM running almost neck-and-neck with the Congress in the panchayat bodies in the last term.

Of Malda's 146 gram panchayats in the last term, 76 were run by the Congress. Of the remaining, the majority was run by the Left, with participation from Trinamul, which did not have control over a single panchayat. In the zilla parishad, 18 members were from the Congress, 15 from the Left and one from the BJP, who later joined Trinamul.

But the picture changed over the last five years, with Trinamul getting in more, but no party could quantify the Trinamul presence in the panchayats.

This time, as the battle gets bloodier, liquor flows harder in the villages. "From Rs 80-90 a kg, the price of chicken has gone up to Rs 180, and chullu (illicit liquor) from Rs 30 to Rs 50 a bottle," says the middle-aged man, fresh from a party.

But it is really another liquid, less expensive but more necessary, which troubles Malda's villages: water.

This isn't distributed by any party so much.

"All parties are the same," says a young man at the tea-stall with a double-string of small beads around his neck. He performs Manasa Gaan in the villages, songs in praise of the serpent-goddess.

He is from the Ravidas community, he says, and has been "denied" his BPL card, which he thinks he is eligible for because of his caste. The community is classified under Scheduled Castes in Bengal.

On one level, Malda misses Barkatda. He was a towering figure with towering achievements: the NTPC, trains, Malda's direct link to Delhi. A minister at the Centre for long, he was someone the ordinary man could turn to and ask for a job, the solution to a problem, as he sat in his huge ancestral home in Kotwali, a 15-minute drive from Malda town.

After his death, the Congress looks smaller in Malda.

There is a feeling that his family members have lost touch with people. Trinamul is trying to step into the gap.

The increasing violence is a result of the new tensions, as also a reflection of the other parts of the state.

But that doesn't change the life of the Manasa Gaan singer, who complains about jobs, roads, electricity ("poles were set up just before the elections; no lights yet"), the lack of a college nearby. And water.

"When we draw water from the river, we have to drain it through a piece of cloth because of the amount of iron it contains," he says.

Malda is either flooded, or without water. In several villages, the water is contaminated with arsenic.

A "gift" of a submersible pump, widely in use in the district to pump groundwater, has turned the tide in favour of the incumbent Congress panchayat candidate in Debipur, a village near Bulbulchandi, a trading area east of Malda town.

At Debipur, Baby Sarkar is happily filling up her pots at the new pump fitted to a square tank at the entrance of the village, and taking a quick but refreshing bath like the many women and girls with her.

She says that the pump is the result of a long struggle.

"We have done whatever was within our power, shouted, protested, sat on roads and finally we got this pump," she says.

She points at a dirty pond on the other side of the road. "We used to take our bath there and wash our clothes."

And the drinking water?

"We had to buy our drinking water for Rs 40 a month," she says.

Debipur, a clutch of mud huts, doesn't even have a primary school, only an ICDS unit, and its two approaches are almost always waterlogged. But that will not deter villagers like Baby Sarkar, who thinks that the panchayat member who organised the water, needs to be rewarded with votes.

Malda town mirrors the problems of the villages. Water in the town is supplied from the pipeline, for which the CPM takes the credit.

"It was because of Sailen Sarkar, minister in the Left government, that the pipeline was laid down to supply ground water," says Ambar Mitra, the CPM district committee secretary.

But Chaitali Chattoraj, principal of Malda Women's College, says that unbridled construction — others allege that it is also unapproved — is eating into the groundwater level drastically.

Inadequate infrastructure plagues development in Malda. Chattoraj's college is another illustration, and also of villages turning to town, hopelessly.

"About 2,200 to 2,300 girls come to study here. About 40 per cent of them are from the villages and most of them are first-generation learners," says Chattoraj.

She is proud that the college is home to the new aspiring young women from the villages who have belief in them but she has to accommodate many more students than the classes actually can. "There's a severe shortage of colleges in the district," she says.

She also talks about encroachment, roads, drainage, flooding.

The parties stick to their agenda.

The CPM concedes that the Congress remains the main rival, but claims it is losing its hold. "It is breaking down," says Mitra.

He says that the CPM has established many colleges, though more could be done.

Trinamul minister Krishnendu Chowdhury, a Malda heavyweight, claims that his government has already spent crores in the district for its development. "The Congress is not breaking down. It has already broken down," he says.

Sitting in the grand Ghani Khan Chowdhury residence in Kotwali, Barkat Ghani Khan's successors Mausam Noor, and her cousin Isha Khan Choudhury, an MLA, say the times have changed.

"We cannot write on a slip of paper that a man needs a job. But we have brought in Rs 220 crore for the district's development from the Centre," says Isha. Noor says Trinamul is trying to make a dent in the Congress' support base, but would fail.

Standing in the shadow of the magnificent ruins of the Baroduari in Gour, built by Sultan Nusrat Shah in 1526, a resident of Ramkeli village, famous for its Vaishnav fair, has a story to tell.

He is a strongly-built man, slightly drunk. "There is acute shortage of water in the village. So I want to dig my own tube-well. But the CPM men won't let me," he says.

"Besides, Krishnendu Chowdhury sat me down next to him at the Ramkeli mela. He talked to me. This was the best Ramkeli mela ever," he says.

"I will vote for the TMC."

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