In Afrazul’s wake: Shaken by killing of muslim labourer in Rajasthan, some returned, but not for long

Sadhu Mandi (right), others at Malda station, back from Indore. “Killing or not, we have to go back,” he says. (Source: Express photo by Subham Dutta)

Leaving behind families, they all go looking for work in other states. Shaken by the killing of Afrazul Khan in Rajasthan, some have returned, but not for long. Ravik Bhattacharya travels to Malda to tell the story of a place defined by migration.

They come and go like cattle in the general compartment,” says a ticket checker at Malda station, minutes after a train had pulled in around 8 pm. “Many of them travel without tickets… probably because they have not been paid by the contractor whom they work for. In 2014, there were 50 trains daily; now there are double that. But the trains were full then, they are still full,” he says, insisting that he not be named.

Yet, they all go. Like Afrazul Khan went over three decades ago, as a 14-year-old, with his father Hafizuddin Khan and a few other men from Saiyadpur village in Bengal’s Malda district. The 47-year-old’s killing in distant Rajasthan has seen panic-stricken villagers from Saiyadpur and villages such as Mozampur and Baluachara, all in a 3-km radius, returning to Malda.

Dressed in a lungi and a T-shirt, Muhammed Hafzul Khan sits outside his brick house in Mozampur with his three sons — Abdul Karim, 25, Ataullah, 21, and Josem, 19. It has only been 48 hours since they returned from Rajasthan, where Abdul worked as a mason while Hafzul and the others worked as labourers. They left soon after seeing a video of Afrazul’s killing.

About a kilometre away, in Baluachara village, Muhammed Tusberul Sheikh, 20, and his brother Noor Alim Sheikh, 19, have been spending most of their time watching TV since they came back from Bhilwada in Rajasthan. They had been working there for the last two years, but after Afrazul’s murder, their father Sariful Sheikh, 55, called them incessantly, till they agreed to return.

But elsewhere in Malda, the district in Bengal that has over the last few decades become a key supplier of migrant workers to different parts of the country, they know they will have to go back sooner or later.

Flanked on its eastern side by Bangladesh and a porous border, Malda was once known for its mangoes and silk. But the harvesting and packaging work at mango orchards only lasts a month, while traditional silk production has suffered in the absence of marketing avenues. The lack of any substantial industrial activity and the resultant stagnant economy have meant that youngsters have few options.

Sadhu Mandi, a resident of Balurghat in North Dinajpur district, has just got off the Intercity Express and is now leading a team of four out of Malda station. They are back home for a few days from Indore, where they have been working with a local contractor for the past two months. Is he scared after what happened to Afrazul? “Sir, amar sonsar er pet chalate hobe… mori aar na mori (Killing or not, we have to feed our families),” shrugs Sadhu.

Nearby, at the station gate, stands Bacchan Kisku, 26, part of a group of 14. “For the last three months, we have been working in Kota (Rajasthan) on high-tension electric poles. We will go back after a week or so on a fresh contract,” says Bacchan, a resident of Gajole in Malda. The job is risky, he says, “but we get Rs 400 a day, including food”.

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While there are no definite numbers on Malda’s seasonal migration, an estimated 7 to 8 lakh people from the rural parts of the district spend at least eight months of the year out, in states such as Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Delhi, Haryana, Rajasthan, Maharashtra, Karnataka and J&K, where they work as labourers.

Anadi Sahu, former labour minister and state general secretary of CITU, the CPM’s trade union wing, says, “There is no data anywhere on how many such migrant labourers leave the state for work. Our rough estimate is that at any given point, over 50 to 60 lakh from the state work outside. Labourers from Bengal also go all the way to Arab countries. Many of them are harassed, held against their will.”

Labour Minister Moloy Ghatak also shrugs when asked about numbers. “Lakhs of people go. It is their right to work anywhere they want. We can’t stop them. We are aware that their living conditions are bad and they are taken there by touts. But there is no (concrete) data. If the Chief Minister directs us, we are ready to start a census and a registration process,” he says.

As per the 2001 Census — the last such figures available — 16.51 lakh people migrated out of the state over 1991-2001. Experts say the figures are much higher as this number doesn’t take into account seasonal migration.

Bhaswati Das, Associate Professor at the Centre for Study of Regional Development in Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru University, who conducted a study based on the 2001 Census figures for Bengal, says, “It was after 2000, when a flood affected Malda district, that migrant labourers started travelling long distances for work, even to Kerala. Earlier the driving force was sustenance. Now it is aspirations. Earlier if they did not go, they would have starved. Now the driving force is better and higher education for children, concrete houses and amenities.”

Dr Debashish Biswas, assistant professor of economics at Raigunj University and an expert on migration, points out, “Traditionally, agriculture, mango orchards and silk production were the mainstay of people in Malda. Over the years, silk production industry lost out to China. The mango farmers got no support from the government either. And like elsewhere, land holdings dwindled. With no investment or industry in Malda, people were left with no option but to move out.”

Biswas adds that since there was no skill development mechanism, labourers picked up new skills only when they moved out of the state. “A labourer who went as a helper would slowly learn to become a mason and then become a construction supervisor,” he says.

Politics too has played a part in Malda’s migration story. It is a traditionally Congress bastion (the party has two MPs and 8 out of 12 MLAs in the district), and hence remained neglected under successive Left governments and now under the Trinamool Congress.

Between 1982 and 1989, Malda was represented by the Congress’s A B A Ghani Khan Choudhury. He is credited with getting NTPC to set up a plant at Farakka in Malda and, as railway minister, ensuring rail connectivity and a railway division to Malda. Now Malda has a daily Farakka Express to Delhi, Vivek Express to Kanyakumari, Karmabhumi Express to Mumbai and the Chennai-Guwahati Express — all packed with migrants.

“After Barkat da (as the late Congress MP is called fondly), no one did anything for Malda. Now there are proposals to set up a food processing centre and a Silk Park,” says Abdul Lahil Mamun, a school teacher and Trinamool Congress Minority Cell leader.

The Kaliachak area, where Afrazul was from, and the nearby Baishnabnagar police station areas are 10 km from the Bangladesh border. Most of the fake notes which enter the country from Bangladesh come through here, with local youths often acting as couriers. Opium farming is also rampant, though the administration claims to have clamped down recently. So the young men who prefer to leave Malda are the ones who choose to play straight instead of being sucked into cross-border smuggling and fake currency rackets.

“Each household has so many youngsters and no jobs. What will they do? Their best option is to leave, like their fathers and uncles did. The money is good. You will never see such money here unless you get into smuggling,” says Muhammed Noor Islam from Baluachara village, who started working as a labourer in Noida two years ago but is now a “labour supervisor”, earning Rs 15,000 a month.

Islam, 30, gives another good reason for leaving Malda. “You get a good bride then,” he says. He married five years ago and now has a two-year-old son.

The remittances sent by workers such as Islam have left their mark on villages here. On either side of the narrow, garbage-lined lanes are concrete three- or four-storeyed houses, most with satellite TV antennas atop and brand new motorbikes outside.

In Saiyadpur, Afrazul’s village, and in the neighbouring Baluachara and Mozampur villages, with men folk working outside the state, the women left behind contribute by rolling and binding beedis or helping as farm hands.

“We get Rs 120 for 1,000 beedis. But most of us can’t reach that number as we have household chores too,” says Fuljan Bewa, 50, who lives in Mozampur with her three daughters. Her sons, 26 and 24, work in Rajasthan. “I am very scared for them. I spoke to them on the phone, they sounded scared. But their contractors have told them they won’t be paid if they leave. So they have stayed back,” says Fuljan.

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Villagers in Kaliachak say there are two ways people leave — as chutta or dadon. The chuttas leave on their own, travel to another state and find their way to labour chowks, where they wait to be picked by a contractor. However, most take the dadon route — leaving in groups of 20, 50 or even 100, through a contractor or sardar, who is usually from the same village. Theirs is an informal, verbal contract, or ‘dadon’, where the sardar arranges for work to last about four to eight months.

At Baluachara, Md Shabbir Ali Sheikh, 26, is among a group of villagers at a chowk discussing their lives away from home, in dingy tents or rooms in labour colonies that each of them shares with seven or eight others. And of work without any job security or insurance cover.

“Before we leave, we get a small advance, about Rs 3,000. Masons get paid Rs 550 for a day’s work and labourers get
Rs 400, but labourers are paid only at the end of the month or when they return home,” says Sheikh, who works in Kota but is now home “for some time”.

When the talk veers round to “insurance”, Haji Md Afsar Ali, 65, shoots back, “Insurance? What are you talking about? If we fall sick or get injured at work, the contractors hand us some money and send us back home. If we die, they arrange for the body to be sent home and the family gets about Rs 30,000.”

Ali retired from a co-operative bank and his seven sons, “all graduates”, work as labourers in Delhi, Patna and cities of Rajasthan. He says he had 12 bighas in Baluachara village which he sold for his children’s education and now has only one bigha left.

The villagers talk of how there have been attacks on them in the past, but Afrazul’s killing was “different”. “Just a month ago, in Rajasthan, a group of men raided our labour colony and looted money and valuables. I lost my mobile phone and Rs 4,000. Police came, but did nothing. I continued to stay there. But after Afrazul was killed, eight of us decided to leave,” says Muhammed Masidur, 42, who worked as a labourer in Jaipur.

A few lanes away is Bablu Sheikh’s house, large by Baluachara standards and with a car parked outside. A contractor, Sheikh says he sends out 30 to 50 people every year. Sitting on a carpet in his living room, Sheikh says “business” was already bad with demonetisation and the GST and now, Afrazul’s killing has dealt him another blow. “We take around Rs 100 from the labourers since it is our contacts that lands them the job. We have to arrange for their transport and stay and deal with locals,” he says. “Over Rs 20 lakh of my money is stuck with developers in Delhi and Bihar.”

Back in Mozampur village, Hafzul Khan is “scared” but knows he can’t afford to be. “Today Afrazul is killed, tomorrow it could be me or my sons. Who knows? The situation is very different in most of these states where we work. In Rajasthan and other places, people look at us in a strange way. What if they target us when this guy (Shambhulal Regar, the main accused in Afrazul’s murder) is hanged?… What if there is a riot? There is a lot of support for this man (Regar),” he says.

The next moment, his face drops. “But if we stay here, our family will die of hunger. There is no work here. I have a daughter to marry off, you see,” he says.