With his left eye completely gone and reddish liquid oozing out all
the time from the right, Dwijen can hardly make out the faces of people
around him.
But whenever he realises a visitor is here, the landless Santal of Gaibandha asks one question repeatedly.
"Will we be able to go back to our land? Will they [the government]
take any measure for us? No matter what happens to me, my children, wife
and parents would need a place to live,” he keeps on saying.
Dwijen Tudu, 36, a day labourer, is one of the 15-20 people injured
during the November 6 eviction drive at Shahebganj Sugar Mills in
Gobindaganj of Gaibandha that also left two Santals dead.
He received numerous pallet injuries in the upper part of his body and one of the pallets went through his left eye.
“Doctors say I am not likely to be able to see with my left eye again
while the right eye is also not working right,” he told this
correspondent who was visiting the National Institute of Ophthalmology
and Hospital in the capital yesterday.
He is one of the three injured Santal men shown arrested in a case
filed after the November 6 incident. Police brought him to the hospital,
hand cuffed and tied two days later.
Police on Monday took off the handcuffs hours after a High Court directive. Three policemen, however, were seen on guard.
“We starved for the first few days when we came here. I had to share
whatever the hospital gave him,” said Dwijen's younger sister Martha
Tudu.
She, however, was grateful that people sympathetic to the cause of
the Santals have been coming to the hospital with food over the last
couple of days.
Dwijen's father Iliam Tudu, a man in his mid 70s, told The Daily Star
that he was concerned about Dwijen's well being as he is his only son.
“I can hardly stand on my feet. He was the breadwinner of the family. His children will starve if he goes blind,” he said.
Director of the hospital Golam Mostafa said a five-member medical
board formed to treat him found that his left eye was too damaged to
treat.
THE LAND IN QUESTION
Families evicted from the predominantly indigenous villages in
Gobindaganj upazila of Gaibandha have been asking the local
administration to reclaim their ancestral land.
The families first lost their homes and were forced to leave the area
in 1962, when the Pakistan government acquired the land for cultivation
of sugarcane to be used in Rangpur Sugar Mill, found a probe by
additional deputy commissioner (revenue) of the district last year.
The probe was conducted after the families rendered homeless on
November 6, brought the issue to the attention of the administration in
March last year.
The memorandum, which allowed Pakistan Industrial Development
Corporation to acquire the 1,842.3 acres of land, mentioned that the
land would be taken back by the government and returned to its previous
state, if anything but sugarcane was cultivated there, added the report.
However, paddy, wheat, maize, tobacco, potato and mustard were found
to be cultivated in the area by influential people who leased the area
from the mill authorities, found the probe by the administration which
concluded that the Santals had a claim to the land.
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