NEW DELHI: A team of the National Commission for Scheduled Tribes (NCST), which visited West Bengal’s Sandeshkhali, has learnt that TMC leader Sheikh Shahjahan and his associates, accused of land grab and sexual assault under coercion, have forcibly been taking MNREGA wages from poor tribal families and torture them for voting against the state’s ruling party.
The three-member NCST team led by its Vice-Chairperson Ananta Nayak has also learnt from complainants that the West Bengal Police allegedly “protected” Shahjahan and his associates in their acts of exploitation against poor tribals.
The probe team is back in Delhi and is in the process of preparing a report, which will be submitted to the government.
Nayak told a news agency that the panel had received more than 50 complaints of sexual harassment of tribal women and land grab by Shahjahan and his associates.
The riverine Sandeshkhali area in West Bengal’s North 24 Parganas district, which is situated about 100 kilometres from Kolkata, has been on the boil for more than a month with protests against the TMC leader, who is absconding, and his supporters.
“The NCST team learned that Shahjahan would instruct poor tribal people to give him their MNREGA earnings. And in case they had already exhausted it, he would ask them to borrow money from lenders and give it to him,” Nayak said, adding that he has not seen anything “like this across the country”.
According to complainants, who are mostly Hindus, narrated their ordeal with the NCST team saying the accused and his associates tortured people, who voted for other parties in elections, Nayak said.
The panel has also learnt Shahjahan and his associates would ask local women to come for meetings late at night, torturing the family members of those, who did not comply with his demands, he said.
“If the victim approached the police, they would not file an FIR or a complaint and instead ask the complainants to ‘negotiate’ with Shahjahan. The police backed the accused in this case,” the NCST vice-chairperson said.
The complaints also told the NCST team that the accused would ask tribal families to hand over their land to him and release saltwater in the fields if they disobeyed, he said, adding that Shahjahan allegedly grabbed land of more than a thousand tribal and non-tribal people in an area stretching more than 10 kilometres.
On February 20, the commission issued notices to the chief secretary of West Bengal and the state's police head, asking them to submit factual and action taken reports on the matter within three days.
