Day 2 of Factfinding in West Bengal

We started out early in the morning from Asinsol, as we knew we had quite a few interviews to get through before we needed to head back to Kolkata. We were well on our way to the village when we got a call from one of our village contacts. It turned out that Mukesh, our main contact the previous day, had been arrested the night before, sometime after we had left the village.

So… right. We go into the village, and hours after we leave, the person whose home we went to, and who we talked to the longest, and who led us around, is arrested. We didn’t know what to think – were we the reason? Was there something else going on we didn’t know about?

We decided to stop in advance of the village, and meet with some of the men who had met with us yesterday, in order to try and figure out a plan and if we should do anything. We discussed possibilities of going to the police station to see why Mukesh was being held, going to the court to file an action immediately, if we should even go into the village again. Ultimately we decided that we should go to the village, and prepare a petition to be filed immediately. We wanted to make sure the villagers themselves were prepared to file a suit, and could file it themselves – we did not want to give the impression (or actually have it) that we were forcing legal action upon the villagers: it should come from them, rather than from us.

When we got to the village, we decided we first wanted to find out what, exactly, had happened the previous night. We started talking to the villagers, and quickly realized we were getting conflicting stories: some villagers claimed dozens of police officers came in the middle of the night and were banging on door; eventually taking away Mukesh. Others, including those immediately neighboring Mukesh’s house, claimed to have heard nothing, only finding out in the morning that something had happened the previous night.

These stories were difficult to believe – when we were walking through the village, literally everyone came out to see who we were, what we were doing there, etc. This was not a village that used to visitors from outside, and any disturbance would surely be noticed immediately. What was clear, however, was the fact that Mukesh had talked to us, and then gotten arrested. It was no stretch to believe that the villagers did not want to be talking to us for any length of time, for fear of what might happen to them. Mukesh's wife did not really answer our questions, and she also didn't seem to be much affected by the fact that her husband had been arrested the previous night (though it's hard to say what an "appropriate" reaction would be in the situation).

In any case, we ended up leaving the village after an hour or so of fruitless conversations. The wife of a man who had previously been arrested (in the first batch, still in jail) was unwilling to take our contact information in order to get legal help for him.

We then ended up going to a nearby village, whose residents had also been involved in the march to the police station. We met with some better luck there, in terms of people who were willing to take the HRLN contact information, and perhaps move forward with a case.

The investigation was an interesting experience. We collected quite a bit of information, and even if it doesn't go towards an immediate case, I know that the information will, at the very least, find its way into a larger human rights report regarding police abuses and other problems in West Bengal.

We ended up only making it as far as Durgapur on Tuesday night, as we missed the last buses to Kolkata, and so we stayed in a hotel there. The hotel search was a little complicated - our driver (apparently listening to us converse in English, assuming we had lots of $$$$) took us to an incredibly nice 4 star hotel, which we could not afford (though I wish I could have seen one of the rooms, I have to see what a luxury hotel in India looks like!).