Marichjhapi massacre

Marichjhapi incident
Date24 January 1979 (1979-01-24) – 18 May 1979 (1979-05-18)
Location
Marichjhanpi

22°06′25″N 88°57′04″E / 22.1070°N 88.9510°E / 22.1070; 88.9510
Parties
Post-partition refugees from Dandakaranya camps who settled in Marichjhapi
Casualties
Death(s)2–8

Marichjhapi massacre or Marichjhapi incident refers to the 1979 eviction of post-partition Bengali refugees who had moved out of the Dandakaranya camps in Odisha, Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh and settled in protected forest lands on Marichjhapi island in the Sundarbans, West Bengal.[1][2] There was a confrontation between the police and the settled population, that led to an economic blockade and later police action was taken to forcibly evict the settlers which all led to several deaths.[3][4]

  1. ^ Mallick, Ross (1999). "Refugee Resettlement in Forest Reserves: West Bengal Policy Reversal and the Marichjhapi Massacre". The Journal of Asian Studies. 58 (1): 104–125. doi:10.2307/2658391. ISSN 0021-9118. JSTOR 2658391. S2CID 161837294.
  2. ^ Butalia, Urvashi (24 February 2015). "6. Reconstructing Marichjhapi". Partition: The Long Shadow. Penguin UK. ISBN 978-93-5118-949-7.
  3. ^ Sengupta, Debjani (1 February 2011). "From Dandakaranya to Marichjhapi: rehabilitation, representation and the partition of Bengal (1947)". Social Semiotics. 21 (1). Taylor & Francis: 101–123. doi:10.1080/10350330.2011.535673. ISSN 1035-0330. S2CID 144730817.
  4. ^ Deep Halder (11 May 2019). "The Left massacre of migrant Hindus in Bengal that was bigger than 2002 & 1984". theprint.in. ThePrint. Retrieved 16 July 2020. Not much is known about the Marichjhapi incident that took place under the Jyoti Basu government on a tiny island in the Sundarbans where Hindu refugees had settled.