“Everyone who goes out of the State to work doesn’t die,” Rafiqul Sheikh, 32, assured his wife, Rabijan, who did not want her husband to leave their village Chauduar in West Bengal’s Malda district to go in search of work. Within a week after leaving, in the second week of February, Rabijan got a phone call from Aizawl in Mizoram informing her that her husband had died in an accident. Rabijan, 30, carrying their nine-month-old child in her arms, laments, “I did not want him to go. But there was no work here and he did not listen to me.”
Rafiqul is not the only one from Chauduar to have died while working at a construction site in Mizoram. In August last year, 12 men from the village died when a bridge being constructed by the railways collapsed on workers, also in Aizawl. Chauduar village, located about 20 km from Malda town, is still recovering from the tragedy.
Beyond the mango orchards, which failed to bear fruit this season because of unseasonal rains, the village shows no signs of any political activity ahead of the Lok Sabha elections. On the day when Union Home Minister Amit Shah held a roadshow in Malda town in support of party candidates Sreerupa Mitra Chaudhury from Malda Dakshin and Khagen Murmu from Malda Uttar, an autorickshaw went around the village making an announcement about a religious jalsha (gathering) in the night.
