: This is the story of 21 Odia families full of untold suffering and poignant pathos quite unseemly in today’s civilised world.
Racial memory of scorn, contempt and disdain is deeply ingrained in the psychic residue of the collective unconscious of some Bengalis and some Odias since the year 1866, when the much maligned “Nanaka” famine had made one Odia family pauperised and hopeless like many others.
The family head Goura Sahoo had abandoned his ancestral village at Bhadrak and had somehow settled at village Majherpada under Atpukur Panchayat in the district of North 24 Parganas of WB. The patriarchal Goura’s family now has sprouted like a banyan leaving behind 21 Odia families, who are now constantly harassed by their Bengali fellow villagers. These 21 Odia families now have lost their parental property at Majherpada, fertile agricultural land including all other assets forcibly by the evil designs of their original inhabitant Bengali brothers of the same village.
It so happened that in the year 1929, Rajendranath Sahoo alias Ghosh was murdered in cold blood in broad daylight by four accused of the same village namely Gokul Mandal, Mukhanda Patra, Kailash Patra and Binanda Das. Subsequently, they were all convicted with rigorous imprisonment at the Andaman cellular jail when three of the accused breathed their last and the fourth one met his end soon after he was released. The progenies of the accused being the permanent inhabitants of Majherpada have taken an oath to exterminate the 21 Odia families by hook or by crook, simply prompted by motiveless malignity of sheer intolerance towards their fellow Odia brethren. The old enmity of nearly the last three centuries continues.
After independence, attempts have been made by senior leaders of Odisha like former Chief Minister Dr HK Mahatab and Biju Patnaik those who had appealed to their counterparts for an amicable settlement between the two communities, but to no avail.
All prayers and petitions to the West Bengal Chief Ministers from the days of Jyoti Basu and others have fallen on deaf ears. The estranged Odia families are spending sleepless nights living under constant threat of violence from their hegemonistic, predatorial and condescending Bengali brothers without understanding the concept of freedom guaranteed under the ambits of the Indian Constitution.
The representatives of these isolated Odia families are always threatened with dire consequences, if they dare approach to meet and ventilate their grievances either before their popular Odisha CM Naveen Patnaik or before West Bengal CM Mamata Banerjee. A representative of the Odia diaspora told this correspondent, “Unless Naveenbabu, the all-time popular CM of Odisha and Mamata Didi, the all -time popular leader of West Bengal resolve the imbroglio, the issue will never be sorted out.”