The days of Turmoil (Contd)

There were thousands of such mohajans in rural Bengal and still persists in different shapes. Initially they start a business to secure protection from the business community. Then began to offer short term loans to the traders that ensure a safe income and safe pre tests.

Gradually they began to influence local headmen and opinion leaders. Bring them under their net and offer them convenient terms. This the end of a long beginning. Then comes the main target group-farmers.

India did not have any organized financial institute. People had little idea about saving and investment. Most exchanges were based on barter. The poorer section did never had the solvency to save. While the upper class used to save something on jewelries or hide them under soil.

Our villages were poor but self-going. A farmer had everything possible except salt or fuel to lit a light although they have substituted these.

A floating community popularly known as Badiya or Beda were the people with exposure to many areas. They used to visit many localities, procure different attractive items and lure the village house wives to purchase them either in exchange of money or rice.

With the development of market economy the need for money began and mettle coin to paper currency developed in various phases. Money became the standard, measure, value and store for all exchanges.

It sharply shaped every body thinking to go beyond. So much so the roots of money economy were dug, the troubles and agonies of the rural people began to rise.

The farmers became daily laborers in their own lands mostly taken on temporary lease from the Zamidars who beat and tortured them to realize money. Flood, cyclone, draught, erosion continue to deprive them of the crops, yet the Zamindars did not show any mercy.

So, they are compelled to submit to the mohajans and take money at a very high rate only to keep the Zamindar happy. Persons who could not pay off the mohajan were sure to lose his homestead, bullock and even house hold items. besides, merciless punishments become their fate accomplices if not the capital one.

Legal protection was given to them who could easily secure a court order to eliminate a family from their forefather’s land. These uprooted people were forced to live under open sky or anybody’s firm house.

Hundreds of ballads can be written about the plights of such people who had lost everything the language of complaining to the God.

Sher E Bangla, once the prime minister of the undivided Bengal came as the savior of these people from the mohajans who enacted necessary laws to established summary courts for dispensation of justice to these people, but he could not do away with the Zamindari system that prevailed till 1950.

Actually, the origin Zamindars had migrated much earlier. Then began install a few agents and hand everything over to them. With the outbreak of war and assurance for partition of Independence they visualized that happy days are gone. So, they hurriedly took their own course.

Once the White men disappeared, gray rulers were installed in power. Similarly, the old Zamindars were replaced by a new generation of Zamindars who were more and more violent. Owing to the Lack of proper administrative machinery the Zamindars directly or indirectly retained control over the land and were allowed to hold landed properties in any anonymous names called Benami.

Still the vast majority remains out of the benefits of the state acquisition Act of 1950. Continued poverty and mounting unemployment simply contributed towards rise in landlessness.

The Bangladesh Land Occupancy Survey,1980 unearths the causes of serious landlessness in the village areas which resulted in severe influx of homeless,helpless and uprooted millions in the cities. It still continues and makes our cities inhabitable every day.

My Words
Four
-- If a wife continues to dominate the husband she should take it for sure that her husband might be eloping or derailed.