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Bangladeshi fishermen have fished in the country’s huge inland waterbodies for generations. How, in just a decade, did they come to be denied the right to fish? How and why did entire villages, their way of life, their culture, their livelihoods, crumble? Khademul Islam describes the battle over water rights
 Rivers, waterbodies, rain, storms, have always fascinated me. It might have something to do with the fact that I am a Bengali. I can sit in my verandah on a Dhaka afternoon during the monsoon months and watch the spectacular sound and light show of a sudden kalboishakhi crash through a mauve sky. I can drive outside Dhaka and feel a sudden vivaciousness come upon me as water glitters by the sides of the road, sometimes stretching to the horizon. This fascination may also have to do with the fact that I am a Pisces, the star sign signified by entwined fish. Back in Bangladesh after living in the United States for many years, I still love to go to the fish markets. Not to the ones tucked away inside uber shopping malls with their gloved attendants for the nouveau haute bourgeoisie, but to Dhaka's Mohammedpur Town Hall and Karwan Bazar where, amid the scaly muck and the raucous racket of canny fishsellers, silvery fish lie on slabs, lit by pinholes of light drilling through cracked roofs. Fishermen have been fishing in Bangladesh for millennia. Ancient fishing villages, often Hindu, or at times inhabited by so-called ‘tribals', have traditionally clustered beside rivers and haors and beels , the huge inland waterbodies, tremendous lakes, that at one time used to be stocked with an amazing variety of sweet-water fish. These haors are mostly in Sylhet , Bangladesh 's tea-growing area in its north and east, bordering Assam and Tripura. When I left for the United States sometime in the '80s, I had not heard of battles over fishing rights. Fishing rights in these waterbodies, in Bengal 's rivers, were unquestioned rights. When I came back to Bangladesh in 2003 however, among other things I kept hearing about wars waged over fishing rights, about how fishermen whose forefathers had fished in waters through the ages were now being denied the right to fish. How could this be, I wondered. How could whole communities be torn away from fishing? What the hell was happening? I began to dig around, ask people. And found out that the racket had evolved along simple lines. Politics used to be centered in the urban areas, decided by the elites in the cities, especially by the governing elite in the capital city of Dhaka . But as the political process broadened, as the demand for democracy took hold in a period of military rule, it meant holding elections. It did not mean true democracy, not government accountability, not the people coming to power, but simply the holding of elections. Elections became the key symbol of democracy, allied with a nonfunctioning parliament, none of whose committees worked, where no meaningful debate took place, with the State's apparatus subservient to the dictates of whichever of the two parties happened to be in power. Increasingly, in the aftermath of these ‘elections', these parties came to be dominated by their rural blocs, since the overwhelming majority of their Members of Parliament were elected from the villages, from the mangrove-rooted swamps in Barisal, from the sweetmeat-making neighbourhoods of Comilla and from the haor -and- beel -covered areas of Sylhet. This was not the rural elite of bygone, gentler times. This was a rapacious lot who had built their thana and upazilla political machines on thugs and black money, a political class not particularly discreet about its hunger for money. After all, there were the costs of elections to be recovered, thugs to be fed and housed, power bases to be enlarged. The first step in this recovery of the money they had spent was obviously to rake in development money, which was considerable: funds for rural development, for local government and electrification, for earthworks, for minorities -- sweet moolah for all kinds of ‘development' strategies and projects. Then, their eyes fell on these water bodies, the wetland areas, which traditionally have been community property called Jalmahals (literally ‘mansions of water' but meaning more prosaically ‘standing bodies of water'). The grabbing and subsequent fight began, I learned, sometime in the '80s, as these newly ‘empowered, democratic' rural elites went after the water bodies. The mechanism for looting that they devised was viciously elegant. The first step was to subvert the law, the Conservation Act of 1950 and the Acquiescing Tenancy Act also of 1950, which hitherto had meant that these were public lands administered by the government and where an ancient network of customary rights ensured the fishing rights of the surrounding village folk. What the new political elite did was start a ‘movement' for ensuring that only ‘legitimate' fishing villages and fishermen had the right to fish in these waters. This was supported, naturally enough, by the folk of the fishing villages. Then, through a series of political meetings backed by manoeuvres at the local and the central level, the idea was floated that such water bodies ought not to be ‘common' property, that the laws should be changed in order to ‘lease' them to the fishermen. Again, the unsuspecting fishermen were supportive. All it needed was this crucial change in the legal character of these water bodies and the deed was done! In 1980, the Ministry of Land Administration and Land Reform handed over all public property to the more pliable Ministry of Fisheries and Livestock. In 1991, the rules governing water bodies and wetlands were changed. That was it! As soon as these water bodies could be leased, the rural elite, often the chairman of the thana or the upazilla linked to the local Member of Parliament, immediately formed a ‘fishermen's co-operative' with a couple of his nephews and sons. This ‘fishermen's co-operative' then applied to the government for a 99-year fishing lease, or ijara . The ministry, linked to the local MP through the party and levers of power, issued the leases. When the fishermen woke up the next morning, their water bodies were guarded by goons, their boats chased away and nets burnt, and in times of monsoon -- the traditional haor fishing time when the banks overflowed and fish swam through their courtyards -- thugs patrolled the area to ensure that not one fish were taken from the water by the villagers. Even entire sections of rivers could be leased. The net result was that all fishing was now leased back to the villagers by the MP at impossible, back-breaking daily wages. This drove them into agricultural labour and brought in migrant, even poorer fishermen, for the leaseholder, driving a stake through the network of fishing communities. What used to be free now became figments of a dream. With a single stroke in just a decade, entire villages, their way of life, their culture, their livelihoods crumbled! They fought back in what came to be called the Bhasan Pani (literally ‘water that floats' or ‘standing water') movement. I heard about one such movement in Sunamganj (on the road to Sylhet), in the villages of Lalpur and Pearinagar, hard by the Gojaria river and the Kharchar haor . Pearinagar used to be a traditional fishing village, its families titled Matsa Das (the Das of Matsa, or Fish). Now, they are called simply Das, their title gone in the whirlwind of democracy, development and modernisation that has come to our villages. And thereby hangs another sorry tale! When fishermen lost their traditional fishing rights, the Communist Party of Bangladesh (CPB) stepped in, aided in their efforts to organise the fishermen protests by the student fronts of the other progressive parties. The movement spread like wildfire over a much larger area. Village meetings were held, changes demanded in the leasing laws and demands made for the reversion of customary rights. Donations of Taka 10 per fishing boat were taken in order for the protestors to engage in demonstrations and marches, for village associations to be linked into a wider movement. Confrontations and pitched battles took place. The State did what it does, blocking marches, arresting movement leaders, driving them underground, pouring in police forces on the side of its rural partymen, pursuing a policy of divide and rule and aiding the attacks on the fishermen by the hired thugs and goons of the leaseholders. Slowly, the Bhasan Pani movement died. Some of its leaders were released from jail conditionally and others bought off. The Communist Party, which had provided some initial leadership, was itself wracked internally and split into two with the fall of the Soviet Union . Younger villagers chose to become migrant workers in the Middle East rather than chase what were fast becoming dwindling catches. Finally, the fight was unable to link itself to the greater national political movement going on then against military autocracy. A great rural peasant movement simply died in its tracks. But what is shocking is that hardly any record of it survives. I asked CPB members for party records of the movement. I got nowhere. When the CPB split, its records too were divided and huge amounts of dusty records -- containing its narratives of valour and defiance -- vanished into thin air. Fishermen associations never kept minutes. Local papers reported the events, but editions disappeared into the rain and mists since there was never any money for archives. What remains are legends, tales of battles planned and fought, stories in the mouths of village elders of an old way of life irretrievably lost, a vanishing bunch of men and women (who kept the villages and homes functioning when the men had to flee from police raids or thug house-to-house searches), stray articles on stray bits of paper later sold to the city's roadside vendors to make the little packets for muris and cholas , rare pieces in old volumes of Ekota , the Communist Party paper. Other than this, no records remain, no papers, no data on this huge, heartbreaking, crushing story of peasant life and survival. In about a decade, these folk memories of resistance too will disappear into timeless dust and water. When I walked through the two villages that had been at the hub of the struggle, I couldn't imagine what it must have been like 20 or 30 years ago. They had a deserted look, their nets and boats gone, their folks dispersed and pauperised, having become the inevitable migrants to the cities in search of work, living in its huge, grey, desolate slums short of water, sanitation, food, electricity, living space, money, pulling rickshaws or working as domestic labour, their children running wild on the streets . . . And every time I go to my Dhaka fish markets and look at those gleaming silvery bodies, and haggle noisily and trade barbs with the fishsellers, I wonder if in some slum somewhere, a few old men of Pearinagar and Lalpur gather in the evenings to talk about how they once ran wild on the water, singing bhatiali fishing songs and hauling in the catch under the single eye of a newly risen moon... (Khademul Islam is literary editor, The Daily Star, www.thedailystar.net) InfoChange News & Features, June 2008
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