Fear still stalks residents who fled Murshidabad

RANCHI?MALDA: Fleeing Murshidabad with his family was the only thing on Hriday Das's mind after he lost a cousin, an uncle, and his house in the spiral of violence that singed the Bengal district since Friday night. He hired an ambulance to get out of his village, then boarded a train to neighbouring Jharkhand's Sahibganj. Hriday is unsure if he will ever return to the place he once called home.

Murshidabad may not have reported any fresh flare-up since Sunday, but fear remains the dominant emotion along a 7km stretch lined by neighbourhoods where mobs ran riot over the new waqf law the previous two days.

"It was a relentless rampage," Hriday, 46, said of the attack in which his cousin Chand Das and paternal uncle Hargobindo were killed. "I sensed it was time to flee. Police only turned up to claim bodies for postmortem. There was no one to help."

Bikram Pratap, of Sahibganj, said scores of others had crossed over from Murshidabad, around 60km from the Jharkhand town. Another said that around 50 people from Bengal had sought refuge in Rajmahal.

In Malda, 19 families sheltered in a school in Baishnabnagar over the past three nights returned to their homes in Murshidabad's Dhuliya, escorted by a police team. Since Saturday, around 500 people took shelter in Parlalpur high school, on the other side of Ganga.

Vegetable vendor Khudu Sarkar said that nobody could feel safe after what happened, never mind the police pickets that have come up overnight.

ADGP (law & order) Jawed Shamim said that Malda police escorted many families back safely on Monday, with help from local administration. "We are hoping more villagers will return to Murshidabad by Tuesday," he added.