The corrugated metal that was once the factory of Dheklapara tea estate neither stands upright nor has it collapsed. It looks suspended between life and death.
The workers of Dheklapara say their lives are no different.
The tea estate closed down in 2002 after the owner quit the business. But the workers, some 600 men and women, almost all of them Adivasis, did not leave. They clung on in the hope of a revival.
Organising themselves into committees, they started plucking leaves to sell to outside buyers. But the economics of tea do not support direct sales. At best, what the workers sell is good enough to fetch them Rs 35 a day, a third of the regular wage.
One afternoon last week, while workers in the other estates were still out at work, the Adivasis of Dheklapara brought back a meagre half day's harvest, emptying it out in the loading station near the factory gates. The green of the tea leaves matched the colour of the graffiti on the wall.
Dheklapara falls in Alipurduar, one of the two constituencies in Bengal reserved for scheduled tribes, held since 1977 by the Revolutionary Socialist Party, an ally of the Communist Party of India. The Trinamool has made significant inroads in recent years, followed by the Bharatiya Janata Party.
The electoral contest is leaving the Adivasis bitter and confused.
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"What are your problems?"
"There are many problems. Not worth telling. What should I tell you?"
"Tell anything you wish."
"There is no work in the garden. There are too many family members in my house. I am the only one who works. My husband is ill with TB. He cannot work. I have four children of my own. I also take care for the child of my brother-in-law, who died."
Malati Mal Paharia is a petite woman with a soft voice and eyes that speak. I met her at the Dheklapara collection centre and asked her if I could accompany her home.
"Living in the middle of nowhere with no work other than that available in the tea plantations, workers and their families have been suffering from malnutrition, anaemia and other nutrition-related problems. Combined with the lack of medical treatment, the results have been drastic. Workers and members of their families have been dying like flies," said a report of a study team led by the Advisor to the Supreme Court on the Right to Food. The report came out in 2004.
A decade later, there have been several reports, by both activists and journalists, on workers living and dying in hunger. Called "starvation deaths" by the activists, and "prolonged illness" by the government, the last time they made it to the headlines was in December 2011, when nine such deaths took place within a month at Dheklapara. The leaders of the Trinamool Congress, which used to attack the Left government in the past, were found issuing denials.
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The quality of tea may change between the Dooars, the foothills where Dheklapara is located, and the hills of Darjeeling, but the lives of tea estate workers remain equally harsh. The wage rate of Rs 95 a day is the same, lower than the minimum wage. But instead of forging unity to negotiate jointly with the owners, the workers in both the places have been caught in their own battle.
Gorkha workers in Darjeeling are part of unions affiliated with the Gorkhaland Janmukti Morcha, the party that's been leading the movement for a separate state. While drawing up a map for its proposed state, GJMM staked claim to both Dooars, the foothills, and Terai, the floodplains, where tea estate workers are largely Adivasi.
This provoked a sharp reaction from the Adivasis, who staged blockades and protests, led by a social organisation called Akhil Bharatiya Adivasi Vikas Parishad, which rose to sudden political prominence.
Journalists in Siliguri believe the ABAVP was tacitly supported by the Communist Party of India (Marxist) government, which wanted to dilute the Gorkha movement.
But in this election, the leader of ABAVP, Birsa Tirkey, has announced support for the Trinamool, prompting the media to bracket the battle in north Bengal as a multi-cornered contest between the GJMM-BJP, the TMC-ABAVP, the Congress and the Left.
On the ground, however, the picture is more complex.
"Birsa Tirkey lives in Kolkata," said Sohan Lakra, a leader of the Progressive Tea Worker's Union, the union started by ABAVP. "You cannot be enemies with the crocodile if you live in the pond. And so, in the last election, he issued a letter asking us to vote for CPM, and this time he has issued a letter in favour of TMC. But Birsa Tirkey is alone. The rest of us are with the BJP."
Sohan Lakra, as it turned out, is a member of the John Barla faction of the ABAVP.
John Barla, a firebrand Adivasi leader, broke away from the ABAVP in 2011 and went and joined the Jharkhand Mukti Morcha, forming its North Bengal unit. The JMM might have allied with the Congress in Jharkhand, but in North Bengal, Barla's people are supporting the BJP. Narendra Modi's posters have come up in several tea estates.
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In Bandapani, the only election graffiti you can find are hand-written posters announcing a poll boycott. The tea estate closed down in the summer of 2013.
"We have 1,200 workers, which means 6,000 voters, if you include their families," said Bablu Minz, a Bandapani worker and trade unionist. "We want to put pressure on the government to force it to work towards opening our garden."
He said he was also affiliated with the John Barla faction, but in this election, he was not going to work for anybody.
"Humara budhijeevi varg bahut zyaada budhijeevi ho gaya hai. Our intellectual class has become too intellectual," he said. "They have stopped coming and meeting us. They are all working for their self-interest…There has never been unity among the Adivasis and there never would be." Since Adivasis are not a homogenous group, it has been difficult to create an Adivasi political identity, and north Bengal is no different.
Sanjeevan, a member of the ABAVP, holds the Adivasi leadership in equal contempt. "Our leaders are easily bought out," he said. "John Barla came into prominence for the way he fought tooth and nail against the Gorkhaland people, but today, he has joined hands with them."
The GJMM-BJP-JMM alliance in North Bengal is indeed peculiar. I asked Sohan Lakra, Barla's supporter, whether the prospect of a BJP government at the centre, favorably inclined to Gorkhaland, was acceptable to the Adivasis. "Well, the BJP has not promised Gorkhaland in its manifesto," he said. “And we are okay with the formation of a new state, as long as it is not called Gorkhaland."
Yet, such a state would have to contend with an ethnic divide that runs deep. Sanjeevan used the term "white tribals" while explaining to me why he was opposed to Gorkhaland. “If our areas become part of Gorkhaland, they will dominate us. Already the white tribals are taking away our jobs,” he said. By white tribals, he did not mean Gorkhas, but the small ethnic groups of Mongoloid stock that have been given scheduled tribe status, who remain in the eyes of the Adivasis from Jharkhand closer to other Gorkhas than to them.
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At Malati's rundown home in the worker quarters, which is neither a brick house nor a thatched hut, her husband is all praise for Trinamool. Their son, Rajib, who has given his 12th board exams, was unwell two years ago. The Trinamool leaders helped arrange for his treatment. Her husband is grateful for the help, but Malati is quick to point out that the family bore the expenses amounting to Rs 13,000.
"I saved my son's life with such trouble," she said. "How much work can I do. I go to the garden for just Rs 35. How much in a week? Just Rs 200. I have to give my son money to travel to the town for his studies. Will anyone let him on board without fare?"
The activists have managed to wrest from the government assistance of Rs 1,500 a month and a free meal for every worker, apart from 1.25 kg rice, 750 gms of wheat and 200 ml of oil every week. But that is neither enough, nor sustainable.
The longer the garden remains closed, the harder it gets to find a buyer. A tea industry executive told me that the crisis is rooted in the way tea gardens came to acquired by dubious companies with no long-term vision and with the sole aim of scrubbing illegal investments. Before it closed down, Dheklapara had changed hands four times in a decade and half.
Have they considered leaving the gardens and starting life afresh somewhere else, I ask Malati.
"We have no other country and land. Where would we go?" said her husband.
"We can't go to Delhi or Bombay," said Malati. "We have children to bring up…"
But they hope their children will manage to escape. And so, despite the hardship, Malati is sending all her children to school, breaking stones at the river bed for Rs 75-Rs 100 a day, whenever she can.
"Since the gardens closed down, people have been coming here and taking back pictures. But what do we get out? We think they are taking back pictures, we will get some assistance to rebuild the house. But nothing happens. Others get something, but the poor do not," she said, her soft voice finally hardening.
Malati Mal Paharia.
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If the future of the workers of the closed tea gardens looks bleak, that of workers of functioning gardens is held hostage by politics. The battles between Gorkhas and Adivasis, and among the Adivasis themselves, have weakened the ability of the workers to negotiate for better wages with the tea estate owners. In December 2013, a Kolkata-based activist, Anuradha Talwar, managed to bring major unions together under the United Tea Workers Front. The UTWF held two meeting with the owners in February and March, but the district administration, which oversees the negotiations, said it was busy with elections, and the wage rise would have to wait until the next government is formed.
Click here to read all the stories Supriya Sharma has filed about her 2,500-km rail journey from Guwahati to Jammu to listen to India's conversations about the forthcoming elections -- and life.
