A year after the arson during the protests over the Waqf law in Murshidabad, the house of Harogobindo Das and his son Chandan, who were killed by a mob, still looks like a bunker.
The walls have black marks. Broken bricks lie near the staircase. A central police camp stands a few feet away. Yet inside the house, nobody speaks of safety.
In Jafrabad, a Hindu-majority hamlet surrounded by Muslim-dominated neighbourhoods in Samserganj, last year’s violence has stopped being merely a memory. It has become a political language before the 2026 assembly elections.
The names of Harogobindo and Chandan are now spoken here the way Bengal once spoke of Nandigram or Sandeshkhali – not only as a tragedy, but also as a warning, a slogan and an accusation.
“We are being remembered because votes are coming,” said Parul Das, widow of Harogobindo and mother of Chandan, sitting at the entrance of the house, where the mob had entered on April 12 last year.
“They dragged my husband and son out and killed them like animals. My husband and son had done nothing. I called the police, the MLA, everyone. Nobody came,” she told PTI.Parul said she refused compensation from the state government.
“What will I do with the money? Can money bring them back? The TMC government cannot give us justice. Suvendu Adhikari came here. Nobody else stood beside us,” she said.
Her vote, she said, is no longer about roads, ration or Lakshmir Bhandar.
“My vote is for security. I want a permanent central police camp here in the village, otherwise we will not survive. Once the election is over and the forces leave, they will come again.”
Upstairs, Chandan’s sister-in-law Sathi Das still does not sleep alone.
That afternoon, she said, she heard shouting from the lane and then the sound of bombs.
“I was with my children. My mother-in-law screamed that they had entered the house. We ran to the terrace. Later, we escaped through another side. My husband was in Coimbatore, and my brother-in-law and father-in-law were taken away. We could not save them,” she said.
Her husband Samartha had been working in Coimbatore when Chandan called him.
“My brother said the mob had attacked. I tried calling the police station, the MLA, and the panchayat leader. Nobody answered. Later, I was told my father and brother had been hacked to death,” he said.
Samartha has now returned to Jafrabad for good, as he doesn’t want to leave his family alone.
In December, a court sentenced 13 men to life imprisonment in the case. But the family said the verdict has not ended their fear.
Across Jafrabad, fear hangs like humidity. Several houses remain locked. Some families have sent daughters to relatives in Malda and Birbhum. Children stop playing after dark. Women do not step out alone at night.
Seventy-year-old Bharat Das said villagers had tried to resist when the mob entered. “But how long can sticks fight bombs? They had crude bombs, guns, everything. We were fewer,” he said.
The village, he said, no longer trusts its own geography. “We are surrounded from all sides. Earlier, our Muslim neighbours spoke to us. Now everyone keeps to themselves. There is silence, but not peace,” he said.
In Samserganj, where Muslims make up nearly 80 per cent of the electorate, Jafrabad is a small island of Hindu votes. During the Special Intensive Revision, nearly 92,000 names were deleted from the constituency rolls, mostly Muslims, bringing the electorate down sharply.
The BJP said the correction has exposed what it called years of demographic change. The TMC termed it disenfranchisement.
The politics of Jafrabad now sits squarely on that faultline. BJP candidate Shashti Charan Das said the killings of Harogobindo and Chandan prove that Hindus are unsafe under the TMC rule.
“This happened because the administration surrendered before radical elements. Minority appeasement has destroyed law and order. Jafrabad is the biggest symbol of that failure,” he claimed.
TMC candidate Noor Alam accuses the BJP of turning a family’s grief into an election campaign.
“It was an unfortunate incident. The guilty have been punished. But the BJP wants riots before every election. They are using dead bodies to polarise Bengal,” he alleged.
Congress candidate Nazme Alam said both the TMC and BJP are feeding off fear.
“The state government failed to protect these people. But the BJP is using their pain to divide Hindus and Muslims further. Ordinary villagers are trapped between the two,” he said.
Yet in Jafrabad, politics returns again and again to the same staircase, the same broken courtyard, the same house with the iron gate.
That is why Jafrabad has become larger than itself.
In a constituency where the TMC has won comfortably since 2016 and Amirul Islam has been replaced this year by Noor Alam, and where the Congress still retains old pockets of influence, the election is no longer being argued through roads, jobs or development.
Here, people speak who came after the killings, who answered the phone, who crossed the lane and who did not.
The village has become Bengal in miniature: grief converted into politics, fear recast as identity, and an election reduced to a single, burning question -who will protect us when the forces leave?
Amid the BJP’s cry of Hindu insecurity, the TMC’s charge of polarisation and the Congress warning against both, Jafrabad now stands where Bengal’s deepest faultlines meet.
When Samserganj votes on April 23 in the first phase of the West Bengal assembly polls, Jafrabad will not be choosing merely between parties or candidates. It will be voting with the memory of a broken door, bodies lying outside the house, unanswered phone calls and the fear that the next knock may again come with bombs and guns.
The second phase of polling is on April 29, and the counting of votes on May 4.
