ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the reasons why and the forces by which refugees opted to become political in West Bengal. It highlights the process of transformation, depending on what had attracted the refugees to the leftists’ strategies and methods of political movements when the key reasons for conflict between the state and refugee organisations centred on the question of land grabbing led by the leftist political parties. By highlighting the nature of the shift from ‘policy-based’ politics to ‘strategy-based’ politics, this chapter tries to explore the larger impact of Partition on the life, land and identity of the refugees, with the changing nature of the political movements. It stresses that the demand for permanent settlements became the driving force for them for attaining socio-economic security, linguistic rights and religious freedom, which they believed would facilitate erasure of the memory of the holocaust.
