Senior Bengal ministers Partha Bhowmick and Sujit Bose toured Sandeshkhali on Saturday and saw first-hand the “evidence” of alleged wrongdoing by Sheikh Shahjahan and his associates, from turning farmland into bheris and tampering with natural irrigation canals to tormenting women and terrorising people.

Irrigation minister Bhowmick and fire minister Bose spent over five hours in Sandeshkhali, covering 12km by toto and 6km on foot. They saw for themselves how the conversion of hundreds of bighas of fertile land into bheris, allegedly by Shahjahan and his close associates Shibaprasad Hazra and Uttam Sardar, had changed the area’s topography.

Scores of men and women accosted the ministers and narrated how their party colleagues had, with tacit support from the local civil and police administrations, terrorised the area, barely 80km from the seat of power in Bengal.

“We are in Sandeshkhali today following an instruction from our chief minister Mamata Banerjee. People told us how they (the accused Trinamul leaders) had forced them to part with their land and converted them into bheris,” Bhowmick, who had come to Sandeshkhali with senior irrigation officials, said.

“We were shocked to see how these people had tampered with natural irrigation canals to pump saline water into the fields (of unwilling farmers).”

The Telegraph had on February 22 reported how two key associates of Shahjahan — Hazra and Uttam — had grabbed hundreds of bighas of land from poor farmers and tormented villagers.

The two ministers reached Sandeshkhali around 12.30pm and left around 6pm after travelling extensively and meeting about 100 villagers, many of them women.

Sandeshkhali hit the headlines on January 5 after Shahjahan’s men allegedly attacked a team of Enforcement Directorate (ED) officials who had come to raid his home in connection with the PDS (public distribution system) scam in the state.

Early this month, several women from the area complained of sexual assault and harassment by Shahjahan’s aides.

Although Trinamul has officially maintained that action on Shahjahan should be taken by the ED, the ministers got a taste of the people’s anger against the fugitive when some women in Majherpara held a protest, demanding Shahjahan’s arrest.

After reaching Sandeshkhali on a government boat, the two ministers first visited the house of a local schoolteacher, Sujoy Mondal, who is believed to have masterminded the popular uprising on the island. Mondal accompanied the ministers during their tour of the island.

As soon as the ministers, along with a few local leaders and Sandeshkhali MLA Sukumar Mahata, reached the Kachharipara area, where 400 bighas of land have been converted into bheris, people stepped out of their homes in droves to air their complaints.

“Sir, see this vast land, all these were our paddy fields three years ago. They forcibly grabbed the land, we couldn’t do anything because they were so powerful,” said Ram Pramanik, a farmer in his mid-50s whose two-bigha land has become part of a bheri.

Amid the vast stretches of water bodies all around, the ministers and their aides had to look around for a place where they could stand and talk to the villagers. Finally, they picked a mud road along a canal running through the bheris.

The ministers heard out all the complainants, but the barrage of allegations against Shahjahan and his men was clearly making them uncomfortable.

They also seemed somewhat rattled as questions flew in about why the party and the police supported Shahjahan, when he would be arrested, and why they hadn’t come to Sandeshkhali all these days.

The most disturbing moments for the ministers came when three women told them in hushed tones how they were tortured by local Trinamul leaders. “We will look into all the complaints,” a visibly embarrassed Bhowmick said.

He told the villagers the state government was determined to set “everything right” within a month and promised that all the victims of atrocities and land-grab would get justice.

“Please give us a month. I assure you that everything will be fine like before. Our government has already arrested two accused. None of the guilty will be spared,” Bhowmick told a woman who described to him how her son was beaten up and their land grabbed by local Trinamul leaders.