Pani Sol (Bankura): Every morning before sunrise, hundreds of bicycles and motorcycles roll out of Pani Sol village in West Bengal’s Bankura district. Plastic buckets, kitchen utensils, clothes, toys, cosmetics and household goods are tied to the carriers with ropes. Their owners travel across Bengal, Jharkhand and Bihar, knocking on doors to sell their wares.
For generations, this has been the lifeline of Pani Sol.
Today, fear travels those roads alongside them.
On 9 June, one of the village’s hawkers, 50-year-old Akbar Ali Mondal, was allegedly beaten to death in Purulia district while earning a living. Yet the arrest of the accused has done little to calm nerves in Pani Sol, where thousands of families depend on hawking for survival.
A week after the killing, the village remains engulfed in anxiety. Men leave for work with apprehension. Families wait anxiously for phone calls. Conversations in tea stalls, village shops and courtyards inevitably return to the same unsettling question: could the next victim be one of us?
Pani Sol, located under Onda Police Station in Bankura district, is one of the largest villages in the region. Home to nearly 80,000 to 90,000 residents, around 90 per cent of whom are Muslims, the settlement is known across neighbouring districts as a village of hawkers, with generations of families relying on itinerant trade for their livelihood.
According to local residents, nearly seventy to eighty per cent of the village’s young men earn their livelihood through itinerant trading. Every day, they travel long distances carrying household goods, relying on personal relationships, trust and repeat customers to earn a living. Few families have agricultural land. Even fewer have access to stable salaried employment.
Akbar Ali Mondal was one of these workers.
How Akbar Ali’s Final Journey Shook a Village of Hawkers
Akbar worked in areas near the Purulia-Jharkhand border alongside his 24-year-old son, Zulfikar Ali. Although father and son operated in different localities, they followed the same routine. They would leave early in the morning and return home after a day of selling goods door to door.
On 9 June, they set out as usual.
By midday, Zulfikar received a phone call informing him that his father had fallen ill and had been taken to hospital. Rushing there, he found not an injured man awaiting treatment but the lifeless body of his father.
Showing photographs of the deceased, Zulfikar struggled to control his emotions.
“I still cannot understand why such brutality was inflicted upon him,” he said.
Akbar Ali Mondal’s killing has left behind more than grief. Akbar’s widow and young daughter depended heavily on his earnings. The family’s modest mud house stands as a reminder of how fragile their economic existence had always been. Now the responsibility of supporting the household rests entirely on Zulfikar.
Fear Spreads Through Bengal’s Village of Muslim Hawkers
While Akbar’s family mourns a personal loss, many residents of Pani Sol fear the killing signals something larger.
Many villagers believe Akbar Ali Mondal’s killing has transformed a livelihood concern into a question of survival. Residents allege that harassment of Muslim hawkers has increased in recent years in some areas where they work. Several claim that traders are sometimes subjected to intimidation and communal abuse.
Zulfikar alleged that Muslim hawkers were occasionally forced to chant religious slogans and threatened with exclusion from local markets and neighbourhoods.
“We have been working under fear for a long time,” he said. “Now that fear has become even greater.”
Whether or not all such allegations are established through official investigations, the perception of insecurity is now widespread across the village. In many homes, parents worry every time their sons leave for work.
The impact on the village economy is already visible. Several hawkers working in distant areas have reportedly returned home after Akbar Ali Mondal’s killing. Others say they are reconsidering where they travel and whether they can continue in the profession at all.
The dilemma is stark: stay home and face hunger, or continue working while fearing for one’s safety.
Why Pani Sol’s Economy Depends on Thousands of Hawkers
Beyond the killing, the deeper tragedy lies in the economic reality of Pani Sol.
A drive through the village reveals a settlement bustling with human activity but struggling with limited opportunities. Bicycles loaded with merchandise are as common here as tractors are in farming villages.
The village economy revolves around hawking because alternative employment opportunities scarcely exist.
Despite its large population, the village has only two high schools and fewer than ten primary schools. Residents complain of teacher shortages and poor educational infrastructure. Extreme poverty forces many children to abandon their studies before completing secondary education.
According to villagers, only a handful of residents have secured government jobs. The number of graduates in a population approaching one lakh is astonishingly small.
The consequence is visible everywhere. Each generation enters the same occupation as the previous one. Sons become hawkers because their fathers were hawkers.
Hawking is not merely a source of income in Pani Sol; it is the backbone of the village economy.
That is why Akbar Ali Mondal’s death has generated fear far beyond his immediate family.
Growing Fear After Attacks on Travelling Muslim Traders
Residents also recalled earlier incidents involving hawkers from the village. One local resident cited an alleged stabbing attack on another trader from Pani Sol a few months ago near Bankura town.
Whether isolated or part of a broader pattern, such incidents have reinforced feelings of vulnerability among villagers.
“Hawking once meant hardship,” said an elderly resident. “Now it also means fear.”
Rights Groups Step In as Family Seeks Justice and Support
Akbar Ali Mondal’s killing has attracted the attention of rights organisations and community groups.
A team from the Association for Protection of Civil Rights (APCR), led by social activist Omar Owais, visited the family and assured them of legal assistance. Representatives of Jamiat Ulama-i-Hind also met villagers and expressed concern over both the killing and the broader economic insecurity facing the community.
According to Owais, the family is living under tremendous psychological pressure and requires legal support to pursue the case, particularly because the crime occurred around 90 kilometres away in Purulia district.
For a family already struggling financially, travelling repeatedly to another district to follow legal proceedings presents a major burden.
“How Are We Supposed to Live?”
The question echoing across Pani Sol today is not only who killed Akbar Ali Mondal, but what comes next.
Akbar’s elder brother, Noor Mohammad Mondal, who survives by selling poultry, summed up the village’s predicament.
“Many hawkers are returning home because they are frightened,” he said. “But there is no other work here. Tell me, how are we supposed to survive?”
His question captures the anxiety of an entire village.
For decades, the roads of Bengal, Jharkhand and Bihar provided a livelihood for Pani Sol’s residents. Today, those same roads have become a source of uncertainty.
As the investigation into Akbar Ali Mondal’s killing continues, thousands of hawkers from this village will once again leave home in search of customers. They will carry their goods as they always have.
But many will now carry something else as well: the fear that, for Muslim hawkers from Pani Sol, earning a living may itself have become dangerous.
