From Liberalism To Secularism, the Battle for Bengal Has Just
Begun
Jawhar Sircar
(The Wire, 28 March 2021)
Voters in Bengal
feel quite amused when told that the next assembly elections are all done and
dusted. But it is rather distressing to see how personal biases or received
wisdom (tonnes of which is freely offloaded in the national capital)
masquerading as profound political analysis. Despite what poll surveys tell us,
a very tough battle lies ahead, not only for Mamata Banerjee but also for the
liberal principles and secular ideologies that the people of the state have
prided in.
Bengal is
surely a difficult state to conduct elections in — I can certify as I had to do
it twice — and the argumentative Bengalis love to gorge, guzzle and breathe
politics. From the early years of the twentieth century, the pistol and the
bomb have been romanticised and socially legitimised, as terrorism challenged
the might of the Empire in Bengal — with the unusual daring, courting the
gallows. Then the violent image was reinforced from 1971 when Congress-backed
lumpen elements fought Naxalites to force through elections. Since then, every
party that controlled Bengal’s politics or challenged such control resorted to
violence, large or small.
Violence
surely makes it to the headlines, irrespective of what the desk had planned
earlier. But while equally problematic states where bullets and bombs fly
around even more, and long lathis crack skulls so effortlessly, manage well
enough with one or two phases of polling; West Bengal has to suffer eight long
phases. It has, after all, consistently voted against the ruling party in
Delhi, for 44 years at a stretch. Of course, the prolonged electoral process does
help those who have to fly in from outside to campaign, one zone at a time.
In the 2014
Lok Sabha elections, Mamata Banerjee was among the few who could successfully
halt Modi’s juggernaut and she actually added 27 seats to her kitty in the next
state assembly elections of 2016. Her Trinamool Congress (AITC or TMC) secured
211 out of the 294 seats in that election, while the BJP managed to win just
three seats. So, where is the challenge?
Well, a lot
of water has gone under Howrah Bridge since then, and though she managed to
stave off the second Modi wave in the Lok Sabha polls of 2019, her party was
left badly battered. She clawed her way to retain 22 of the 42 parliament
seats, while the BJP shot through the roof to secure an incredible number of 18
MPs in place of only two that it had won earlier. It was almost as if the BJP’s
slogan ‘Unishe half, Ekushe saaf’ (halve TMC in 2019, finish it off in 2021)
was coming true.
The BJP’s
vote share also went up by a whooping 22.7%, to equal the 40% that TMC had
secured in the last Lok Sabha election. Mercifully, for the TMC, it managed to
garner an additional 3.5% in 2019, which gave it its 22 seats. It was quite a
photo finish and while Narendra Modi has surely tasted blood, the perennial
street fighter is far from over. Her TMC is desperately fighting to improve its
position, based on her reasonably good execution of welfare schemes.
Mamata’s
micro-management has been quite obsessive and she is also banking on the Modi
magic dimming, as it does, in state elections. But Modi is not only splattered
all over the place but has made more visits to the state in weeks than he has
done in several years. And the BJP has pulled out its entire reserve force as
if the other three state elections do not matter. It is using the Enforcement
Directorate (ED), the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) and Income Tax to
bludgeon opposition and engineer defections, but convictions are next to nil.
It is surely splurging much more than the state has ever seen and that matters.
The BJP has
also capitalised on Mamata’s autocratic manner and corruption issues to whip up
a strong anti-incumbency breeze. This is stronger than what the Left could
achieve with its consistent attacks, but one is not sure whether to call it a
‘wave’. Mamata’s elected representatives have surely antagonised voters by
demanding cuts from welfare schemes and enriching themselves from illegal
mining of sand and coal. Sadly, Bengal has neither granite or other major
minerals to finance ruling parties, nor huge infrastructure projects for
cronies to feast on and also contribute to the regime. Hence, corruption in
Bengal is on the MSME model rather than, say, the Bellary one.
We seem to
have forgotten that the Communist Party of India (Marxist) and the Left Front
had ruled the state for 34 years. Well, in 2019, the party was almost wiped out
as all its candidates lost and it could not secure the second position in any
of the 294 assembly segments. Its overall vote crashed to just 6.3% in 2019 —
from its earlier historic levels of 30 plus to less than 20% in 2016. The
Congress has been systematically bled by its own breakaway party, TMC, and
relations are bitterly hostile. It managed, however, to send two MPs to the Lok
Sabha in 2019, even as its vote share plummeted to barely 5%.
Many had
expected that the three secular parties would either stand up together against
the most deadly challenge from communal forces after Jinnah and his Great
Calcutta Killings of 1946. It is puerile for any of the three to complain about
being victimised by the other(s) as every one of them has indulged in violence
when in power. In fact, the present colossal size of the BJP in Bengal is
indirectly Mamata’s contribution, as her party’s goons tormented local leaders
of the Congress and the Left, filed false or exaggerated police cases (before
an ever obliging police administration) and drove them away from their homes.
Many of
those attacked were also musclemen, but the cumulative result was that almost
all of them took shelter under the centrally-protected BJP, that constantly
flashes the Union home ministry’s biceps. To add to the pandemonium, the
Congress and the Left have buried their blood-stained hatchets and formed a
Third Front to fight primarily the TMC, the bête noire.
While a
demoralised, confounded Congress, abandoned by its central leadership, focuses
desperately to retain its traditional base in ‘middle Bengal’, the CPI(M), led
by its intellectual brigade, has unleashed a bitter war on the TMC, as if the
BJP threat hardly exists. Communists have tapped into youth power and crafted
innovative slogans, songs, memes and lampoons heckling the TMC — much more than
the BJP. The BJP surely profits from this divide in secular votes and we must
thank the Marxists if the BJP romps to power. They will, of course, then spend
several debating days to deliberate on yet another ‘historic mistake’. And this
Left-Congress combo has (hold your breath!) tagged along with a new Muslim
party led by a 24-year-old rabble rousing hereditary religious leader from the
very-famous Furfura Sharif in Hooglhy.
Obviously,
it will cut into the 27% plus of Muslim votes that Mamata has been wooing to
the point of making it a major electoral issue. The Bengali Muslim is hardly
swayed by the Urdu oratory of, say, an Owaisi who wisely decided to stay away.
A section of Bengal’s Muslims must have taken it too easy or else the BJP could
not have got away with Lok Sabha seats in Muslim-dominated Malda, Raiganj and
Balurghat. A large section has also supported the Congress and the Left, but
with such an unprecedented threat from the BJP, it is likely that they may
seriously back Mamata’s TMC.
Incidentally,
at the time of India’s partition, the east did not witness the bloodbaths of
Punjab and there is more in common among the Bengalis of both religions than in
the west. Over the next decades, however, lakhs of refugees streamed in, but
the Communist parties played a sterling role in de-communalising disgruntled
displaced masses. They needed them for class wars and political agitations.
Even the most optimistic secular Bengali will, however, admit — there has been
an unbelievable polarisation, especially of Hindus.
It does not
matter whether the local bhakts are victims of non-stop exaggerated, one-sided
propaganda or whether they seek the uterine comfort of blind, non-thinking
political guru–vad that is doled out by an irresistible demagogue. Many nurse a
deep rooted hatred for the corrupt leaders of the TMC and are prepared to
invite communal forces to combat it and it is a small mercy that communal
incidents have not been ignited, not yet.
But voters
here are certainly not amused when they are informed that they now suffer from
regional parochialism. This hurts, as Bengal is one of the very few states that
has rejected regionalism rather vigorously, consistently for over seven
decades. But many rural voters can hardly understand much of what the prime
minister, the home minister and leaders like Adityanath say in Hindi — even
though they flock to see these TV characters alight from helicopters and
address them.
If, say,
Gujaratis who can hardly understand what Telugus say are not branded parochial,
there is no reason why Bengalis should be — if many don’t understand Hindi. Why
Bengal’s own Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leaders do not lead the charge is not
clear and this unprecedented PM/HM-led campaign has all the pitfalls of a
centrally-sponsored scheme — that invariably ignores local traditions.
Bengalis
have, however, lesser angst against Hindi than Tamils, and they can easily
massacre Hindi pronunciation, accent, gender and grammar quite adroitly. Even
so, one is really not sure that they would be delighted to be an extension of a
Hindi-Hindu-Hindutva world. An extremely worrisome phenomenon is a new divide
along linguistic lines and the swagger that accompanies both sides. This has
hardly ever been seen before and must be cured the soonest.
True,
Bengalis are passionately attached to their language and their fellow speakers
in the east, now called Bangladesh, sacrificed more than 30 lakh lives for it.
This does not, however, condone the incorrigible habit of speaking in Bengali
among themselves, when others present do not understand. And, while more
sensible folk elsewhere made money, many Bengalis remained fixated with
culture, literature, songs, revolution and such other terribly uneconomic
vocations. Thus, when their icons like Tagore, Vivekananda or Netaji are tossed
around flippantly for votes and subjected to sacrilegiously wrong descriptions by
the powers that be, there is an expected hue and cry.
Whether the
mainly-liberal ideals that were injected into most educated Bengalis over the
last two centuries will hold on against a tsunami of men, materials and money
is yet to be seen. Civil society that usually exerts only a moral pressure from
a distance has, however, jumped into the fray this time — somewhat like
liberals in America — and are leading an active ‘No vote to BJP’ campaign. But
we also have to remember that a BJP, flush with crony-funding, views electoral
results only as indicating the ‘base price’ above which MLAs are to be bought,
to form governments. There is, however, quite some time left for that. “A
week”, Harold Wilson had once said, “is a long time in politics”. Six weeks are,
thus, oceans of time for political history to traverse.
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