By Dipankar Bhattacharya
It has been just one month since a BJP government was sworn in for the first time in West Bengal. This one month has taught the people of West Bengal much more about the BJP than they could ever learn watching the party rule in other states or at the Centre. The BJP came to power championing the slogan of ‘change’. Its election campaign promised to end ‘fear’ and inspire ‘trust’ in public life. But for millions of people in West Bengal, the experience of the first month under BJP rule in West Bengal has been all about fear and insecurity.
For many who lost their votes in SIR, the ordeal has just begun. Hundreds are being herded into detention camps rechristened as ‘holding centres’. Children, women, old and ailing people are being forcibly pushed across the India-Bangladesh border only to be pushed back by the Bangladesh border forces. From voteless they have now become stateless. Many others who may not yet have come close to this line of detention and deportation, have started losing a whole range of rights and cash transfer benefits.
Across the state, bulldozers are on the rampage, demolishing houses and shops, evicting millions of people from their homes and livelihoods. Without any rehabilitation, often without any notice, bulldozers are arriving at night to uproot and dislocate people and destroy livelihoods. In station after station, colony after colony, this is now the harsh reality for the urban poor and toiling masses in the greater Kolkata region. Life has become utterly uncertain and insecure for tens of thousands of railway hawkers, street vendors, small shopkeepers.
The promised DA for government employees, the increased cash benefit for women already appear deferred dreams. Before handing out any cash benefit, the government wants to collect all possible data about not just individual beneficiaries but their entire families. At one single stroke, OBC reservation in the state has been reduced from 17 to 7 percent. Every caste certificate issued since 2011 is now subject to mandatory recertification. Indigenous people too are being sought to be divided on the basis of religion. The BJP is now bent upon turning the constitutional right to reservation that belonged to all socially and educationally backward groups into an exclusive Hindu right.
The pain is certainly not being felt by all. There are many who are ready to justify and welcome this pain being inflicted on the socially and economically deprived as a necessary price for ‘progress’ or ‘development’. The dominant media is busy manufacturing consent for ‘bulldozer raj’. Many who are not yet cheering for the rampaging bulldozer as the new symbol of governance are willing to wait and watch. Meanwhile, the BJP washing machine is working overtime. Ousted from power, the TMC establishment is now clearly vulnerable to the BJP’s tried and tested ‘carrot and stick’ strategy and the ‘Operation Lotus’ dynamics. From panchayat and municipality level representatives to MLAs and MPs, the swelling numbers of TMC turncoats now appear to have reduced the official TMC to a minority.
With the TMC turncoats making a beeline for the BJP, a Congress-TMC rapprochement is now very much visible and understandable. It of course remains to be seen if and how the TMC-Congress bloc reinvents itself as an opposition on the ground. The imperative before the Left in West Bengal is to get its act together as the tribune of the crisis-ridden toiling people of the state at this critical juncture. The energy witnessed in the anti-eviction resistance campaign of the united Left is quite encouraging. The initiative unleashed by activists of the CPI(ML) and civil society groups and human rights organisations to reach out to the disenfranchised people of West Bengal is another important step. As the BJP government unleashes its divisive and deceptive agenda and bares its repressive fangs, the Left must be there on the ground with the people at every step.
The unprecedented scale of the BJP’s victory in West Bengal is a result of several factors. There are unmistakable elements of electoral fraud along the entire election process right from the preparation of electoral roll to the counting of votes and declaration of results. But more ominous is the BJP’s actual growth on the ground and its ability to channelise the anger of the people against the TMC misrule towards the Sangh brigade’s Hindutva agenda. We remember how in the wake of the Gujarat carnage of 2002, Narendra Modi turned Gujarat elections into an anti-Pakistan vote. The BJP in Assam, Tripura and West Bengal is working on a similar strategy using Bangladesh, particularly the growing influence of Jamaat-e-Islami in Bangladesh politics, as a constant target of attack.
The challenge before the Left and democratic forces of West Bengal is to defeat this communal design of the BJP. The answer lies in upholding the class interests that combine Hindus and Muslims, advancing the agenda of social justice that concerns every deprived and marginalised group, strengthening the inclusive culture that has sustained and empowered generations in the region since the colonial period. The BJP’s attempt to turn the festive occasion of Eid into a theatre of hate and conflict failed quite spectacularly when the predominantly Hindu cattle-traders and dairy farmers of West Bengal rose against the cattle slaughter ban.
The syncretic culture of West Bengal has been rooted in close ties of economic interdependence and social coexistence that defied every attempt to divide the people on communal lines. In the early years after partition, the Left in West Bengal grew through the struggles for agrarian reforms, refugee rehabilitation, equitable education, and dignity and security for the oppressed and the marginalised. Electoral victories and a prolonged stint in power came riding on this basic identity and strength of the communist movement. Today once again communists will have to fight back by summoning this basic strength and glorious legacy. (IPA Service)
** The writer is the general secretary of CPI(ML) Liberation.
