West Bengal gets no respite from political violence

Old-timers are likely to see the current prolonged spell of violence in West Bengal as a throwback to the 1960s and 1970s when the state was in the throes of a similar upheaval. The protagonists, too, are mostly the same. In the earlier period, the communists, including the Naxalites (Maoists), fought pitched battles against their ‘class enemies’, represented mainly by the Congress, in the urban lanes, bylanes and in the countryside, using home-made bombs and pipe-guns. Today, it is again the communists who are skirmishing with the Trinamool Congress, a party that comprises Congressmen who broke away from the parent party in 1997.

If it was relatively quiet during the Left Front’s rule between 1977 and 2011, the reason was the political dominance of the communists and the emasculation of the Congress. But peace was only on the surface. The intimidating cadre raj of the Left ensured that resentment continued to simmer underground leading to an upsurge of popular anger, which swept the comrades out of power in the 2011 elections.

The beneficiaries were the Trinamool Congress and the Congress, which were allies at the time.

Since then, however, the state has known no peace. If Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee had the visionary outlook of a statesman and not continued to be the rabble-rouser she is, West Bengal might have experienced political stability and economic progress. The overwhelming public support she received would have enabled her to lead the state away from the path of confrontation between rival political parties, which has plagued its politics for so long.

Initially, it did seem that she was on the right track. She said that her victory was for badal (Hindi for change) and not badla (revenge). But the poriborton (Bengali for transformation) which she promised turned out to be for the worse. First, her instincts as a street fighter, which served her so well in her battles with the communists, made her take on even her allies, leading to a falling out with the Congress in the state and at the Centre.

Perhaps aware of her inability to fulfil her promises, she then began to regard every incident which reflected poorly on the administration as a conspiracy against her. Hence her description of a case of rape in Park Street as “sajano ghatona” (Bengali for concocted incident). Not only that, the summary transfer of a well-regarded police officer, Damayanti Sen, who was diligently pursuing the case, showed that she had taken a leaf out of the book of the Left Front, which routinely used the police for partisan purposes.

Unambiguous message

This wasn’t the only incident of bending the police to her will. When the commissioner of Kolkata Police, R.K. Pachnanda, went after Trinamool ‘activists’ following an incident of violence in which a police officer was shot dead, he was transferred. The unambiguous message to the law-enforcing agencies was to let the Trinamool cadre have its way. Perhaps this explains why the policemen present near Presidency University in Kolkata said that they had no orders to intervene when hooligans carrying Trinamool flags vandalised the elite institution last week.

The provocation for the goons was the heckling of the chief minister near the Planning Commission building in New Delhi on the previous day by supporters of the Students Federation of India (SFI), which is associated with the Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPI-M). The SFI followers had gathered near the building to protest against the death in police custody in Kolkata of a young member of the organisation. Tempers flared after Banerjee’s unfortunate description of the tragic incident as “petty”.

Some in the Trinamool Congress, however, felt that the demonstrators intended to kill her. This was a throwback to an infamous incident in 1991 when Banerjee was severely injured in an attack by CPI-M rowdies in the heart of Kolkata. Since then, she has harboured the suspicion that the Marxists plan to kill her — a fear she expressed in an interview with the Washington Post, in which she said conspiracies against her were being hatched in “Hungary sometimes, sometimes Korea, sometimes Venezuela”.

It is evident from this peculiar allegation that she sees a threat where none exists. This is probably what made her suspect a looming danger in a cartoon posted on the internet by a professor and his friend in Kolkata, which quoted a passage from the Satyajit Ray film, Sonar Kella, about a character in the film who ‘vanished’. The two ‘offenders’ had to spend some time in jail. So did a farmer who asked her a question at a public meeting.

All these incidents — the death of a student, the heckling of Banerjee, the vandalism at Presidency, the retaliatory attacks on CPI(M) offices as well as what happened earlier when frequent clashes were reported between Trinamool supporters and Marxists lend substance to Governor M.K. Narayanan’s regret over the prevailing “goondaism”. For the hapless people of West Bengal, however, it is all too distressingly familiar. Where the Marxists took the upper hand before to spread terror, the Trinamool is running amok now.

— IANS

Amulya Ganguli is a political analyst.