#dnaEdit: Mamata's vote-bank politics

The Calcutta High Court observation, terming the West Bengal government order of setting time limits for Durga idol immersion “arbitrary” and a “clear endeavour” to “appease the minority section of the public”, is music to the ears of those who often accuse the Mamata Banerjee dispensation of being partial to Muslims. The HC’s harshly-worded view was prompted by the state government’s measures to ensure that Muslims too can observe Muharram. “Minority appeasement” has become the constant refrain for a large section of Hindus in Bengal. The former Left Front government’s 34-year spell too had encountered similar accusations, but to a lesser extent. In case of Banerjee, the criticism is vociferous because of her visible efforts to reach out to Muslims. For instance, a hoarding at a city’s major traffic junction shows her wearing a hijab and offering namaz. Many Hindus also find it particularly galling when her address to a gathering of Muslims invariably ends with a string of invocations like Allah ho Akbar. This in-the-face marriage of politics and religion has caused a fair amount of consternation in a state that is seeing unusual communal polarisation since 2011 when Banerjee’s party Trinamool Congress (TMC) came to power. 

What has irked a growing number of her detractors the most are some state government policies for the benefit of the Muslim community. Scholarships for Muslim students and the Rs 2,500-a-month honorarium to imams and Rs 1,000 a month for muezzins have provoked widespread outcry, demanding similar incentives for Hindu students and priests. 
To put her actions in perspective, Banerjee’s “love” for Muslims is solely because of the strength of their numbers in the state. At 30% of the population, the minority vote-bank is especially attractive to her since the Hindu vote is fragmented. Getting a chunk of that 30% will ensure a long political career for her as the chief minister. Banerjee, an astute politician, saw the merit of drawing Muslims to her party at a time when the CPI-M was gradually losing its grip over the community. The Left’s drubbing in the 2008 panchayat elections was a turning point in Banerjee’s political fortunes. She had already begun to build bridges with Muslim marginal farmers who felt threatened by the Left’s industrial policies. After Singur and Nandigram, Banerjee had no reason to look back.  

Hindus began to feel insecure when cases of alleged discrimination and violence began surfacing from Muslim-dominated areas. A couple of days back, Hindu residents of Batanagar, a Muslim stronghold on the outskirts of Kolkata, lodged a police complaint after idols in a puja pandal were found badly damaged. Earlier, too, especially in the border towns and districts of West Bengal, Hindus had expressed fears of being the minority community. The primary thread running through these cases is the police’s reluctance to bring the perpetrators to book. That shouldn’t come as a surprise since law-enforcers have mostly remained under the thumb of the ruling party. Their helplessness was most evident in a major communal clash when a Muslim mob beat up policemen and vandalised Malda’s Kaliachowk police station, early this year. The district is notorious for a thriving cross-border illegal drug trade. Malda and its adjoining districts have seen a sharp increase in communal violence in the past few years. 
There is a growing public opinion that the state has become a safe haven for terrorists entering the country through the porous Bangladesh border. The 2014 Burdwan blasts in 2014 bolster that belief. 

Thanks to a vitiated atmosphere, very few voices dare to highlight the fact that an overwhelming majority of Muslims in the state are far worse off than the Hindus. On the occasion of releasing a report titled Living Reality of Muslims in West Bengal in February this year, Nobel laureate Amartya Sen had said, “The fact that Muslims in West Bengal are disproportionately poorer and more deprived in terms of living conditions is an empirical recognition that gives this report an inescapable immediacy and practical urgency.” So much for the bleeding-heart chief minister’s love for Muslims.