Religious polarisation in rural Bengal is a grim reality

The turmoil in West Bengal over the panchayat elections is only to be expected. The support that the Mamata Banerjee-led Trinamool government once enjoyed in the state has weakened. However, the outcome of the panchayat elections, though considered an acid-test of her popularity, may not reflect the level of disenchantment of the electorate.

What it does indicate is the level of desperation of the ruling dispensation. Long before the preparations for the panchayat elections were initiated, the state had witnessed widespread violence.

This is not unprecedented in West Bengal. Previously, under the Left Front government in 2003, the state had been through a similar turmoil. In the absence of opposition candidates, the CPI(M) had won more than 10,000 seats. This time the Trinamool Congress has steamrolled other parties, winning almost 6,500 seats unchallenged. The Left Front, Congress and the BJP couldn’t field enough candidates. The muscles of the ruling party were at work. In the panchayat elections in 2003, from the time of filing nominations till the date the poll results were declared, 45 people were killed in political violence. This year, the death toll is already 12. In this conflict, the poor are killing the poor.

By May 2008, rural Bengal had begun dumping the Left Front, especially the CPI(M). The Congress votes were confined only to Malda and Murshidabad. The results of the 2011 assembly elections in eight districts of the state in which minority voters were the determining factors, showed the miserable performance of the CPI(M).

When chief minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharya’s government began to forcibly acquire agricultural land for industries, the farmers’ disenchantment with the Left was complete.

The overwhelming majority of the Muslims in the state, who constitute 27 per cent of the total population, are dependent on agriculture. With Banerjee spearheading the movement against land acquisition, she became the obvious choice of the community.

However, after coming to power, Banerjee began indulging in tokenism instead of setting long-term goals for improving the lot of the state’s backward minority class. What the community, largely dependent on agriculture, needed was education, land reforms and job opportunities. Banerjee could only come up with an allowance of Rs1,500 to the imams.
Curiously, out of 30,000 imams in the state, 50 per cent has not applied for the allowance.

In the days to come, Bengal will witness the increasing assertion of identity politics. The BJP, taking full advantage of Banerjee’s minority-appeasement politics, is trying to consolidate the Hindu votebank in rural Bengal.

The minority community, fed up with tokenism, is now looking at the possibility of floating political parties to safeguard their interests. Since Muslims will decide the fate of 140 out of 294 seats, they are trying to use this power to their political advantage.

This can already be seen in Birbhum’s Nalhati constituency’s assembly by-election where the vote shares of both the TMC-Congress alliance and the Left Front had gone down.
Those who gained were the BJP and Muhammad Siddiqullah Chowdhury’s People’s Democratic Conference of India (PDCI) party, attracting 10 per cent and 7 per cent votes, respectively.

Post Babri Masjid, the BJP had witnessed a similar rise in Bengal in the late Nineties’ general elections, managing to secure two parliamentary seats. Though it was later wiped out, it’s now trying to stage a comeback. The state unit of RSS claims it has enjoyed 11 per cent growth in the last one year.

The violence in panchayat polls may have halted the growth of religious parties for now, but polarisation at the grassroots in rural Bengal is a reality that cannot be wished away.

The author is a senior journalist.