Mamata’s Politics is a mix of Welfare Populism and Fascism - III

Course correction by Trinamool: Many citizens of West Bengal were availing the benefits of the Pradhan Mantri Avas Yojana, a subsidized loan scheme for house building. It was launched in 2015 and till 2019 there were thousands of beneficiaries in West Bengal. But almost all had to pay a certain percentage of their loan to the Tola-baaz sharks of the Trinamool; this had a local name ̶ cut money. Mamata Banerjee shrewdly projected herself to be above this wide spread corruption. She went round the districts asking her people to ‘return the cut money’, as if her errant party men had been doing things without her knowledge. In many cases the cut money was retuned partially or fully.

Mamata modified the Swasthya Sathi scheme and made it open to all by removing the income bar. The scheme, in its post-2019 avatar, is more popular than the Ayushman Bharat scheme; families of all income groups are availing it and the private hospitals are also happy doing brisk business.

Mamata announced and successfully implemented two more schemes̶ Duare Sarkar (meaning Government at your door) and Did Ke Bolo (meaning Tell Didi). According to the Duare Sarkar scheme, the officials of all public-dealing departments encamped in a Para (Mohalla) for a few days, heard the citizens’ complaints and grievances and handed out solutions on the spot. Then they moved to a new locality. Every para got Duare Sarkar when its turn came by cyclic rotation.

Did Ke Bolo scheme provides a system of large number of hot telephone lines by which complaints can be directly registered with the Didi’s (CM’s) office. One example would suffice. Within a month, the CMO officials realized that the Panchayats were not issuing Scheduled Caste certificates promptly and taking money under the table. The recalcitrant people were sternly dealt with and the pending SC certificates were promptly disbursed.

Most important of all, Mamata launched her Aikyashree scheme, aimed to please the Minorities. State Scholarships for Minority Students were arranged from the financial year 2019-20 onwards. Three types of scholarships will be provided under this scheme, provided the family income is below Rs. 2 Lakh.

• Pre-matric Scholarship (for meritorious students from Class-I to Class-X)

• Post-matric Scholarship (for meritorious students from Class-XI to Ph. D), and

• Merit-cum-Means Scholarships (for pursuing technical & professional courses).

At the same time, she started to visit Hindu temples and pilgrim centers frequently. Her speeches often ended with Joy Ma Kaali and were interspersed with the Chandi Path. Her whole demeanor changed and became more attuned to Hindu religion.

‘Bahiragata’ or outsider factor: Banerjee in almost all her election speeches accused the BJP to be the party of outsiders or Bahiragata people. No doubt that there is a mild undercurrent of fear in Bengal about the outsiders. It is the product of a sociological phenomenon spanning over one and a half century, since when the first settlements of North West Indian businessmen started appearing in Calcutta (Kolkata now).

I am constrained to paint a picture with a very broad brush; the actual phenomenon is much more complicated and has gone through many historical phases. Bengal has a large indigenous business (Bania or Beney) caste, but they were no match in thrift and enterprise to the newly arrived North Indians. They yielded space and the loser is always resentful. A similar resentment is present and more articulate in Assam, where it is equally directed against the North Indian and Bengali settlers, Hindu and Muslim. In Jharkhand too this identity-related insecurity is present in a different form; The Adivasi tribal is afraid of the outsider (Diku, in their language) who takes over their land.

BJP understood this phenomenon in Assam well and handled successive elections most adroitly. But in Jharkhand and Bengal it played its cards ham-handedly. In Jharkhand, egged on by the North Indian business class and the vision of a 5-trillion -dollar Indian economy by 2025, the BJP had tried to modify the land-ownership-laws that gave special protection to the Adivasi; the upshot was that they lost the next Vidhan Sabha election to the Jharkhand Mukti Morcha.

Returning to Bengal, in particular to Kolkata, the North Indian businessmen of various language groups have acquired total control over the business hub. The Bengali, skilful in science, literature, medicine, art, film-making etc. but quite incompetent in the matter of business and wealth creation, is nowhere to be seen. Vast tracts and properties of the most prized locations in almost whole of proper Kolkata have been acquired by the North Indian communities; the Bengali has been pushed to the outskirts.

Yet the most prominent cultural symbols of Bengal, the Mahajati Sadan, Rabindranath Tagore’s and Swami Vivekananda’s ancestral residences, the historical theatre houses, the area around the Statesman House, Victoria Memorial, High Court, St. Xaviers’ school and college, Sir J. C. Bose’s house and the Bose Institute, institutions established by Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar, etc., the list can be indefinitely stretched, are all located in the heartland of Kolkata, where the Bengali speech now has to compete with Hindi. One hears a constant refrain among the Bengali Calcuttan, ‘We have lost Kolkata to the A-bangali or non-Bengali (the colloquial terms for the outsider)’. Mamata Banerjee has given it a Sanskrit name ̶ Bahiragata. BJP inadvertently played into her hands by fielding a large number of Hindi-speakers in election rallies, and appointing a fair number of such people as prominent spokesmen and advisors.

Mistakes made by the BJP: During the Panchayat elections of 2018, when the Trinamool Congress let loose a reign of terror in the countryside and was preventing other parties from filing nomination papers, there was a strong case for applying Article 356 of the Constitution and promulgating President’s rule. But the BJP-led Central Government was too shy of this constitutional provision.

Again, into the run up to the 2021 Vidhan Sabha election, when more than one hundred of BJP workers were murdered and no arrest was made and the police remained inactive, there was a case for applying Article 356. But the NDA government would not walk that path. One year of President’s rule would have been enough to turn around and motivate the police force, and neutralize the fascist forces nurtured by the Trinamool. Thereafter a free and fair election could have been held.

BJP underestimated Mamata Banerjee’s strength and popularity and thought that a blitzkrieg of a campaign and PM Narendra Modi’s charisma would do the job. This was overestimating one’s own strength. It seems that the BJP did not pay much attention to the course correction measures taken by Mamata after the 2019 Lok Sabha election. This points to the organizational weakness of the party.

The BJP should have correctly assessed the populist measures of the Trinamool Government. It should have promised to continue most of them, excepting the discriminatory Minority-appeasing ones, in its election manifesto. The manifesto would be reflected in the election speeches. Instead, the BJP chose to ignore them. Of course, its own menu of central schemes and new schemes at the State level, when added to the existing Prakalpas, would have had ‘double-engine’ traction over the voter. But the BJP was not astute enough to play this game.

The greatest mistake was that the BJP failed to interpret the ‘Khela Hobey’ slogan in the initial stages. Later, a proper understanding of the slogan forced itself on everyone. Khela Hobey literally means ‘there will be a play’. But its actual codified meaning is that ‘violence will happen’. Mamata Banerjee was routinely asking in all rallies, ‘Ma bonera, hata khunti niye khela hobey to?’ It literally means, ‘Mothers and sisters, will you play with your iron ladles?’ It was a call for violence in coded language.

The central forces can only ensure a peaceful polling. But what happens at night and away from the polling booth is under the control of the well-organized fascist goons. BJP underestimated the vicious fascist attitude of Mamata Banerjee and her cahoots, and has lost many of her brave heart workers due to excessive shyness about Article 356.

Post-victory Fascist Violence and Fugitives from the Para: Most political observers, including the stalwarts of the BJP, failed to anticipate the systematic violence that was let loose by the Trinamool, after coming back to power. This time the aim of the fascists is to send all BJP activists into a kind of exile, whereby they cannot enter tehir para or mohalla. He is forced to live like a fugitive, away from his village, Para and friends. Such a diabolical plan cannot be executed without a few murders, and a fair dose of loot and arson.

Yet it has precedence in West Bengal. After the 1971 victory in the Bangladesh Independence war, Indira Gandhi reigned like an autocratic queen from the Delhi ‘Masnad’. Her satrap, Siddhartha Shankar Ray was installed as CM of W. Bengal and surrounded by advisors from the CPI. Indira Gandhi too surrounded herself by advisors from the same party. The activists and middle-tier leaders of the CPI(M) were systematically ousted from their homestead by the goon gangs of the Indira Congress, often assisted by the police. These ousted people were forced to lead the life of a fugitive running from place to place.

This situation lasted into the 1975 Emergency promulgated by Mrs. Gandhi. Only after the 1977 Lok Sabha election and Vidhan Sabha election, when the Congress (I) was ousted from power at both the Center and State, the conditions changed and the fugitives could return home after a long 6-year gap. Mercifully, this eviction-game was limited only to the urban centers, like Kolkata, Durgapur etc. The next CM, Jyoti Basu of the CPI(M), prevented revenge taking by his party men, and the despicable phenomenon came to a stop. However, the Kerala CPI(M) is not so liberal-minded; its murder spree of the RSS workers over the last 4 decades is vicious and comparable to the pre-election murders of the BJP activists by the Trinamool. Article 356 was neither applied in Kerala, nor in West Bengal.

Mamata has gone two steps further than late Siddhartha Shankar Ray. First, she is ousting people not only from cities and towns, but also from the villages. Second, she is dislocating not only individual activists, but entire families. The process is 10 times more vicious. Yet the Central Government cannot apply Article 356, so soon after the Trinamool has won a landslide victory, for purely political reasons; there will be a howl from all over the world if it did. This is the price one pays for not being able to anticipate events and not taking the right action at the appropriate time. (Concluded)