Political violence breeds retaliatory strikes, heightening acrimonious tension and creating a miasma of fear. West Bengal, incubator of a blood-soaked political culture, has entered another sanguinary cycle.
Eyes set on next year’s assembly polls, TMC and BJP draw swords in a gathering mass of political violence in Bengal
Political violence breeds retaliatory strikes, heightening acrimonious tension and creating a miasma of fear. West Bengal, incubator of a blood-soaked political culture, has entered another sanguinary cycle.
Within three days of the murder of Manish Shukla, a Bharatiya Janata Party leader and a close aide of its Barrackpore BJP MP Arjun Singh, the state police increased the security of Partha Bhowmik, a Trinamool Congress MLA from Naihati, an assembly segment within the Barrackpore Lok Sabha constituency. The state administration fears that Bhowmik, who has played a leading role in recovering ground lost to the BJP in Barrackpore when Arjun Singh switched over from the TMC and won on a BJP ticket, could be a marked man. The Bengal CID has arrested three persons for Shukla’s death and suspect personal rivalry to be the motive; the BJP has alleged it was a political murder “jointly planned and executed by the TMC and the police”.
On October 12, two BJP state unit vice presidents, Biswapriya Roy Chowdhury and Arjun Singh, addressed a press meet in Calcutta to protest a ‘bomb attack’ on the vehicle of the party’s Murshidabad district unit president on October 10. It came four days after senior BJP leader and former MLA Samik Bhattacharya’s car was vandalised, allegedly by TMC workers, in South 24 Parganas district.
“Now, we will…also retaliate,” Roy Chowdhury warned. “In Kerala, when RSS and BJP workers were being killed (by Marxists), they decided to retaliate. They targeted four people for every RSS and BJP worker killed. We will follow the same model if a proper investigation is not conducted into the incident (in Murshidabad) and the guilty are not arrested.” State food minister Jyoti Priya Mallick countered, “The BJP is responsible for the violence. They are bringing in criminals from other states.”
With assembly elections about half a year away, political observers note the telltale signs of the start of a violent phase. “The vortex of violence has started. It will intensify in the days to come,” says psephologist Biswanath Chakraborty. The season opened when 13 people from the TMC and the BJP died in alleged political clashes in July, August and September. The BJP has claimed seven as its own, while the TMC alleged the killing of five of its workers.
Chakraborty also fears a spike in communal riots due to an intensification of identity politics. A “complete politicisation of the administration”, he fears, may prevent it from effectively dealing with the violence. “This year, I fear violence at an unprecedented level as the ruling party and the principal opponent both regard it as a do-or-die battle. The political turf war is largely over the scope for illegal income in which a section of Bengal’s ruling party leaders have become habituated over the past decade,” he says.
Concomitant with the violence is the mutual blaming. According to BJP state president Dilip Ghosh, the party has lost 115 workers to political violence perpetrated by the TMC since 2014. TMC’s Firhad Hakim, the state urban development minister, alleges that the party lost more grassroots leaders to BJP-engineered violence. However, there is no way to independently ascertain the actual number of deceased, as any death by violence of a victim with political affiliation is attributed to political rivals.
Over the past two years, two MLAs have been killed—the TMC’s Satyajit Biswas in Nadia district in February 2019 and the Left-turned-BJP MLA Debendranath Roy in North Dinajpur district in July 2020. Besides, several TMC and BJP leaders have received VIP security cover due to threat perceptions since 2018—TMC leaders are protected by the state police, BJP leaders by central paramilitary forces. For example, in the Diamond Harbour sub-division of South 24-Parganas, a district known for political violence, apart from local MLAs, TMC youth wing presidents of four block areas enjoy Y+ security (two armed guards round-the-clock) from the state government, while the BJP’s outgoing district unit president Abhijit Das is protected by central security. Diamond Harbour Lok Sabha is represented by Abhishek Banerjee, Mamata Banerjee’s nephew and heir apparent. He has Z+ security cover. Significantly, almost every TMC leader across West Bengal who joined the BJP has security provided by the Centre.
Violence has been an inherent part of Bengal’s political gene. In the early 20th century, secret revolutionary societies like Anushilan Samiti and Jugantar Dal struck at the British administration, spreading consternation. Bengal, along with Punjab, was one of the centres of the botched armed forces insurrection plan of 1915. Use of revolutionary terrorism to undermine British rule went on till the ’30s. Even mainstream Congress leaders weren’t loath to use strong-arm tactics. Balraj Madhok’s account of Hindu Mahasabha leader Syama Prasad Mookerjee’s political life claims that Subhas Chandra Bose’s supporters used to attack and vandalise Mookerjee’s meeting venues during the 1940s. The rise of the communist movement since the ’40s also fostered the continuing use of violence.
At the end of the 1960s, the state was the main battleground of the Naxalite attempt to overthrow the Indian State through armed insurrection, leading to massive socio-economic upheaval at a tremendous human cost. Calcutta is perhaps lone the Indian metropolis to have witnessed urban guerrilla warfare during 1970-71.
While the Congress rule of 1972-77 has been infamous for administrative highhandedness and political violence, the latter half of the Left Front’s 34-year tenure since 1977 had also been marred by bloodletting, especially since the birth of the TMC in 1998. In turn, Mamata Banerjee’s party has frequently faced the charge of unleashing political violence on opponents.
“There was hardly any election in recent memory, be it panchayat, municipality, assembly or Lok Sabha, that has been free from violence in the run-up to, duration and aftermath,” says political analyst Amal Kumar Mukhopadhyay. “However, TMC adopted an entirely undemocratic way since coming to power in its bid to wipe out the opposition.”
The recent convulsions started in 2018, ahead of the panchayat elections, when the TMC called upon its workers to ensure opposition-free panchayats. It was in that election that the BJP emerged as the TMC’s principal opponent, a position it cemented after the 2019 Lok Sabha election by bagging 18 of the state’s 42 Lok Sabha seats, as against the TMC’s 22. The LS results predicted a close contest between the TMC and the BJP in 2021, as the latter led in 128 of the state’s 294 assembly constituencies, while trailing the TMC’s voteshare of 43 per cent by only three points.
In July this year, amid darkening clouds of unrest, Ghosh had concocted—and later dropped it when a section of the BJP objected—the slogan bodol hobe, bodlao hobey (‘there will be change and revenge’), clearly replying to the 2011 TMC slogan bodla noy, bodol chai (‘no revenge, we want only change’). “We are maintaining a list of perpetrators of violence. They will get their due after the government falls,” Ghosh has been telling public gatherings over the past two months. The seeds of future bloodshed are already sown.
By Snigdhendu Bhattacharya in Calcutta