It is easy enough to see political parties measuring their responses to harvest the hostility and distrust that went up several notches with the outbreak of communal rioting over Ram Navami “Shobha Yatras” in pockets of Howrah and Hooghly districts. The inevitable blame game over who cast the first stone, trashed a parked vehicle and then set it on fire that followed has become the officially approved formula for the Bharatiya Janata Party on the one hand and the ruling Trinamool Congress on the other, with the Congress and the Communist Party of India Marxist-led Left parties delivering tired, scripted responses.
Even as some senior leaders of the BJP insert themselves into locally organised protests in the areas where tension is running high, as the state party chief Sukanta Majumdar and his predecessor Dilip Ghosh have done, there are others in the party who are finding it difficult to explain what happened and why the violence continues.
Like the invisible and menacing foreign hand, the outbreak of communal confrontation is being attributed by politically ambivalent local residents to “outsiders”, clearly with a vested interest in igniting trouble. The narrative has gained traction with even BJP leaders talking about “unknown faces” who penetrated the peaceful shobha yatras of local Ram Bhakts chanting “Jai Shri Ram” like a “war cry”, while aggressively brandishing swords, and unverified viral video clips of guns.
The unidentifiable outsider as agent provocateur is a convenient presence for all political parties. It allows the Trinamool Congress as the dominant ruling party to reiterate that the politics of hate and hostility have been imported into West Bengal to wreck the tradition of communal harmony. It allows the BJP to distance itself from the aggressive presence of sword-wielding persons in its procession. It excuses the police for its professional failure to maintain peace and order in what has become, since 2016, a routine by various affiliates of the BJP during Ram Navami.
For the state government and its embattled chief minister, Mamata Banerjee, the outsider, this time, is a problem. The probability of infiltration by outsiders ought to have been estimated by the police and there should have been some preparedness to deal with trouble makers. If there was no such anticipation it reveals the decline in the professionalism of a police force that was reputedly adept at containing communal tensions and rapidly restoring order. As stories circulate of police personnel cowering when the stones rained down or being absent when vehicles were destroyed followed by arson, the narrative of a Trinamool Congress regime losing control over the coercive machinery of the state is picking up momentum.
The calculated communalisation of politics in West Bengal is new, but it is not unfamiliar. Howrah has been a favourite stamping ground for arms-wielding processions organised by affiliates of the Sangh Parivar. Politically conscious Bengalis were apprehensive about how the Ram Navami celebrations during Ramzan would pan out. The state government must have anticipated trouble. The question is, why then did the rioting spread to Hooghly? And that too, into the industrial belt, where maintaining communal peace is an imperative, as Hindus, Muslims and other minorities live in congested localities.
Describing the spreading violence as a natural outcome of the “clash of civilisations” is as dangerously irresponsible as it is deliberately malevolent. There is nothing natural about communal violence that continues and spreads. One outbreak on one day that is emphatically not murderous violence does not grow and sneak into other areas on its own, unless there is a will to keep the communal fire burning.
By appealing to the Hindu majority to protect the Muslim minority as Mamata Banerjee did on Monday, anticipating that there would be more trouble around April 6 when Hanuman Jayanti is celebrated, is chanting an old mantra to ward off an entirely new evil. It has not worked, as pockets in Rishra in Hooghly continue to burn on Tuesday. A decade ago this would have been an adequate message from a strong chief minister to political and community leaders to maintain order and restore normalcy. It is no longer so.
The clash of competing ideologies, majoritarian Hindutva in aggressive mode versus passive secular values, playing out in pockets of Howrah and Hooghly is an indication that the 75 years of politically enforced equilibrium between communities is ending. It is cancelled by the BJP’s dogged push to establish itself as the alternative to the Trinamool Congress in West Bengal.
The controlled but continuing violence in Howrah and Hooghly delivers specific messages to voters in rural Bengal where panchayat elections are due soon. It can be read as an appeal for consolidation of Hindu votes by the BJP campaign that the majority is unsafe and threatened in West Bengal, more so because the Trinamool Congress is shaky about its support from Muslim voters. It can be interpreted as an appeal to tolerant Hindus to support the Trinamool Congress or face the consequences of a manufactured volatility in the social equation. It can also be understood as a caution to Bengali-speaking Muslim voters that their best interests are protected by the Trinamool Congress.
Amassing votes in the panchayat elections by stirring up Hindu nationalism as a bulwark against Muslim appeasement is a cynical calculation that simplifies the causes of growing mass discontent as economic hardships multiply and fears of more crises and greater uncertainty rise. It helps the incumbent regimes, in the state and at the Centre, to temporarily dodge responsibility for failure.
The writer is a senior journalist based in Kolkata
