Opinion Secular TMC vs communal BJP — the Bengali voter is trapped in a political binary. It is time to move on
Identity politics, historical anxieties and the absence of a credible third space have frozen Bengal’s political imagination. It leaves Bengal without political exits
The Left parties, along with the Congress, have miserably failed to transcend this and create an alternative space For centuries, Bengal’s culture and politics have been steeped in binaries — despite its presumptive intellectual supremacy, the place for the “transcendental” has been limited. Take football clubs, for instance: It’s either East Bengal or Mohun Bagan; other clubs rarely pop up in popular discussions. In debates over fish, the conflict revolves around hilsa and prawn; over identity, it is Bangal versus ghoti, and many more. This is not to claim that there is no liminal space, but that its scope is constrained. The state’s politics also reflect these binaries, hardly leaving space for alternatives.
The recent instance of Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee intervening in an Enforcement Directorate raid on the political consulting agency I-PAC, and the subsequent confusion over whether it should be read as federal resistance or administrative interference to safeguard the corrupt, reflects a larger political contradiction, produced out of the binaries that determine Bengal’s political landscape.
Since 2011, when the TMC came to power, ending the Left Front’s 34-year rule, the party has faced widespread corruption allegations. From Saradha, Narada to the teacher recruitment scam, the TMC’s track record has been anything but clean. The only narrative that helped the party return to power in 2021 and increase its seat tally in the 2024 Lok Sabha elections was the question of “Bengali” identity. Its political campaign after the 2019 Lok Sabha elections weaponised the insider-outsider binary, the Bengali-non-Bengali conflict, and the imagination of a homogenous Bengali community that is propped up against the communal politics of north Indian parties.
These narratives appear to thrive on three historical anxieties. First, students in Bengal schools learn a single unnuanced narrative: When Siraj-ud-Daulah, the nawab of Murshidabad, lost the battle of Plassey due to Mir Jafar’s betrayal, Bengal lost its independence and paved the way for the British Raj. In this lack of complexity, what gets lost is Siraj’s indecisive tenure, nepotism and arrogance that affected the people of undivided Bengal. However, beyond Siraj’s heroism, as celebrated by the anti-colonial historians, and his “autocracy” and “despotism”, as upheld by British officials’ saviour approach, there was a realpolitik that made Mir Jafar use the East India Company to take over the throne.
The image of colonising outsiders making inroads due to a betrayer continues to resonate with Bengalis. Banerjee’s repeated invocation of “outsiders” to refer to the BJP leaders shows how this binary is played out.
Second, the Bengali-non-Bengali binary has both an economic and a political root that has been overlooked. During the early days of the British Raj, with Calcutta as the capital, there was a wave of English education in the city. European rationality and what the West called modern education shaped the Bengal Renaissance. Apart from producing an upper-caste English-educated elite bhadralok class, such socio-cultural churn also led to the formation of a “clerk” class, more precisely, a clerk mentality. This section was happy in its comfortable cocoon of 9 to 5 jobs at Company offices or other private enterprises. Scientist Prafulla Chandra Ray criticised this mentality and asked Bengalis to start businesses, a very early call for entrepreneurship, from a person who founded Bengal Chemicals and Pharmaceuticals. But Bengali bhadraloks, basking in cultural pride, barely paid heed to this advice and continued serving at the offices owned by “non-Bengalis”, mostly “Marwaris”, even after Independence. In a state where industrial growth has almost stalled since the jute-mill days, the flow of labourers from UP and Bihar also leads to competition over limited resources. Instead of locating the binary between Hindus and Muslims like the BJP, the TMC has chosen to frame the class anxiety between Bengalis and “non-Bengali” migrants in cultural terms.
Third, the memory of Partition and the Bangladesh war that the BJP seems to be playing on to invoke communal sentiment among Bengali Hindus, with the “Bengali Muslims are Bangladeshi” narrative at the Centre, is another historic anxiety that is helping the TMC. Though the sentiment of being uprooted from their Bhita-maati (land and home) undoubtedly played a strong role in the consolidation of Bengali Hindus across refugee camps on Jessore road, instances of “our Muslim neighbour helped us escape a mob” were also galore. Besides, communist politics and the resultant “political society”, as political scientist Partha Chatterjee explains it, paved the way for secular cohabitation in urban clusters. This notion of secular politics has given Banerjee an edge over the BJP’s politics of memory and Partition anxiety.
All these have trapped the Bengali voter into another political binary: A secular TMC versus communal BJP rhetoric; regionalism versus religious politics. The Left parties, along with the Congress, have miserably failed to transcend this and create an alternative space. As a result, Bengal’s future is caught up in this confusion. Unless Bengalis learn to break free of this binary, the state risks remaining trapped in a political loop that repeats old ideals without offering new futures.
The writer is senior assistant editor, The Indian Express. abhik.bhattacharya@expressindia,com
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