Opinion Rule of violence
TMC-BJP clashes are a reminder that the players may change, but Bengal’s political culture remains the same.
A report in this paper drew attention to the grim fact of a three-fold increase in clashes between cadres of the TMC and the BJP in West Bengal. Though these are still much lower in number than incidents involving TMC and CPM workers, the trend is revealing in two ways. One, it underlines that Bengal’s verdict for “paribartan” hasn’t translated into a change of political culture. Parties of government and opposition have swapped places while politics continues to be conducted in the language of mob violence, with fear and coercion being the favoured instruments of mobilisation and party-building. No party in Bengal can plead innocence. Two, the increasing presence of BJP cadres in political clashes with the TMC is a reflection of the continuing marginalisation of the CPM, which hasn’t recovered from the drubbing it received in the 2011 assembly election. The BJP appears set to make the most of the decline of the Left — and the Congress — in its bid to grab the opposition space.
The TMC’s failure to usher in a new language of governance stems from its refusal to change the grammar of politics. The Left ran Bengal for three decades by controlling opinion and quashing dissent. With the party in command, institutions collapsed, public delivery systems failed and the much-needed private capital stayed away from the state. The rule of law became secondary to the rule of the party, blinding the Left government to local grievances over land acquisition in Nandigram and Singur, which ultimately caused its electoral meltdown. The TMC, now flush with the lumpen cadre who fled the CPM after electoral losses, seems only too eager to reproduce Left rule in Bengal in perhaps a more populist idiom.
The rise of the BJP in Bengal has been at the cost of the CPM. The latter must worry why many of its cadres schooled in “secular” politics are crossing over to the BJP in Bengal. With the CPM failing to challenge the BJP’s aggressive push, the TMC has emerged as the preferred party of Muslims in Bengal.
Marginalisation in Bengal will further diminish the CPM’s — and the Left’s — clout in national politics. In a country like India, the Left’s incapacity to hold up its end of the political field, can only be a troubling development.
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