Bengal Muslims on the cusp of change and hopelessness

It was a typical afternoon scene on Jannagar Road in Kolkata’s Muslim-dominated district of Park Circus. Over an open fire in the narrow and noisy lane, a man in a soiled singlet and a chequered lungi cooked a greasy mutton korma for the restaurant packed with men in similar attire.

Children, naked or in rags, who should have been in school, darted back and forth across the lane, playing with a yellow plastic ball as their mothers, some clad in burqas, screamed obscenities at them.

“This has how it has been for the past 25 years,” said Mahnaz Warsi, president of Prem-e-Asha, an NGO, motioning to the lane. Her NGO tries to provide basic education to orphaned or abandoned Muslim children of Jannagar Road, Beniapukur Road and other areas in Park Circus. “Nothing has changed. Not even the blaring of the microphones over which the maulanas herald the prayers and also exhort people to vote for the party which will best take care of Muslims’ interests,” Warsi said.

Suddenly, there is a commotion. Columns of men and women holding the red CPM flag file past her office shouting “Inquilab zindabad,” in support of the party’s candidate from Ballygunge constituency, Fuwad Halim, son of former West Bengal Assembly speaker Hashim Abdul Halim.

The procession was headed to join Chief Minister Buddhadev Bhattacharya’s “road show” in Jadavpur constituency.

“For the past two years I must have filled in at least 250 applications on behalf of children who were long promised an annual scholarship of Rs 1,000 per head by the Left government. None of them have received that amount yet,” Warsi said.

The Left Front in general and the CPM in particular have traditionally enjoyed the support of the Muslim voters in Kolkata. But all that changed  after March 14, 2007, when 14 persons were killed in police firing in Na.

“After the Communists came to power in 1977, they distributed land among the Muslims, but no pattas (deed) were given. Now they wanted it back for industry, even though they know that land is our only source of livelihood,” Sheikh Manirul Islam of Garh Chakraberia, who lost his son in the police firing four years ago, said. He is also the husband of Nandigram’s TMC MLA Phiroja Bibi.

Political analysts and even senior CPM stalwarts admit that more than the Nandigram episode, it was the 2008 publication of the Rajinder Sachar committee report, which mapped the socio-economic condition of Muslims across the country, which blew the lid off the abysmal and pitiable condition of minority community members in the state, that will hurt the Left most in West Bengal.

According to Abusaleh Shariff, Chief Economist at the National Council of Applied Economic Research (NCAER),  the poor condition of the Muslims is at all levels – educational, the loans they get from public sector banks, implementation of development schemes in minority concentrated districts or representation in state government.