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Amit Shah in Bengal: Spite does not win hearts

Trashing Bengali pride is not the best way for the BJP to win the hearts and minds of voters
Last Updated 09 May 2022, 08:46 IST

The recently concluded tour of Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) mastermind Amit Shah was a 'combo' exercise in 'killing it' in West Bengal. His agenda was to make inroads into Mamata Banerjee's bastion and kickstart the battle of votes for the 2024 Lok Sabha elections, after his strategy and Narendra Modi's performance failed in 2021.

Shah did just about everything he could think of to revive a connection that has virtually died, from demanding a Central Bureau of Investigation probe into an alleged murder/suicide by a BJP worker in Cossipore, north of Kolkata, to declaring that the unlamented Citizenship Amendment Act will be resurrected from the morgue in which it is currently stored. His efforts did not cut much ice.

There is a reason for the BJP's frustration and Shah and Narendra Modi's failure. The party and the leaders are clueless about Bengali pride. To make itself even less endearing, the Modi regime has hit upon a perfect target; Bengal's pride about its place in the history of India's freedom struggle.

In a vivid description of the late afternoon of March 29, 1857, at Barrackpore, 19 miles away from Kolkata, historian Rudranghsu Mukherjee recounts the events that ignited India's first war of independence, labelled as the Sepoy Mutiny by colonial historians. The BJP knows better because it knows different.

In an astonishing piece of fiction crafted to fit the BJP's narrative, the location of the origins of the 1857 uprising has shifted - from Barrackpore near Kolkata to Meerut in Western Uttar Pradesh. In the New India Samachar, published by the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, headed by Anurag Thakur of "goli maaro" (shoot them) fame, the story of India's freedom struggle has undergone a metamorphosis. The start of the "mutiny" is no longer March 29, 1857, at Barrackpore but May 31, 1857, at Meerut.

In rewriting history, the Modi regime has once again moved Mangal Pandey "away from history into myth." The change of date and place may endear the BJP to voters in UP, but it will rile the proud Bengalis.

For all people resident in West Bengal, nationalism is pride in the long history of anti-imperialism. Bengalis trace their fervour in battling imperialism from the Battle of Plassey in 1757, a full 100 years before the timeline drawn up by Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, also known reverentially as Veer Savarkar by the BJP and the Sangh Parivar and frequently quoted by Modi for describing the Sepoy Mutiny as India's "War of Independence" in a pamphlet published in 1909. To wipe out the Bengal connection to the armed wars against British imperialism is to strike at the fundamentals of what maketh the Bengali.

The weaponisation of history, mythology, and fiction by the BJP is integral to its construction of Hindutva and the politics of purity and pride. This line did not sell very well in the West Bengal elections that the BJP lost. Baffling as it may be, Bengali pride is wrapped up in a profound conviction that its culture and contribution to modernising India places it in an entirely different place, far above and beyond the reach of obscurantist hate-mongering politics of divisive, toxic communalism.

By altering the place and date of the trigger that unleashed India's first war of independence, the Modi government seems to have decided that it will work actively to undermine the Bengali connection and contribution to the struggle for freedom. If this is punishment for the folly of rejecting the BJP in the May 2021 elections and voting for the return of Mamata Banerjee for the third term with a spectacular majority, then the BJP is being both peevish and pernicious. Cutting Bengal out of the anti-imperialist fight is like cutting off the nose to spite the face.

Generations of Indians have learnt that the "Mutiny" began in Barrackpore because the Enfield Rifles used cartridges that were greased with tallow, a substance that was deemed "unclean." The cartridges were known as Dum Dum bullets because they were made at the munitions factory in Dum Dum. Cutting it out by putting Meerut in its place means the Modi regime is consigning Mangal Pandey to the BJP's dustbin of inconvenient history. It also means that the Mangal Pandey Park and Memorial and the tree from which he was allegedly hanged will cease to be significant, at least in the BJP's version of things.

Trashing Bengali pride is not the best way for the BJP to win the hearts and minds of the voters. Plodding down the same old path of attacking Mamata Banerjee as the fountainhead of all evil, from violence and death of opponents to protector of illegal Muslim immigrants to win elections, Shah is doing no good for the BJP in West Bengal.

One year after the May 2021 elections, Mamata Banerjee has effectively stormed her way into national politics as an opposition leader and a charismatic presence who can challenge the Modi brand, regardless of her problems with the Trinamool Congress party apparatus and the nexus between grassroots leaders and the state administration, including police, that is making life almost unliveable for locals trapped in the crossfire.

The BJP is as unable to resolve its internecine fights as the Trinamool Congress in West Bengal. That Shah, on his overnight trip to the state, did not attempt to address it directly is an indication that the BJP does not know how to solve the problem, just as Mamata Banerjee does not know how to create a mechanism in her party to discipline the unruly and the unholy, who have combined forces to undermine her authority as the party's leader and the state's chief minister.

West Bengal will be an important battle for the BJP in 2024. It seems to have calculated that it needs the 18 seats it won from the state in the 2019 Lok Sabha elections. For Mamata Banerjee, ejecting the BJP from those 18 seats out of the total of 42 Lok Sabha seats in West Bengal is crucial. Her claim to lead an opposition collective of anti-BJP parties, with or without the Congress, hinges on winning most of the 42 seats.

West Bengal ranks number three in the list of states in terms of Lok Sabha seats, after Uttar Pradesh and Maharashtra. Banerjee needs a huge win in her home state to become the unchallenged leader of a post-election alliance in 2024. Despite her problems with tackling the autonomously functioning factions within her party and getting the police and the administration to maintain a semblance of neutrality and independence from political influencers, in a fight against the BJP, Mamata Banerjee is still a winner in West Bengal. However annoying this may be for a BJP buoyed by its win in Uttar Pradesh and expecting that its hijab-Ram Navami-azaan over microphones-temple politics will deliver the outcomes it needs to establish its ideological Hindutva hegemony over India, the party is clueless when it comes to West Bengal. The formula it uses to inspire Hindus elsewhere into succumbing to the seduction of majoritarian politics does not attract the Bengali voter in the same way.

The disconnect is that the BJP's construction of nationalism and nationalist history fails to give sufficient respect to Bengal's place, contribution and interpretation of nationalism as a struggle against imperialism and autocracy, regardless of how authoritarian Mamata Banerjee may be in her style of governance. What is forgivable in a Bengali is unforgivable in an outsider, which is how the BJP continues to the perceived in the state it so desperately wants to win.

(The writer is a senior journalist based in Kolkata)

Disclaimer: The views expressed above are the author's own. They do not necessarily reflect the views of DH.

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(Published 09 May 2022, 08:46 IST)

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