Carnival and calamity: Bengal’s South-North fault line

As the clock struck 4 pm on October 5, West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee arrived at Kolkata’s iconic Indira Gandhi Sarani – still known as Red Road, although the boulevard was renamed in 1985. She inaugurated the annual Durga Puja carnival, standing on the podium for a couple of hours as award-winning idols of the goddess rolled past, heading towards Babu Ghat for immersion in the Hooghly. The spectacle — a medley of songs, dances and the beats of dhaks and dhols —showcased Bengal’s cultural heritage at its best.

When Mamata, joined by several film stars and cultural luminaries, was presiding over the grandiose ceremony marking the end of the Durga Puja festivities in the ‘City of Joy’, the rain-ravaged northern districts of West Bengal were grappling with grief. At least 20 people, including several children, had been confirmed dead after overnight thunderstorms and torrential rain on October 4 and 5 triggered multiple landslides in Darjeeling and Mirik. Overflowing rivers, swollen by rainwater and inflows gushing from neighbouring Bhutan and Sikkim, submerged vast swathes of land, cutting off roads and railway tracks.

Though the chief minister monitored the situation from the state secretariat since the early hours of October 5, she left Kolkata to visit the affected northern districts only the next day. The opposition Bharatiya Janata Party criticised the delay, alleging she stayed back to attend the Red Road carnival -- an annual event her Trinamool Congress government introduced in 2016. “This is yet another example of the TMC government’s stepmotherly approach to North Bengal,” said Suvendu Adhikari, Leader of the Opposition in the state Assembly. State BJP president Samik Bhattacharya echoed him, “North Bengal has only received neglect and deprivation during the TMC’s rule in the past 14 years.” 

With assembly elections just months away, the disaster in North Bengal, where death toll went up to 32 by October 7, has undoubtedly given the BJP an opportunity to whip up the discontent which stems from a deep-seated perception of socio-political and economic deprivation of the region. The saffron party has been trying to turn the region into a stronghold over the past few years and hence will, of course, seek to channel the anger of the distressed people against the ruling TMC.

North Bengal has 54 of the 294 assembly constituencies and eight of the 42 Lok Sabha constituencies of the state. Thirty-three of the 77 seats the BJP won in 2021 to emerge as the principal challenger to the TMC came from the region, which also gave the party half of the 12 seats it won in the 2024 parliamentary elections. The party had won seven Lok Sabha seats from the northern districts and 11 others from the rest of the state in 2019. The winning margins in several North Bengal parliamentary constituencies, where the BJP won, shrank in 2024.

A few weeks after the LS elections, then-state BJP chief Sukanta Majumdar suggested clubbing North Bengal’s eight districts with the Northeastern region. Majumdar, now Union Minister of State for the Development of the Northeastern Region, even sent a proposal to the Prime Minister’s Office, underlining that such a move would ensure that North Bengal would get a fair share of funds allocated for implementation of the central government’s schemes.

Nishikant Dubey, a BJP MP from Jharkhand, suggested that the border districts of Malda and Murshidabad in North Bengal should be turned into a Union Territory so that the central government could more effectively check illegal infiltration from neighbouring Bangladesh. Two MLAs and an MP of the BJP – all from North Bengal – made similar suggestions around the same time but were rebuffed by their colleagues within the party itself.

Ananta Maharaj, a Rajya Sabha member aligned with the BJP, argued that the demand for the Greater Cooch Behar state should be met first. Bishnu Prasad Sharma, a BJP MLA from Kurseong in Darjeeling, also opposed the demand for carving out a separate state or a UT. The BJP’s ally, the Gorkha National Liberation Front, reacted to the proposal mooted by Majumdar and Dubey by asking the saffron party to first clear its stand on the long-pending demand for a separate state of ‘Gorkhaland’.

The region’s ethnic communities fear that any move to separate North Bengal from the rest of West Bengal would undermine their respective struggles for autonomous homelands and the right to self-determination. The TMC, of course, called it an “evil plan” drawn up by the BJP for its vested political interests. Adhikari later clarified that the BJP never supported any proposal for the division of West Bengal. A resolution was also unanimously passed in the state assembly opposing any such move.

“The BJP is again resorting to the North Bengal versus South Bengal narrative, hoping to polarise people ahead of elections. Let us be clear: Bengal is one – emotionally, culturally, and politically,” Mamata, the TMC supremo, said recently, countering the saffron party’s criticism against her and her party’s government in the wake of the disaster in the region.

With its leaders themselves facing protests from people in the calamity-hit region, the BJP is likely to continue blaming the TMC for the lack of development in North Bengal, but the fear of a strong backlash from the Gorkhas and Koch-Rajbanshis in the region, as well as in South Bengal, will keep it from going overboard with the demand for a separate state or a UT.

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

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