Looks like the BJP has been quick to disappoint Bengalis, and it’s been barely two months since it came to power in West Bengal. If not the diehards then certainly the apologists, who thought voting in the BJP was the only way to show Mamata Banerjee’s Trinamool Congress (TMC) the way out.
The horrific gangrape and murder of a minor girl in the suburb of Baruipur, the alleged involvement of BJP local leaders and the initial police inaction have brought back memories of the R.G. Kar Medical College incident of August 2024. Except this time, one of the key accused, Prabhas Mandal, was killed in a police encounter.
Another divergence is this: unlike the R.G. Kar incident, Baruipur triggered no ‘Occupy the Night’ or candlelight vigil. Though for pro-TMC social media influencers, ‘R.G. Kar activism’ was a BJP- and CPM-backed political action to corner Mamata Banerjee. They point out that the R.G. Kar victim’s mother contested and won the Assembly election on a BJP ticket.
Aloke Biswas earns a living painting houses. “I used to vote for the TMC. This time I voted for the BJP, but now I feel I made a mistake,” he says. “All the corrupt leaders have now joined the BJP. After this Baruipur incident, I wonder how the BJP will run the state for five years.”
Close on the heels of the Baruipur incident came BJP state president Samik Bhattacharya’s inflammatory remarks on ‘Netaji’ Subhash Chandra Bose, a national hero and Bengal’s great pride. Speaking at an event to commemorate the birth anniversary of Syama Prasad Mookerjee — who founded the Bharatiya Jana Sangh, the political forerunner of the BJP —Bhattacharya recalled how Forward Bloc “goondas (thugs)” had thrown stones at Syama Prasad and injured him.
If the Forward Bloc, founded by Netaji Subhas Bose, was a party of goondas, what does that make Bose himself?
Bhattacharya also invoked Bose’s face-off with Syama Prasad in the run-up to the Calcutta Municipal Corporation elections of 1940, and then thought better than to go into that incident “as it could lead to controversies”.
In its desperate search for Bengali icons the party can more legitimately claim than it ever could Netaji, the BJP has been peddling the narrative that Syama Prasad singlehandedly ensured West Bengal remained part of India — by pushing for the partition of Bengal in 1947. But contrary to the BJP’s conception, most Bengalis see the Partition as a great tragedy and Syama Prasad as the villain who pushed for that outcome via his Bengali Hindu Homeland Movement.
The Netaji-bashing hasn’t gone down well, nor has the state government’s diktat to observe ‘Syama Prasad fortnight’ in schools — with proof of compliance.
A new violent street-sport for the party’s rowdies is egg-pelting — and even while MPs Abhishek Banerjee and Mahua Moitra were targeted, the state police stood by and gleefully watched the spectacle. This has become so routine that even the 73-year-old general-secretary of the Posta Bazaar Merchants’ Association, Bishwanath Agarwal, was not spared. Ironically, the association is dominated by Marwari traders, who are known to be close to the BJP.
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Describing a recent train journey to the port city of Haldia, 120 km southwest of Kolkata, the same Aloke Biswas quoted above, who wondered what the BJP might do to the state in five years, said: “I couldn’t even get a bottle of water as the hawkers have all been evicted. I do not know how these people will survive.”
“Bengal is ill at ease with the socio-political narrative the BJP is trying to foist on the state,” says a veteran journalist, preferring not to be named. “But the TMC lacks the wherewithal to strike back; it has neither the moral standing nor the ideological scaffolding to do so.”
TMC insiders say Mamata Banerjee decided not to go to Baruipur because the party couldn’t muster enough people to go with her. Instead, she went on a candle march in her own neighbourhood. “This is not the Mamata Banerjee of 2011, when a sea of people would join her every time she hit the streets,” the journo said.
Are the state Congress or the CPI(M) better placed to take on the BJP now that the TMC is out of power? The CPI(M) has at least marked its presence again, and its leader Meenakshi Mukherjee was also pelted with eggs, but it would be a stretch to read it as a sign that the BJP has begun to see the CPI(M) as the real opposition in the state.
The party hasn’t even recovered from the embarrassment of getting into bed with the BJP in 2019, seeing it as a means to the coveted end of getting rid of Mamata Banerjee and her TMC. This was the time when its ‘comrades’ started being called ‘Ram-rades’.
The slogan ‘aagey Ram, porey baam’ (first Ram, then Left) — the wishful rationale that once the TMC was removed, the political space would open up for the Left to reclaim its ground (porey baam) — must still echo in their ears.
The folly of that fantasy has begun to dawn on the CPI(M) leadership. They have begun to see that facilitating the rise of the Right in Bengal does not pave the way for a Left resurgence.
Let’s count that realisation as a new beginning.
Sourabh Sen is a Kolkata-based independent writer and commentator on politics, human rights and foreign affairs. More of his writing here
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