It is worrying that West Bengal’s political class remained tactical spectators to the Kolkata rally organised by Muslim groups in support of Bangladeshi war criminals
West Bengal looked to the Shahbag protests in Dhaka with
hope. In 1971, a massive relief and solidarity effort was undertaken in
West Bengal for the millions trying to escape a veritable genocide. The
then leaders of the Jamaat-e-Islami in East Bengal and its students
wing organised murder and rape squads in collaboration with the
Pakistani forces. Their crimes included mass murder, rape as a weapon of
war, arson and forced conversions. Post-1975, generals used them to
cast an Islamic veneer of legitimacy over their illegal capture of
power. Their immunity lasted until the present Bangladesh government
restarted the legal proceedings in the War Crimes tribunal. The Shahbag
protests demanded maximum punishment for the guilty.
Shocking
In
West Bengal, a few meetings have happened around Shahbag, mostly
expressing support. But, shockingly, the largest was a massive rally
held in Kolkata on March 30, explicitly against the Shahbag protests and
in support of the war criminals already convicted. Various Muslim
groups, including the All Bengal Minority Council, the All Bengal
Minority Youth Federation, the Madrassa Students Union, the Muslim Think
Tank and the All Bengal Imam Muazzin Association, organised the rally.
People arrived in buses from distant districts of Murshidabad and Nadia,
as well as from neighbouring districts. Students of madrassas and the
new Aliah Madrassa University were conspicuous at the gathering.
The
old rallying cry, “Islam is in danger in Bangladesh,” was heard. We
heard a similar cry in 1952 during the mother-language movement, in 1954
when Fazlul Haq and Maulana Bhashani challenged the Muslim League, in
1969 when the Awami League made its six demands and during the 1971
liberation struggle — basically during every secular movement for rights
and justice. The rally thundered that West Bengal would be “cleansed”
of supporters of war crimes trial and the present Prime Minister of
Bangladesh. They promised that political forces supporting Shahbag would
be “beaten with broom-sticks” if they came asking for Muslim votes.
Like Taslima Nasreen and Salman Rushdie, Sheikh Hasina would not be
allowed inside Kolkata. They expressed solidarity with the anti-Shahbag
“movement” in Bangladesh. This assertion is worrisome, as the
anti-Shahbag forces in Bangladesh have initiated a wave of violent
attacks on Hindus, Buddhists and secular individuals, and the
destruction of Hindu and Buddhist homes, businesses and places of
worship. Amnesty International documented attacks on over 40 Hindu
temples as of March 6. That number has increased.
This
large gathering and its pronouncements have been in the making. A
collapse in the Muslim vote was important in the Left Front’s demise.
Muslim divines regularly remind the present government of this. The
Trinamool Congress wants to ensure a continued slice of this vote. In an
unprecedented move, the government handed out monthly stipends to imams and muezzins
to build a class of Muslim “community leaders” who eat out of its hand.
The debt-ridden, vision-deficient government is unable to solve the
problems that are common to the poor. It has wooed a section of the
marginalised on the basis of religion by selective handouts. These are
excellent as speech-making points masquerading as empathy. This also
gives fillip to forces whose trajectories are not under usual political
control.
The Left Front’s political fortune
stagnated after 2011. It has cynically chosen not to strongly oppose
this communal turn. Waiting for the incumbent to falter is its roadmap
to power. The damage this is doing to the West Bengal’s political
culture is possibly irreparable. The incumbent’s connivance and the
opposition’s silence are due to the long-eroded tradition of democratic
political contestation through grassroots mobilisation. Both deal with
West Bengal’s sizeable minority population primarily via intermediaries,
doing away with any pretence of ideology in the transactions.
Politics of blackmail
Organisations
inspired by political Islam have used this disconnect to the hilt to
blackmail the government. An emerging bloc of divines, and former and
present student leaders have used students and youths as storm troopers
at short notice. Sadly, they are unconcerned about life and livelihood
issues of Muslims. With assistance from the Left Front regime, they
drove out the persecuted humanist writer, Taslima Nasreen. The extent of
their clout as blackmailers was evident from the government’s
pro-activeness in keeping Salman Rushdie out of Kolkata, after his visit
to Bangalore, New Delhi and Mumbai. This pushing of the envelope fits
into a sequence of events that is increasingly stifling the freedom of
expression. The double-standards are clear.
On March
21, a group of small magazine publishers, human rights workers, theatre
artists and peace activists were disallowed from marching to the Deputy
High Commission of Bangladesh to express their support to the
war-crimes trial efforts. The police had “orders;” some marchers were
detained. A month earlier, the same police provided security cover to an
anti-Shahbag march and later to the marchers when they submitted a
memorandum to the Deputy High Commission demanding the acquittal of
convicted war criminals. Last year, public libraries were directed to
stock a sectarian daily even before its first issue was published! The
State thinks that it can play this brinksmanship game with finesse. When
the political class acts as tactical facilitators or tactical
spectators to apologists of one the largest mass-murders ever, the
demise of Kolkata as a centre of culture is a natural corollary. A
combination of circumstances can cause an uncontrollable unravelling.
Bengal’s experience with sectarian politics is distinctly bitter.
The
bye-election to Jangipur, a Muslim-majority Lok Sabha constituency, saw
the combined vote of the two main parties fall from 95 per cent in 2009
to 78 per cent in 2012. The beneficiaries were the Welfare Party of
India, a thinly-veiled front organisation of the Jamaat-e-Islami Hind,
and the Social Democratic Party of India, a similar group. “Tactical
pluralism” is their game, a concept quite akin to the tactical defence
of Taslima’s freedom of speech by Hindu communal political forces. The
rally in support of war criminals has exposed this faux pluralism.
There
was another significant beneficiary in the same election — the
Bharatiya Janata Party. Communal tension has been rising, with serious
disturbances in Deganga and Canning. Sensing a subterranean
polarisation, the majoritarian forces see an opportunity. Mouthing
banalities about Bengal’s “intrinsically” plural culture is useless.
Culture is a living entity, recreated every moment. It is being
recreated by the victimisation discourse by fringe groups like Hindu
Samhati and in certain religious congregations where unalloyed poison
produced by divines like Tarek Monawar Hossain from Bangladesh is played
on loud-speakers. Thanks to technology, vitriol produced in a milieu of
free-style majoritarian muscle-flexing in Bangladesh reaches West
Bengal easily. Hence the popularity of one of the convicted war
criminals, Delwar Hossain Sayedee, who in his post-1971 avatar had
become a superstar in the Bengali waz-mahfil circuit.
What
are the effects of cultural exchange of this kind? The rally is a clue.
A defence of Sayedee and the claim that he is innocent, made repeatedly
in the rally, are like perpetrating Holocaust-denial.
A
day after the anti-Shahbag rally in Kolkata, almost as a divine
reminder of starker realities beyond the defence of Islam, nearly 45
lakh unemployed youth, Hindus and Muslims, sat for the primary school
teachers’ recruitment examination for 35,000 posts. Clearly, the
‘minority’ employment exchange set up by the incumbents has failed. West
Bengal has petitioned the Centre for a relaxation of the minimum
qualifications for primary school teachers. The promotion of religious
education is hardly the way to empowerment and livelihood generation for
the minorities in a State where they have been grossly
under-represented in all white-collar services. There are no short-cut
solutions.
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