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The fracas in West Bengal’s Malda district marks the opening shot in the campaign for the 2016 assembly election due this year. In the last election in 2011, Mamata Banerjee’s promise of poriborton (change) won her Trinamool Congress 184 out of 294 seats. Amidst complaints that very little has changed from the 34 years of Marxist rule, she is likely to face a serious challenge this time, especially from the BJP which won no seats in 2011 but managed to capture one in a 2014 by-election when its share of the vote in Malda increased by almost 15 per cent.
The speculation now is that forgetting its Hindutva plank for the moment, the BJP will pander to communal exclusiveness by fielding a raft of Muslim candidates. This suspicion of fishing in the troubled waters of sectarian politics may have prompted Banerjee to ensure that Surendrajeet Singh Ahluwalia, Bhupendra Yadav and Ram Vilas Vedanti, three BJP parliamentarians whom the party chief, Amit Shah, sent on a “fact-finding” mission, could not reach their destination, Kaliachak village, last Monday.
Kaliachak in the Muslim-dominated Sujapur area is where a mob of about 100,000 Muslims vandalised the police station on January 3, destroyed a Border Security Force jeep, set fire to several cars, attacked the block development office and ransacked a Hindu-majority locality. The imposition of Section 144 in Kaliachak meant the three BJP politicians had to take the train to Kolkata after cooling their heels for three hours in Malda station’s VIP lounge.
Shamik Bhattacharya, West Bengal’s lone BJP MLA, was not allowed to visit Kaliachak either. “We said we want to know the truth, we have not come here to instigate anybody.” Mr Ahluwalia, one of the party’s national vice-presidents, explained. “Our purpose was to restore the confidence of the people there.” Of the three BJP politicians, he alone can claim a West Bengal connection: he replaced Jaswant Singh as Lok Sabha member for Darjeeling.
In one respect Malda is Bengal in microcosm. Officially, 51 per cent of Malda’s population is Muslim. But given allegations of a constant illegal human traffic from adjoining Bangladesh, no one can be sure of the actual numbers. According to the 2011 census, 70.54 per cent of Bengal’s total population is Hindu, while Muslims — the second-largest community — comprise 27.01. The border district was the fief of the veteran Congress politician, A.B.A. Ghani Khan Chowdhury, for as long as he lived. The Trinamool won just one assembly seat out of Malda’s 12 in 2011. Since then, defections from the Congress and the Left Front have brought the TMC’s tally up to five. The Congress won two of Malda’s Lok Sabha seats in 2014.
The Election Commission recently urged the Centre to allow it to carry out a limited delimitation exercise in West Bengal to ensure that people who came to India after the India-Bangladesh exchange of enclaves enjoyed full voting rights. The updated voter list for 2016 published this month shows that West Bengal leads the rest of the country with a 0.68 elector-population ratio. The electoral roll lists 6.55 crore voters- 3.39 crore male and 3.16 crore female.
In the background is an alleged exchange of sexual allegations between an Uttar Pradesh cabinet minister and senior Samajwadi Party leader, Azam Khan, and the Akhil Bharatiya Hindu Mahasabha’s Kamlesh Tiwari. While Tiwari was arrested for making a hate speech and is behind bars at the time of writing, a gathering of about 100,000 Muslims in Muzaffarnagar in UP, is clamouring he should be put to death for insulting Prophet Mohammed. A Muslim organisation called Anjuman Ahle Sunnatul Jamaat organised the Malda protest.
Predictably, the BJP accuses Banerjee’s government of shielding the accused, complaining that only a handful of the people against whom charges were levelled have been arrested. Apparently, many of even those few were let off on bail within hours of being taken into custody. Given this political polarisation, it’s hardly surprising that Rajnath Singh’s request for a report from the West Bengal government on the eruption is interpreted in Kolkata as a party political provocation rather than a Union Home Ministry initiative. If Singh does visit West Bengal next Tuesday (January 18), he can be assured of the hostility of Trinamool cadres.
Predictably, too, the Chief Minister insists there was no communal dimension to the violence. She calls it a clash between locals and the BSF, a central force. There may be something in that for the porous Malda-Bangladesh border is a smuggler’s paradise that the state government has no wish to interfere with. Most locals are Muslims and Banerjee is keenly aware of the importance of their vote.
It is believed that Bengal’s Left Front might never have been ousted if it had not alienated Muslims in 2007 over the acquisition of 10,000 acres of land at a place called Nandigram where Buddhadev Bhattacharjee, the former Marxist chief minister, wanted a Special Economic Zone with a chemical hub operated by Indonesia’s Salim Group. Banerjee fully exploited the resultant pitched battle between at least 3,000 policemen supported by armed Marxist cadres and the Bhumi Uchhed Pratirodh Committee (Committee to Oppose Uprooting from Lands) of mainly Muslim peasants in which at least 14 people were killed.
Since then Banerjee has made ostentatious efforts to identify with Muslims. She invited ridicule by wearing a burkha and going through the motions – it can’t be more since she knows nothing of the language or Islamic prayers and, in any case, Muslim women don’t pray in public – of offering namaz. The Calcutta High Court struck down her decision to pay Rs 2,500 per month to more than 30,000 West Bengal madarsa imams and a monthly Rs 1,500 to over 15,000 mosque muezzins – which the BJP and other Opposition parties denounced as sheer bribery for minority community votes – but she is believed to have found a way round to make the payments through Wakf Boards.
Banerjee has had other problems in Malda. Angry hawkers were reported last May to have stoned and killed a Railway Protection Force (another central force) jawan and injured three other RPF personnel when they tried to clear the station platform of illegal vendors. While not exactly condoning the murder – which she described as “unfortunate” — the Chief Minister blamed the Centre for interfering in the state’s law and order situation. Railway hawkers, she said, live in poverty. Their eviction should be carefully planned and executed, and not in the abrupt manner the RPF had attempted. The Centre should have informed the state government about its hawker eviction exercise. It has to be borne in mind that while RPF personnel come from all over the country, railway platform hawkers are locals with votes that matter.
The RPF death is forgotten, as the communal violence will be. But there are bound to be more such clashes as the election draws nearer.
Clashes contrived to win an election | Free Press Journal
The speculation now is that forgetting its Hindutva plank for the moment, the BJP will pander to communal exclusiveness by fielding a raft of Muslim candidates. This suspicion of fishing in the troubled waters of sectarian politics may have prompted Banerjee to ensure that Surendrajeet Singh Ahluwalia, Bhupendra Yadav and Ram Vilas Vedanti, three BJP parliamentarians whom the party chief, Amit Shah, sent on a “fact-finding” mission, could not reach their destination, Kaliachak village, last Monday.
Kaliachak in the Muslim-dominated Sujapur area is where a mob of about 100,000 Muslims vandalised the police station on January 3, destroyed a Border Security Force jeep, set fire to several cars, attacked the block development office and ransacked a Hindu-majority locality. The imposition of Section 144 in Kaliachak meant the three BJP politicians had to take the train to Kolkata after cooling their heels for three hours in Malda station’s VIP lounge.
Shamik Bhattacharya, West Bengal’s lone BJP MLA, was not allowed to visit Kaliachak either. “We said we want to know the truth, we have not come here to instigate anybody.” Mr Ahluwalia, one of the party’s national vice-presidents, explained. “Our purpose was to restore the confidence of the people there.” Of the three BJP politicians, he alone can claim a West Bengal connection: he replaced Jaswant Singh as Lok Sabha member for Darjeeling.
In one respect Malda is Bengal in microcosm. Officially, 51 per cent of Malda’s population is Muslim. But given allegations of a constant illegal human traffic from adjoining Bangladesh, no one can be sure of the actual numbers. According to the 2011 census, 70.54 per cent of Bengal’s total population is Hindu, while Muslims — the second-largest community — comprise 27.01. The border district was the fief of the veteran Congress politician, A.B.A. Ghani Khan Chowdhury, for as long as he lived. The Trinamool won just one assembly seat out of Malda’s 12 in 2011. Since then, defections from the Congress and the Left Front have brought the TMC’s tally up to five. The Congress won two of Malda’s Lok Sabha seats in 2014.
The Election Commission recently urged the Centre to allow it to carry out a limited delimitation exercise in West Bengal to ensure that people who came to India after the India-Bangladesh exchange of enclaves enjoyed full voting rights. The updated voter list for 2016 published this month shows that West Bengal leads the rest of the country with a 0.68 elector-population ratio. The electoral roll lists 6.55 crore voters- 3.39 crore male and 3.16 crore female.
In the background is an alleged exchange of sexual allegations between an Uttar Pradesh cabinet minister and senior Samajwadi Party leader, Azam Khan, and the Akhil Bharatiya Hindu Mahasabha’s Kamlesh Tiwari. While Tiwari was arrested for making a hate speech and is behind bars at the time of writing, a gathering of about 100,000 Muslims in Muzaffarnagar in UP, is clamouring he should be put to death for insulting Prophet Mohammed. A Muslim organisation called Anjuman Ahle Sunnatul Jamaat organised the Malda protest.
Predictably, the BJP accuses Banerjee’s government of shielding the accused, complaining that only a handful of the people against whom charges were levelled have been arrested. Apparently, many of even those few were let off on bail within hours of being taken into custody. Given this political polarisation, it’s hardly surprising that Rajnath Singh’s request for a report from the West Bengal government on the eruption is interpreted in Kolkata as a party political provocation rather than a Union Home Ministry initiative. If Singh does visit West Bengal next Tuesday (January 18), he can be assured of the hostility of Trinamool cadres.
Predictably, too, the Chief Minister insists there was no communal dimension to the violence. She calls it a clash between locals and the BSF, a central force. There may be something in that for the porous Malda-Bangladesh border is a smuggler’s paradise that the state government has no wish to interfere with. Most locals are Muslims and Banerjee is keenly aware of the importance of their vote.
It is believed that Bengal’s Left Front might never have been ousted if it had not alienated Muslims in 2007 over the acquisition of 10,000 acres of land at a place called Nandigram where Buddhadev Bhattacharjee, the former Marxist chief minister, wanted a Special Economic Zone with a chemical hub operated by Indonesia’s Salim Group. Banerjee fully exploited the resultant pitched battle between at least 3,000 policemen supported by armed Marxist cadres and the Bhumi Uchhed Pratirodh Committee (Committee to Oppose Uprooting from Lands) of mainly Muslim peasants in which at least 14 people were killed.
Since then Banerjee has made ostentatious efforts to identify with Muslims. She invited ridicule by wearing a burkha and going through the motions – it can’t be more since she knows nothing of the language or Islamic prayers and, in any case, Muslim women don’t pray in public – of offering namaz. The Calcutta High Court struck down her decision to pay Rs 2,500 per month to more than 30,000 West Bengal madarsa imams and a monthly Rs 1,500 to over 15,000 mosque muezzins – which the BJP and other Opposition parties denounced as sheer bribery for minority community votes – but she is believed to have found a way round to make the payments through Wakf Boards.
Banerjee has had other problems in Malda. Angry hawkers were reported last May to have stoned and killed a Railway Protection Force (another central force) jawan and injured three other RPF personnel when they tried to clear the station platform of illegal vendors. While not exactly condoning the murder – which she described as “unfortunate” — the Chief Minister blamed the Centre for interfering in the state’s law and order situation. Railway hawkers, she said, live in poverty. Their eviction should be carefully planned and executed, and not in the abrupt manner the RPF had attempted. The Centre should have informed the state government about its hawker eviction exercise. It has to be borne in mind that while RPF personnel come from all over the country, railway platform hawkers are locals with votes that matter.
The RPF death is forgotten, as the communal violence will be. But there are bound to be more such clashes as the election draws nearer.
Clashes contrived to win an election | Free Press Journal
