Communalism: Who is breeding it - Secularists or Communalists? The following editorial in the Economic & Political Weekly, under the captionDangerous Games - The resistable rise of communalism in West Bengal might help one to understand it. EDITORIAL: EPW, november 15, 2014 vol xlix no 46, 9. West Bengal has not lent itself to communal polarisation or violence for a long time. However, the past few years have seen a visible communalisa- tion of politics and the public sphere in West Bengal, helped in equal mea- sure by a short-sighted pandering to Muslim fundamentalism by the Trina- mool Congress (TMC) and the inability of the Left Front to rediscover its class-based politics. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has used the oppo- rtunity given to it to catalyse a communalisation of politics in the state. West Bengal is among the few states in the country where the BJP has not yet secured a substantive foothold. It has always been an uphill task for the party to break into Bengal, largely due to the radical class-based politics which has dominated the state. But Prime Minister Narendra Modis campaign in the run-up to the general elections pointed to a deliberate strategy of communal mobilisation by his party. And the TMCs myopic approach to the problems of the Muslim community has given the BJP the opening it has always sought. The Rajinder Sachar Committee had pointed out, in 2005, that the Muslims of West Bengal had poor levels of employment, education and health, and had very limited representation in government jobs. This was a stinging indictment of the incumbent Left Front’s track record over the previous three decades. Recent surveys indicate that little has changed in almost a decade since. It was the sustained neglect by the Left Front of this backwardness and discrimination faced by West Bengal’s Muslims which gave political space to the TMC to gain their support with promises of redress. However,rather than building on the few progressive steps taken by the Left Front in its last years – reservations in education and employment, provision of formal credit, and larger state funding to minority-strong districts – the TMC government focused almost entirely on religious symbolism. The TMC government has provided monthly honoraria to religious heads such as imams and muezzins. It has also included virtually all sections of Muslims under the category of Other Backward Classes. The party itself has provided leadership positions to fundamentalists and its state govern- ment has shown deliberate laxity in tackling extremist and fundamentalist outfits such as the Bangladesh-based Jamaat-ul-Mujahideen Bangladesh (JMB). The bomb blasts in Bardhaman district on 2 October point to the presence of such groups from Bangladesh who have found refuge in the state and are using the space provided to extremists in West Bengal to organise attacks on the Awami League government in that country. For some time now the Government of Bangladesh has been requesting the Government of India to clamp down on the JMB which was responsi- ble for a series of blasts and violent actions in that country in the mid-2000s. The TMC government, however, chose to ignore the requests and it required the central government to intervene. The Bangladesh govern- ment is also investigating the alleged transfer of funds from the Saradha chit funds through Trinamool leaders to Muslim fundamentalist groups in that country. Political opportunism combined with administrative negligence has created a communally volatile situation in West Bengal. The BJP has played up the Trinamool’s “appeasement” of Muslims and has opposed any mea- sure to address their socio-economic backwardness. At the same time, providing space to Muslim fundamentalist politics has helped push the poor and backward Muslims of Bengal away from radical alternatives and has strengthened right-wing Muslim politics. A blundering Left Front in the meantime, despite its steady decline, has refused to articulate itself clearly on the issue. The former chief minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharya had in the mid-2000s echoed the BJP when he had suggested that madrasas were breeding grounds for terror in the state. The present Left Front leadership, now in the opposition, seems to have no political alternative to propose to combat the growing communa lisation of West Bengal and has been reduced to only calling for stringent police action against the bomb blast accused. All in all, these events do not portend well for the state.
Posted on: Thu, 27 Nov 2014 11:03:02 +0000
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