In a conversation a few years ago, one of the prominent English-speaking faces of TMC had narrated an anecdote about his leader Mamata Banerjee’s political acumen. He said ‘Didi’ had asked him to make a PowerPoint presentation on how to win the 2011 Bengal election beating the Left Front.
In his presentation, he proposed building a parallel grassroots organisation.
Banerjee sat patiently through it. At the end, she shook her head and told him: “That is exactly their strength. We can’t beat them at their game. We need events which will make their own organisation in towns and villages collapse out of anxiety, fear.”
Protests against land acquisition in Singur and Nandigram proved to be those events. The Left’s heavy-handedness and arrogance instilled fear across Bengal that their land holdings would be snatched away. CPI(M)’s use of brute force made it believable.
Atrocities by TMC goons in Sandeshkhali could become for Mamata Banerjee what Singur and Nandigram were for the Left Front government.
Bengal has already established itself as the Mecca of misrule (the phrase may please Didi since it backhandedly fits into her lexicon of minority appeasement). Brutal pre- and post-poll violence is in the courts, wanton corruption has blazed across TV screens of every household, anger of the jobless has spilled onto the streets, and the state’s debt has touched Rs 6 lakh crore.
Along comes Sandeshkhali.
Suffering indignity and violence in silence for decades, the dam of citizens’ patience has been breached. Woman after woman from the wetlands of North 24 Parganas are coming out to narrate how TMC goon and once member of the CPI(M)’s ‘Harmad’ militia Sheikh Shahjahan and his men would handpick women and take them away from their husbands, keep them for nights and return them when they were satisfied. Shahjahan is absconding after his men thrashed an ED team which had gone to question him in the ration distribution scam.
Forced dispossession and sexual exploitation have reached a point where the locals do not care to even risk their lives. They have been protesting against Shahjahan’s barbaric presence. The West Bengal police have been arresting the protesters while Shahjahan roams free.
Why could this be the inflection point for the Mamata Banerjee government?
Because of the same creeping, growing, universalising fear of ceding both property and dignity, losing land and wife and sisters and daughters to jihadis; something that Bengal knows very well from the memories of a bloody Partition.
The heat of this fear will begin to melt the rural unitary structures of the TMC’s support base. Eight or nine people including the Panchayat members, bankers, teachers and others form the power structure of a village. If Hindus start fearing complete dispossession and humiliation like the kind meted out in Sandeshkhali, they will turn. Even ordinary Muslims won’t feel safe from the Shahjahans of Bengal.
Already, protests are erupting elsewhere in the state, against Sheikh Khalil in Howrah, for instance. Those could only grow.
Mamata Banerjee will have to summon her best political instincts to salvage the situation. The fact that her nephew and scion Abhishek Banerjee is facing multiple corruption cases complicates matters for her.
But a cornered Mamata is a dangerous animal. The BJP will do well to remember that. So far, the BJP has shown some spunk by organising local and state protests. But the intensity it can unleash, as well as using this opportunity to unite its otherwise fractious state unit, still seems missing.
It has the finest street fighter to learn from, if only it cares to look at the formidable credentials of its opponent-in-chief, Mamata Banerjee.
Abhijit Majumder is a senior journalist. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely that of the author. They do not necessarily reflect News18’s views.
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