What led to Bengal’s latest turmoil?
TheeruptionofviolenceatBasirhat,witheveryoneclaiming thelooterstobeoutsiders,raisesseveralquestions.What turn the state's politics will take remains to be seen
When you give everyone a voice and give people power, the system usually ends up in a really good place, Mark Zuckerberg, founder and chief executive of Facebook, had said. The operative word here is "usually". Basirhat is an exception to this general proposition. Events there provoked West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee to say: “There is Fakebook happening in the name of Facebook; I respect Facebook, not Fakebook.”
It started with an alleged controversial Facebook post featuring Prophet Mohammed, shared by a 17-year-old boy, on July 2, Sunday. Within hours, Baduria and Swarupnagar in North 24 Parganas flared up, with shops, police stations, and houses being vandalised. When the vandals got tired, the violence ebbed. But, only briefly. The next day, mobs hurled bombs at a rath yatra procession at Basirhat, 60 km from Baduria. By then, the accused had been taken into custody and a message to that effect was disseminated by representatives of the Muslim community. However, there was no dousing the fire. It was then that the administration clamped on internet services.
But, as normalcy was being restored with the help of the central forces by Thursday, Basirhat flared up again. It was as if people were trying to keep the fire alive.
There are some curious aspects of the entire episode. A still from a Bhojpuri film,
Aurat Khilona Nahin, was being shared on Facebook, being passed off as the Basirhat incident. The man who had posted it was arrested by the state police. Reportedly, an official of the Bharatiya Janata Party's Haryana unit was among those who had shared the image on social media, targeting the West Bengal government.
The latter has ordered a judicial inquiry on Basirhat and Banerjee has said action will be taken for spreading fake pictures and videos. What is more curious is that Muslim leaders and the administration now claim the rioters were “outsiders”. Some might have joined the rioters to settle scores with the administration on account of the clampdown on cattle smuggling. Banerjee has made it clear that there will be no smuggling of cattle to Bangladesh.
Basirhat, Baduria, and Swarupnagar are in North 24 Parganas district, a border one. West Bengal's 2,200-km porous border with Bangladesh, stretching over 10 districts, has been a problem on many counts. Infiltration leading to law and order problems, and smuggling, especially of cattle, are some. Successive state governments have tended to lose the initiative to stem infiltration just before elections. West Bengal's 29 per cent Muslim population can swing elections in any direction. The locals of Basirhat and the administration claim most of the rioters came into the area the evening the problem started on motorcycles and none has a clue about their identities. So, what might have started with Facebook goes much beyond that. The bigger question is the identity of the people who caused the riots.
Manerjee's Trinamool Congress and the administration are clearly pointing fingers at the BJP for fuelling communal tension in Bengal. Basirhat-Baduria are not isolated incidents. In recent times, there have been quite a few communal flareups, which were not so common in the Left Front regime.
The Left, specially the Communist Party of India (Marxist), has accused the Trinamool and BJP of polarising West Bengal. And, the TMC for appeasement policies, too. It's not that the Left didn't reach out to the Muslim community in its time but perhaps not so blatantly.
Her monthly stipend for imams and muezzins, scholarships for students from minority communities and, above all, lax law and order for a particular community have had even the most secular Bengalis seething with quiet resentment.
For the BJP, it's a window of opportunity. With no leaders of any meaningful calibre, a polarised West Bengal is a weapon that it plans to use freely in the run-up to the panchayat polls in 2018 and the general elections in 2019. Thus, the sudden burst of celebrations over Ram Navami. The Narada and Saradha scams have had little impact on West Bengal's electoral choice so far.
This might spur the government to work on its intelligence network in the months before the elections. For instance, the state government underestimated the Gorkha agitation in the hills. If it is also unsure of the identity of the rioters at Basirhat-Baduria, that is alarming.
All said, will the BJP be able to dislodge Banerjee? A former bureaucrat says that it can be fodder for good discussion at the elite clubs of Kolkata, since a section of society is unhappy with the lack of the industrialisation, and perhaps an even smaller section with the West Bengal Clinical Establishments Bill, which contains stringent norms for private hospitals. But, it will do little else. The BJP can, of course, hope to become the principal opposition party in West Bengal if it can establish an office in every block and subdivision in the way the CPI(M) still has.
STATE SCAN WEST BENGAL