WB: MAMATA STOKES BENGALI PRIDE
Mamata is hoping to build a Bengali narrative against the BJP’s Hindu one to retain her Bengalispeaking vote bank for 2021
The south is not the only region opposing the central government’s attempt to impose Hindi on the entire country via its June 3 New Education Policy. The streets of Kolkata are also set to register their protest. Signage in the West Bengal capital will now only be in Bengali, followed by English. The ones in Hindi and Urdu, in areas where the concentration of their speakers is higher, will be removed. It brings to mind the Amra Bangali movement of the mid-’80s, when Hindi and English signboards were blackened with tar so that only the Bengali name remained.
A few days earlier, on May 30, Trinamool Congress (TMC) chief and West Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee floated the Jai Banga Janani (JBJ) for women and the Jai Hind Vahini (JHV) to counter the public outreach of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS). Mamata has appointed her brothers Subrata (aka Ganesh) and Samir (aka Kartik) as the president and convenor, respectively, of the JHV. Though seemingly apolitical in nature, the outfits will have ministers in the Mamata government working under them.
The BJP’s inroads into her turf this Lok Sabha election—the party won 18 of the state’s 42 Lok Sabha seats and a 40 per cent vote share—has clearly rattled Didi. On May 30, while on her way to Naihati to participate in a TMC dharna against poll violence, she lost her cool with BJP supporters shouting ‘Jai Shri Ram’ as her motorcade passed by. An enraged Mamata got out of the car and berated the sloganeers, and inevitably clips of the incident went viral.
The recent burst of Bengali chauvinism betrays Mamata’s anxiety to retain her Bengali vote bank for the 2021 assembly poll. The RSS was able to woo a large chunk of Mamata’s Bengali vote bank in rural areas by appealing to Hindu sentiments.
“She’s trying to arouse a pan-Bengali sentiment (Bangaliayana) to consolidate the 4.2 crore Bengalispeaking Hindu voters of the state,” says Biswanath
MAMATA HOPES TO RETAIN HER 42 MILLION BENGALI VOTERS FOR 2021
Chakrabarty, political science professor at the Rabindra Bharati University.
“Raising ‘Jai Bangla’ as a counter slogan to ‘Jai Shri Ram’ is a clear signal that Mamata will treat the BJP as a party of the Hindi heartland, with no understanding of Bengal, its history, its culture, its language, its food or clothes,” says Sovon Lal Dutta Gupta, a former professor at Calcutta University. JBJ girls and JHV men have been asked to wear traditional attire—red-and-green border sarees for women, kurta-pyjama for men.
Will it work? As Chakrabarty sees it, “Once again, Mamata is falling into the BJP’s trap of narratives. Trying to emulate the RSS through Jai Banga Janani and Jai Hind Vahini will be a disaster. The way the RSS works through a disciplined cadre system and its networking is unmatchable. It will also distance her from the 28 per cent Muslim vote bank, which stuck to her loyally this election.”
“Such a move of trying to club Bengalis with promises of Bengal’s resurgence might not have much impact,” says Prasanta Ray, a former political science professor at Presidency College. “The desecration of Vidyasagar’s bust, whoever did it, might have provoked strong reaction on social media and saved two seats—Kolkata North and Dum Dum—from going to the BJP, but people are not ready to accept that the BJP, with little knowledge of Bengal’s icons, was behind it.”
BJP state vice-president Joy Prakash Majumdar dismisses this belated appeal to Bengali pride as “window dressing”. “They (the TMC) were responsible for the killing of two Hindu students in Daribhit, who were protesting the induction of Urdu teachers instead of teachers for Bengali. They lost the Raigunje Lok Sabha seat, of which Daribhit is a part,” says Majumdar.
Besides, the BJP is hoping two trump cards of its own—the Citizenship Amendment Bill and the National Register for Citizens—will unite the Hindu vote.