Ujjwal K Chowdhury
Depleted opposition trying to win majority vote on communal lines for 2019 general election
The Scene & the Actors
Mamata Banerjee, the two-time Chief Minister of West Bengal, recently announced a dole of Rs.10,000 to each of 28,000 Durga Puja committees this festive season in Bengal, of which 3000 are in Kolkata city limits, thus granting Rs.28 crores from culture ministry of her government. This is along with the waiver of fire licenses and Kolkata Municipal Corporation fees for the Kolkata puja committees. Earlier she tried to prevent Durga Visarjan on the Moharram day last year, to maintain law and order, which was stuck down by the Kolkata High Court. She had also brought in Imam Bhata, the policy of stipend to Imams and Muezzins, which was also struck down by the High Court.
Moreover, since 2011, after coming to power first time, she has distributed Rs.600 crores to 15,000 clubs of Bengal for festivals and sports events from the Sports & Youth Welfare Ministry. This has been criticised by the CAG at the centre as a wasteful expenditure. Expectedly, the Hindu groups of Sangh Parivar protested against Imam stipend then and Imams are now protesting against Durga Puja dole in Kolkata.
Rahul Gandhi, the Congress President, after a continued year-long temple hopping from Gujarat in 2017 to Karnataka and the North Indian states of MP, Rajasthan and Chhattisgarh in 2018, is now preparing for Durga Puja participation actively on camera in Kolkata. The competitive majoritarian appeasement by Mamata and Rahul in Bengal has naturally unnerved the original majoritarian party, BJP, which for the first time had organized Ram Navami rallies in Bengal with swords and maces never seen before in the erstwhile left-oriented state.
BJP had recently accorded cabinet ministry status to five so-called Godmen in the poll-bound MP state. MP CM has announced a bovine express in the state in which poor people take ailing or dead bovine cattle to the hospital or to cremation. And they are now up on the streets of Kolkata calling out the ‘communal politics of deceit’ of Mamata and Rahul.
The Irony of it All
It is an irony enough that the major anti-BJP forces of Bengal have to tread the same path as the central rulers in spite of the worst ever crisis in fuel prices, dollar exchange rate, joblessness in economy, and fall in exports and rise in commodity prices in the country in the fifth year of Modi rule.
Any hope for real positive demonetization impact has been neutralized by the facts that more than 99% of demonetized notes have come back to the RBI and through a web of accounts opened under Jan dhan Yojana. Also, the total volume of new notes, including that of high value Rs.2000, that has been injected into the system is more than the value of the earlier demonetized currency.
The opposition fails to take lessons going by the facts that the ruling BJP has been continuously defeated in all Lok Sabha by-polls across India wherever there has been some semblance of opposition unity or a united face of the major opposition party.
The practice of funding social clubs and religious organisations is in poor light because the injured in the Majherhat bridge collapse in Kolkata have not been compensated by the Bengal government as announced, and there have been smaller instances of bridge collapses and damages continuously since then. The government instead of paying the victims has been complaining of cash crunch due to the alleged unfavourable allocation of funds to the states.
The Bengal irony is further compounded by the fact that the Left Front, which ruled the state with an iron hand for four decades before Mamata came to power, is nowhere in the picture today with no youth force worth noting, has no stand against appeasement, and is sulking from taking a public stand on dole to imams and Durga Puja committees.
Sadly enough, its forces at grassroots have been seen even colluding with BJP to resist TMC violence during the recently concluded Panchayat elections. The Left has failed so far to either organize a movement against the economic woes of the people or take any political leadership to bring secular and democratic forces together for the electoral battle of 2019. The only credible work of the Left has been to mainstream the farmers’ woes and agrarian distress through the Kisan Sabha rallies in some parts of India.
Poverty of Political Imagination
Mamata regime, in spite of politically paying and globally appreciated measures like Kanyashree for the welfare of the girl child, and some admirable initiatives of public health, education, roads, power & urban beautification etc, failed to create an atmosphere of communal amity in the state. Syndicate run construction corruption, forced fund-raising from small time business enterprises by TMC cadre, and harassment of women in rural hinterland have rocked the state repeatedly.
Congress, on its part, is failing to take the onus of creating a strong anti BJP front in spite of there being no dearth of issues, owing to its weakened central leadership, arrogant and over-ambitious regional leaders, rampant factionalism, and a lack of organizational coherence or a killer instinct to fight it out on ground.
An overall poverty of political imagination in the coteries of two PM hopefuls in the Opposition camp, Rahul Gandhi and Mamata Banerjee, is leading them to fall prey to an unimaginative strategy of what is being dubbed as ‘Soft Hindutva’ to stay afloat. They have failed to make the issue of breach of social cohesion during Modi regime a mass concern through Mohalla/local level Aman (peace) committees. They have failed to actually take the issues of economic failures of the centre to each household. They have no clear alternative development vision or a Common Minimum Program and are lost in the din of who leads the Opposition camp.
Even with regards to the Hindutva brigade’s favourite slogans of cow protection, Ganga cleaning and Ram Mandir construction, the Opposition is seen paralysed with a lack of innovative positioning. While the nation should just accept the Supreme Court decision, pending which if the litigants in the case come to an amicable solution among themselves, the Opposition has not been able to state it unequivocally and stand strong on it to call the bluff of slogan of Mandir construction by BJP without actually doing anything for decades.
Ganga cleaning has not proceeded in any remarkable way in spite of Namami Gange slogan and allocation of funds by the Centre. And the cattle livestock is one of the worst in the world in India with a huge majority of the estimated 3 crores of cows suffering from numerous ailments and lack of fodder.
These make a mockery of slogans of BJP centering around Ganges and the cow. But then an unimaginative opposition has no strategy to take these up and are falling into the Hindutva idiom of BJP, in effect giving credence to majoritarianism in national polity through their short-sighted Soft Hindutva.
(The author is Dean, School of Media, Pearl Academy, Delhi & Mumbai, and former Dean of Symbiosis and Amity Universities.)
