Bengal on the brink?

The CM is battling a problem of her own making

The recent communal troubles in West Bengal – seven in the past month, according to the state police – should sound loud alarm bells for Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee. Already battling a crisis over Gorkha rights in the hills, West Bengal can ill afford flare-ups in Muslim-majority districts abutting Bangladesh, with which it not only shares a 2,217-km border but which is being roiled by Saudi-financed Islamic fundamentalism. True, the deliberate spread of incendiary fake news feeds via social media bears a large share of the blame. But Ms Banerjee must surely bear responsibility for not responding quickly enough to restore law and order — if the police forces were inadequate in quelling a riot by Muslims protesting against an offensive Facebook post, she could well have agreed to the Centre’s offer of central forces. This would have sent out an unambiguous message that breaches of law and order would not be tolerated.

By allowing the crisis to fester, she has played into the Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP’s) hands as it focuses on the state ahead of the 2019 elections. In this, thus, Ms Banerjee is facing the consequences of the ill-advised identity politics in which she herself has indulged in the past. The absence of communal violence since the Partition riots – except the 1964 one – in a state in which 27.5 per cent of the population is Muslim was one of the few achievements of 34 years of the Left Front’s otherwise deleterious rule. West Bengal saw no anti-Sikh riots in 1984; nor communal riots after the demolition of the Babri Masjid in 1992-93, even as other parts of India burned. The question of illegal immigration from Bangladesh, which the BJP has built up into a significant issue, was a non-issue in the state, principally because politicians of all hues were happy to legalise these cohorts to swell their vote-banks. The absence of political encouragement meant that communalism was a non-issue in public life in West Bengal. Ms Banerjee opened the door to these forces.

In her first term as chief minister came the extraordinary decision to pay a monthly stipend to imams and muezzins of Rs 2,500 and Rs 1,500, respectively. This pandering to a particular community provided a useful foothold for the rising BJP to tap into Hindu disaffection. The Trinamool Congress’ claim that Karnataka and Telangana spend more per capita on Muslims than West Bengal is irrelevant in the circumstances. From a non-existent electoral presence in 2009, the BJP won two seats in the 2014 Lok Sabha elections, and six seats in the 2016 Assembly elections. The Trinamool Congress’ stunning comeback last year may have caused Ms Banerjee’s failure to anticipate that the BJP would inevitably target West Bengal in the run-up to 2019, and low-intensity communal riots spread through doctored social media feeds are part of its playbook. In that sense, her community outreach programme to track social media feeds may be too little, too late.