West Bengal elections 2021: This book talks to individuals on the street to gauge what they want

In the thirty-four long years that the Left Front ruled Bengal, the “classless, casteless” Left gaze shrank Bengal, Mr M tells me, biting into a juicy fish finger, with its massacres and mayhem and the killing of industry. There were other massacres, apart from the one at Marichjhapi, and Mr M remembers with a shudder the Bijon Setu killings when sixteen sadhus and a sadhvi belonging to the Ananda Marga sect were burnt alive at a bridge near Ballygunge in south Kolkata on 30 April 1982.

The burnings happened in broad daylight, but no arrests were ever made. Repeated calls for a judicial investigation led to the appointment of a single-member judicial commission to investigate the killings as late as in 2012, a year after the Left Front lost power in West Bengal. Nothing has happened till date.

But it is the killing of industry that stings Mr M more, understandably, as he comes from a family that has never had to work for other people. “There was this industrialist, staring at bankruptcy due to frequent strikes at all his Calcutta factories organised by Leftist unions. He sought an appointment and went to meet chief minister Jyoti Basu at what was then the state secretariat, the Writers’ Building. Basu, the Bhadralok Marxist, heard him out. Then told him to his face that capitalists were class enemies and the poor sod should expect no sympathy,” Mr M tells me.

“In communist Russia and China, economic development was a must. In India, communism came in through the politics of votes. Basu knew land reforms, Panchayati Raj and fanning of pro-labour sentiments would keep them in power. And painting the industrialist as the class enemy would cement their hold on the state. They did just that. Sucked out the lifeblood of industry in the three decades they ruled this state.”

I remind Mr M that in the last Assembly polls in 2016, the Left Front won only 32 seats out of 294. The party has also lost power in Tripura, which it ruled for twenty-five years. It is only in power in Kerala, and it is highly unlikely it will make any headway in Bengal in 2021.

We should talk about Mamata Banerjee instead.

“Tell me, how is she different? I would have preferred a Right-wing government, you know, for Bengal. Economically Right, that is. Left of Centre socially.”

So, he wants the BJP to form the next government in Bengal in 2021?

“No! The BJP says maximum governance, minimum government. But where is the proof of that? Modi 1.0 has come and gone, we are into Modi 2.0 and the government is everywhere! I also cannot stomach the BJP’s stand on NRC and CAA. They have reduced the Muslim to a second-class citizen. That is very wrong.”

Who will he vote for then? Trinamool Congress again? Congress is not even a serious player in the state anymore. “Do you know the story behind this club’s crest?” Mr M asks me instead. I shake my head. “The story goes that a cobra was discovered while workers were digging for the foundation of the building. Work stopped. A priest was brought in...and after he offered milk to the snake, it quietly left. And the cobra became the club’s crest. An Indian belief became a European-only club’s identity.”

As I wonder about the significance of this story to my question on who Mr M would vote for in 2021, he says: “NOTA. I will vote for nobody. Nobody can change Bengal’s fate. Like the English adapted a local belief and made the cobra the crest of the Bengal Club, a political party that had hardly any presence in Bengal even a few years ago needs to know this state before trying to win it.”

And that would be the BJP, right?

Mr M smiles, says nothing...

Outside, the sun has dipped and the sultry March day has given way to a pleasant evening. I call a taxi, a yellow Ambassador that seems to have leapt out of a kitschy Kolkata postcard, and give the cabbie an address for Kasba suburb.

84 Gouranga Sarani houses someone who could seem like the antithesis of Mr M.

Jyotirmoy Mandal smokes bidis, croons loudly and swears when I ask him if I need to keep his identity a secret in this book. “Kon shala ki korbe amar? (Which rascal will do me harm?),” he hollers.

“Ma, Mati, Manush, my foot! There is only one M: Mamata. What does Ma, Mati, Manush even mean? Arbitrary words strung together. Mamata has this penchant for coining phrases that are best suited for jatra parties. Like her pet project, Biswa Bangla. Ridiculous coinage! And yet people cheer her on like fools!”

Why is he so anti-Mamata? “I wasn’t. Despite her upper-caste surname Banerjee, she is a true subaltern. She rose from the dumps, worked among the people, gained their trust and finally dethroned the Left. But what has she done for people like us? Those who came from the other side of the border?”

Mandal is what you call in Bengal a Bangal; people whose roots are in East Bengal, which became East Pakistan and now Bangladesh, and were forced to migrate to West Bengal.

Mandal is also a Namasudra, a Dalit sub-caste. His immediate neighbours and also the larger Kasba and surrounding areas of south Kolkata are steeped in refugee history. Brick lane after brick lane bears testimony to the struggles of a people who came here as refugees and made the marshlands of south Kolkata their permanent address.

The original inhabitants of the city, the Ghotis, who are clustered mostly in the north, often looked down on these settlers with smug derision. From food habits to pronunciation of Bengali words to support for rival football teams, there are sworn differences between Bangals and the Ghotis.

Unlike the Ghotis, the Bangals migrated to India. The lower castes among them like Mandal came in later and saw far more riots and rapes than the upper-caste Bangals who came in before them. But among the lower-caste migrants, as I would gradually come to know, the Citzenship Amendment Act has found some favour.

In popular discourse, in newspaper editorials and on Facebook posts, one may find opposition to CAA among Bengalis of the Left-liberal kind, but for many of the Namasudras this side of Bengal (the other side is now an independent country, Bangladesh), it is a step that recognises the struggles of the Hindus left behind in Bangladesh.

Mandal recalls the tortured history of his people who had stayed back in East Pakistan after Partition in the hope that Muslims would give them the dignity caste Hindus didn’t. Instead, they faced a worse fate and many migrated to West Bengal.

“And it is those same Muslims whom the Mamata government is allowing inside West Bengal. People have a short memory, politicians shorter. Don’t you remember when a political power was behind sending a man to kill Mamata? Beloved Didi has forgotten that and opened up our borders with Bangladesh to fatten her vote bank. I am happy the BJP has brought in the CAA. I support the CAA. The Namasudras left behind in Bangladesh are maimed, killed and converted to this day by Muslims in that country. Who will stand up for them? I want the BJP to seal Bengal’s borders once and for all. No more infiltration. We have had enough!”

Gorom cha tastes funny after Glenlivet, but I finish it anyway and come out of the house with my head buzzing.

Excerpted with permission from Bengal 2021: An Election Diary, Deep Haldar, HarperCollins India.