The lion that Durga rides is made of clay and dissolves in the water in which the murti is immersed after Puja is over. Tiger Mamata Banerjee rides is proverbial: She will increasingly find it difficult to get off her mount lest it turn on her
This past week has not exactly gone the way the strong-headed Chief Minister of West Bengal and the one and only leader in Trinamool Congress would have wanted it to go. Durga Puja, once upon a time a celebration of faith restricted to the homesteads of zamindars, landlords and rich traders in Kolkata and Dhaka, is now a public festival no longer limited to the five days between Shashti and Dashami, the sixth and the tenth days of Navratri.
In Kolkata alone, there are more than a thousand community Durga Pujas, nearly all of them crassly commercialised and more a show of political clout, funded by big ticket fast-moving consumer goods advertising, than collective Hindu faith. The godless Marxists discovered the wondrous benefits of appropriating community Durga Puja soon after coming to power in 1977.
That appropriation is now the Trinamool Congress’s as yesterday’s Red Card holders are today’s Didi fans. Political fidelity in Bengal, as elsewhere in India, has always been extremely malleable and elastic, and adaptive to circumstances. This phenomenon is most starkly visible among Hindus who, as snarks would point out, are like that only. Swami Vivekananda possibly had the Bengali in mind when he castigated the “timid Hindu”; Nirad C Chaudhuri wrote an entire book on ‘Atmaghati Bangali’. But we digress.
Mamata Banerjee would not have wanted any distractions from ‘inaugurating’ Durga Puja at venues that attract the largest crowds of gawkers and hawkers. This no-cost mass contact programme, so crucial for a political leader to be seen as one with the masses, is now a part of Bengal’s political playbook. To ensure the leader and her factotums get maximum time to go pandal-hopping, Durga Puja now virtually begins the day after Mahalaya. Orthodoxy died an unsung death long ago.
Yet there were two distractions that Mamata Banerjee could neither ignore nor wish away. Both of them rudely questioned her presumed supremacy in all matters temporal and spiritual. And both by way of the judiciary drawing a line between a politician’s cynical abuse of authority and the rights of citizens in a democracy.
The first distraction came in the form of the Calcutta High Court striking down Mamata Banerjee’s imperious order prohibiting the immersion of Durga murtis on October 1 as Shia Muslims would be observing Muharram. For a politician whose core vote comprises Muslims who now account for a third of Bengal’s population (officially they hover at 27 per cent) and make up the majority in at least three districts, this made good electoral sense; secularism has long ceased to be a principle of governance in India.
A group of Hindus went to court, challenging the sweeping denial of Hindu rights. As in the previous year, this time too the court questioned the Government’s wisdom and pointed out that visarjan could not be blocked because of two Moharram processions. It was for the administration to figure out how to prevent the “law and order problems” it anticipated.
Incandescent with rage, Mamata Banerjee threw a fit. The next day she seized upon half a sentence in the court’s order to issue a new firman — Durga Puja organisers would need permission from the police for visarjan on Moharram. That has put paid Hindu hopes that rose after the court’s verdict. There is a Bengali adage which comes to mind: “Ghughu dekhechho, phand dekhoni”. Roughly translated, it means you have seen the bird but not the trap.
The other distraction has come by way of the Calcutta High Court allowing Hindus to do Shastra Puja at the place of worship. That means Hindus cannot take out a procession with traditional arms but can worship them in private. It’s a bit of a non-order because the prohibition imposed by Mamata Banerjee’s administration is on public display of arms as part of Shastra Puja. That stays.
Two points merit mention. Shastra Puja was never a part of Durga Puja observances in Bengal. It is possible arms were worshipped at homes but there was never a public demonstration in the form of a procession. The inclusion of Shastra Puja as part of community Durga Puja is, frankly, more a response to denialism and minorityism than anything else. The argument that if Muslims can bear traditional arms in public on Moharram, so can Hindus as part of Shastra Puja observance, is not without merit in terms of assertion of equal rights.
That, in a sense, is the central point of the opposition to restricting visarjan on Moharram: Why should Hindus be denied their religious freedom to uphold the religious freedom of MuslimsIJ The State is obliged to protect rights, not deny them. And, it is the State’s responsibility to maintain law and order; citing possible violence to infringe upon one community’s rights while upholding another’s is unacceptable.
The larger issue is secularism and its practice — or call it malpractice, if you wish. To be fair, Muslims have not asked for visarjan to be prohibited on Moharram. Till Mamata Banerjee’s disruptive intervention, both visarjan and Moharram happened in West Bengal without causing any discord. So, what has changedIJ
Ever since coming to power riding the twin anti-Nandigram and anti-Singur waves, Mamata Banerjee has sought to consolidate her Muslim support base through extraordinary means of appeasement. This is not to suggest that Muslims in Bengal are better off today than they were when the Marxists were in power (and tried to ride the beast of minorityism with disastrous consequences at the fag-end of their rule) but to underscore the danger of pandering to mullahs.
The neo-Islamists and meme Jamaatis of Bengal today feel sufficiently empowered to declare that Sharia’h rules over the Constitution and threaten to bring down the Union Government if the borders are not opened to Rohingya Muslims. That the Jamaatis feel emboldened to hold a massive rally in the heart of Kolkata in support of the 1971 war criminals and razakars who mass-pillaged, mass-murdered and mass-raped Hindus during the Bangladesh liberation struggle, or are allowed to stop Salman Rushdie from visiting the city and disallow Taslima Nasreen from entering West Bengal, is a fallout of this appeasement.
It is easy to keep talking about Rabindranath Tagore’s Bengal and Kazi Nazrul Islam’s Bengal. It is easy to indulge in bogus chatter about tolerance and pluralism. The indisputable truth is West Bengal today is far removed from the Bengal of either Gurudev Tagore or Kazi Nazrul Islam. It is inexorably slipping into a shadow zone where cynical political expediency has birthed forces that bear no semblance to everything that Bengal once stood for.
The lion that Durga rides is made of clay and dissolves in the water in which themurti is immersed after Durga Puja is over. The tiger Mamata Banerjee rides is proverbial: She will increasingly find it difficult to get off her mount lest it turn on her.
(The writer is Commissioning Editor and commentator at ABP News)