Not even heinous crimes against women seem to disturb the Trinamool Government in West Bengal. The Chief Minister discovers politics there too
Polarisation and pluralities celebrate the existing fissures within the body politic. Mobilisations represent the strength of the differences in perception. By that measure, the spontaneous collection of thousands who walked through the streets of Kolkata appalled by the ruling leadership's response to the deeply disturbing escalation of violence and crimes against women and the increasing sense of insecurity, is representative of only one segment of the opinion. The other and numerically larger segment of opinion is prepared to brave rain and discomfort to pay homage to West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee and her efforts to transform and uplift West Bengal.
Ironically, the revulsion expressed through the Kolkata rally and the support revealed by the avid crowds at Ms Banerjee's campaign meeting in Bankura happened at the same time, separated by space and sensibility. While the two events reflected the plurality of views and the freedom of democratic choice on the one hand, it also revealed the extreme divergence within the body politic, on the other. As long as the balance of opinion is tipped against a change, the response of Ms Banerjee will continue to be rude, crude and despotic.
Portraying dissent, disapproval and complaints as crimes, is sinister. It is a blatant bid by an authority to snatch away from criticism and objection the legitimacy, respect and status they enjoy in a democracy. When Kamduni, the village in North 24 Parganas, a stone's throw from Kolkata's international airport, dared to challenge Mamata Banerjee, it was told to ‘shut up’! Its women were branded as agents of the Maoists and the Marxists for their audacity to question the Chief Minister about how her Government intended dealing with the horrific gang rape, mutilation and murder of a 20-year old college student and the fear that menacing stalkers spread as they prowl the community looking for vulnerable targets.
The cohesion within Kamduni, despite the efforts of the Trinamool Congress to pressure it into submission, is not how the rest of West Bengal responds to the blandishments and threats from the ruling establishment. There is a tendency to succumb to the lures of the powerful, because in the wasteland to which the State has been reduced through political turbulence where offers of jobs and money and assurances of patronage can sap the will and drain out the resistance of the vulnerable.
If this is another version of votes-for-money, then it is a practice that has acquired the patina of legitimacy as a time-honoured tradition. The purchasing power of the political class as a whole is always greater than the capacity to resist, since the patronage is automatically financially beneficial. Of all persons, Ms Banerjee has confirmed the truth of this. Angered over the response of Kamduni's women, especially Tumpa, Mita and Mousumi Kayal, she spat out that the people who had been picked up for the gang rape were erstwhile members of her bête noire, the Communist Party of India (Marxist). The Chief Minister even named the CPI(M) patron of the arrested, even as everybody else knew that the gang had sheltered under the Trinamool Congress flag.
The propensity of the lumpen to seek and find political shelter is as routine in West Bengal as it is elsewhere in India. The difference is the spirit in which the criminally-inclined are incorporated into the political machine. They have every reason to believe that their activities will be viewed with a vast tolerance. When the Chief Minister accuses those who have voiced their revulsion to rape as perverts (involved in pornography) and goes on to claim that the media had cast her as a potential rapist for visiting Kamduni, then it seems that the criminally-inclined sheltering under the Trinamool Congress flag have every reason to believe that their activities will be viewed with a vast tolerance.
If West Bengal's Government had shown a capacity to respond effectively to crime by fast-tracking its capacity to nail the culprit and bring him to book, then the sense of crisis would change. But criminals have become pawns in the political games.