Bengal: Daylight Dacoity as a Public Spectacle?
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Cryptic Comment: Will the people of West Bengal become the epicentre of a mass resistance in India?
By Aditya Nigam
Will West Bengal be the Waterloo of the West India Company?
That is the big question today. At least, will it be the dress rehearsal for the big showdown, whenever and wherever that happens?
There are at least two issues involved here. First, will the BJP be defeated despite the reported massive daylight dacoity (with Gyanesh Kumar and Co as its chief executors) taking place before our very eyes, right now?
This is certainly not a trivial question even though it may mean rallying around the ruling TMC -- despite some very legitimate and serious problems with it. In any case, its problems are nothing compared to the promoter-builder raj of the 34 years that preceded it -- nor the massacres that regime presided on -- but that is not the point of this post.
The second issue involved here is far more serious: even a TMC victory in West Bengal (or any other non-BJP party in other states) will mean nothing as far as the disenfranchisement of large sections of the population is concerned.
If the West India Company succeeds in its plans, the first issue simply will cease to exist since the disenfranchisement will have achieved its purpose. In most places, it will as it did in some ways (before the formal so-called SIR process) in Delhi, Maharashtra, Haryana and Andhra Pradesh. And I suspect Bihar also.
That is where the struggle will become really ferocious -- perhaps also in West Bengal. The struggle against mass disenfranchisement will not be fought -- as has become quite clear -- by political parties who cannot see beyond their own nose. It will, rather, take a massive push back from the people at large and on that score, only West Bengal seems to be the place where such a mass resistance can and is taking place. (As in Malda recently.)
If on that score, West Bengal loses, we are in for a very different scenario in the near future, for then, legal-parliamentary processes will have become completely meaningless -- which they already have to a very large extent. Small protest demonstrations will not have any meaning anymore and anything big will mean something of the order of the anti-CAA movement or the farmers' struggle.
Will things move in that direction well before 2029?
They must if we are not to move into decades of a dark Hindutva winter -- but how that will happen is the big question.
Aditya Nigam is a former Professor, CSDS, Delhi.