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‘Sandeshkhali quintessentially displays the disaster of a mannequin of governance’
| Picture Credit score: The Hindu
There are two routes to Sandeshkhali in West Bengal. One takes you thru a Hindu-Muslim divide. The opposite via the acquisition-deprivation divide. Each tales are compelling and highly effective.
Within the first story, the identify of the villain is Trinamool chief Sheikh Shahjahan, and the victims are the Hindu girls. The story suits into the lengthy story of Muslim assaults on the hapless Hindu each time and wherever the Hindu is weak or in a minority, be it in Bangladesh, Pakistan or locations comparable to Sandeshkhali. The energy of this story reinforces a sweeping narrative that has gained traction in West Bengal in recent times, restoring the festering wounds of Partition. The issue is that in Sandeshkhali the story is just not solely partial but additionally false. The instant perpetrators of alleged crimes towards girls listed here are Uttam Sardar and Shibaprasad Hazra, each non-Muslims. The third is Ajit Maity, whom the villagers of Sandeshkhali attacked final week.
Below public stress, Mamata Banerjee’s police arrested all three males, although Sheikh was absconding. That he had been spared for thus lengthy helped to feed the allegation of Ms. Banerjee’s Muslim ‘appeasement’ with an eye fixed to the forthcoming elections. Hindus are all however in ‘minority’ in each Sandeshkhali blocks: 70% in a single and 77% within the different, largely belonging to the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes.
A disaster of governance
Quite than a Hindu-Muslim strife, Sandeshkhali quintessentially displays the disaster of Mamata Banerjee’s mannequin of governance. Not like in lots of different States the place individuals kind collectives round caste, tribal, linguistic or spiritual identities, in West Bengal’s post-Partition strife for all times and livelihood, individuals clung to completely different political events for each safety and provisions.
In the course of the lengthy rule of the Left Entrance, because of the well-coordinated construction of the hegemonic CPI(M), partisan affiliations of people and teams received additional bolstered in providing the grasp key to enter public life. Get together affiliation gave individuals an identification which, in flip, created a fusion referred to as party-society. Within the twilight years of the Left Entrance, the educated center class celebration leaders have been slowly however steadily getting changed on the grassroots by enterprising people representing both comparatively well-off farmers or these operating small commerce and companies. With the Left Entrance’s defeat, essentially the most formidable of those native political managers modified sides and joined the Trinamool Congress (TMC).
Ms. Banerjee realised early on that though she needed to work with celebration society, she couldn’t run a authorities the CPI(M) approach. In her celebration, she alone drew common authority with none secure hierarchy of command. She compensated for this in a three-pronged method. She introduced some key bureaucrats and law enforcement officials, regardless of their rankings, beneath her direct command and positioned her religion in them over celebration employees. She befriended ethnic, caste and spiritual group leaders, and inducted them within the celebration. Furthermore, she prolonged safety to the native celebration chieftains to develop their doubtful companies in lieu of full private loyalty. These enterprising political managers have been fast to leverage their political energy — in cahoots with the native administration and police — for usurping as a lot revenue as attainable from authorized and unlawful companies involving land, forest, sand, coal, fisheries, foodgrains and siphoning off money from numerous authorities schemes and contracts. Most of those persons are from comparatively wealthy peasant households who earlier misplaced land because of the Left Entrance’s land reforms however finally have been positioned in locations of energy — first within the CPI(M) and thereafter within the TMC.
With West Bengal’s regular industrial decline, these enterprising people at the moment are the principle employers within the casual financial system. Such a mixture of energy and revenue has created cronyism of small capital in West Bengal’s huge swaths of rural and semi-urban settlements. These micro-appropriators and likewise political leaders money in on Ms. Banerjee’s recognition for operating private fiefdoms. They eradicate all attainable challenges to their native energy and prosperity, routinely forcing Opposition events to withdraw their candidates within the panchayat elections.
The TMC embodies such a two-way move of may and cash unfold over ‘leased out’ zones of management and command to its key gamers. Notice, the construction primarily stands on absolute materials positive factors and makes use of individuals’s obscure religion in Didi’s ‘good intentions’ as its ethical hinge. In an extended essay, I’ve referred to as it ‘franchisee politics’ (“Of Collaboration and Battle: Mamata Banerjee and the Making of ‘Franchisee Politics’ in West Bengal”, Financial & Political Weekly (EPW), September 9, 2023).
The essence of Sandeshkhali
Sandeshkhali is an apt instance of franchisee politics. The disaster sparked off when the Enforcement Directorate (ED) officers went to Sheikh Shahjahan’s home. They have been attacked by the locals. Even journalists weren’t spared. For the locals, Sheikh is a patron-provider of their livelihood. Sheikh’s identify surfaced throughout an investigation of a Public Distribution System (PDS) rip-off by which a considerable amount of foodgrains was allegedly siphoned off to the open market. In October, the ED arrested Jyotipriya Mallick, former Minister of Meals and Provides in Ms. Banerjee’s authorities. Sheikh reported to him. Whereas Mallick ran his fiefdom over North 24 Parganas district, he ‘sub let’ the 2 blocks of Sandeshkhali to his deputy Sheikh, who, in flip, ‘sub let’ Sandeshkhali Block-II to Shibu Hazra. Hazra ‘sub let’ Sandeshkhali Gram Panchayat to Uttam Sardar. A transparent chain of revenue and energy was drawn, which constitutes the lifeblood of the TMC.
When the chain snapped
Why did the chain snap? It snapped as a result of the equation flipped with Mallick’s arrest and Sheikh’s absence from the scene. Because the media centered on Sandeshkhali, the locals discovered sufficient braveness to open their mouths. They made two particular allegations: that the TMC leaders like Hazra and Sardar illegally seized their farmland and turned them into personal fisheries with none compensation. And the TMC employees routinely referred to as girls from the village to the celebration workplace late within the evening and sexually abused them. The primary is a basic case of the reversal of land reforms by which the Left Entrance within the late Seventies and early Eighties had distributed privately held agricultural land above a hard and fast quantity among the many landless and the land-poor peasants. The second is a typical demonstration of monstrous masculine energy by activists of a political celebration bereft of any binding ideological-moral self-discipline.
Predictably, the TMC now makes an attempt to distance itself from the Sheikh, Hazra and Sardar. And the Bharatiya Janata Get together is on an overdrive to color it as exploitation of Hindu girls by Muslim goons. With the celebration’s large occupation of the Opposition area in Bengal at present, it might discover fertile floor to additional polarise the turf within the days forward of the Lok Sabha elections. But, the untold story of Sandeshkhali is without doubt one of the usurpation of absolute energy to misappropriate property from the poor in a reversal of land reforms and rejection of native democracy by an emergent class of rural wealthy, pampered and promoted by the Trinamool Congress.
Dwaipayan Bhattacharyya is Professor on the Centre for Political Research, Jawaharlal Nehru College, New Delhi
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