Trinamool Congress government led by Mamata Banerjee ruled West Bengal unchallenged for over six years and no major mass movements, except the mass movements against the rapists her government protected and the Jadavpur University student’s movement, developed into the state that could seriously project the tyrannical rule of Ms Banerjee. It was Bhangar land movement that brought a fresh lease of life after a period of lull in the state since the fall of the Left Front government.
Mamata Banerjee never required a proper corporate perception management campaign to build up favourable mass opinion. A strong network of syndicate lords, local gangsters, real estate sharks, and women traffickers forms the backbone of her regime. She was quite confident about maintaining the status quo at the grassroots and then Bhangar land movement changed the equation. It even shook the empire of the gangster cum Mamata’s close aide, Arabul Islam, as the mass waves caused a huge erosion to the Trinamool Congress vote-bank.
Now Mamata has a serious contender, no political party, no strong and well-known leader, no regimented cadre force - but the people, fearless and militant people who will go the extra miles to ensure that the tyranny of Arabul Islam and through him that of Mamata Banerjee ends in the Bhangar area, 40 km south of capital Kolkata. It’s a subtle death knell for the ruling TMC and its reign of terror that has crippled the state since the last six years.
Karl Marx said-: “Hegel remarks somewhere that all great, world-historical facts and personages occur, as it were, twice. He has forgotten to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.” (18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, 1852) - this quote seems more lively in the present situation where Mamata and her coterie are facing the same problem her bete noire CPM-led Left Front faced exactly 10 years ago. They are in a lock-horn position in a battle waged by the state against the peasantry, against the people, on behalf of corporations.
Mamata Banerjee and her sycophants within and outside the Trinamool and even the opposition BJP, with which Mamata’s party has a secret bonhomie, are parroting those cliches about “development” and how the poor must sacrifice for the greater good of the “nation” that only belongs to the rich and the affluent upper-middle class.
No wonder if such a project would’ve been planned in the centre of Salt Lake or Ballygunge Circular Road in Kolkata, the rich would’ve voluntarily sacrificed their source of livelihood and their accommodations for the greater good of the “nation” and its “development”. No wonder we don’t see Maoists slinging assault rifles in the apartments of Shakespeare Sarani!
Yet, it wasn’t enough that Mamata Banerjee’s compassionate police, which the government claimed didn’t have any permission to shoot the agitators in the Bhangar area on Tuesday, 17th January, shot dead two protesters from point-blank range; the Chief Minister started sending contingents of police and intelligence sleuths to bully the peasantry and to flush out the students and youth by labelling them as “Maoists” from the area.
Mamata Banerjee started playing the same cards that Buddhadev Bhattacharya played during the Singur-Nandigram agitation, the colonial era “divide and rule” card, which happens to be a powerful card even this date. Her “outsiders” vs habitant people theory was propagated religiously by the pro-market corporate media to ensure that a rift is created among the protesters so that the government can find a leak to force its rule upon the rebellious people.
The elite and Brahminical upper-caste Bhadralok community of West Bengal, as usual, loathed the struggle waged by the poor villagers of Bhangar and called them buffoons who aren’t willing to be a part of the “development” bandwagon and despite considering Mamata Banerjee a scorn of their eyes, these Bhadraloks did stand behind her agenda of land acquisition in Bhangar this time, which clearly manifested that the class divisions and class antagonisms between the haves and have-nots have reached an unprecedented level in West Bengal.
No one questioned the wit of the upper-caste well-fed Bhadraloks of South Kolkata’s posh localities when they spew venom against the poor who struggle to save their land from the Tatas, Salems, and Power Grid corporations; it seems the normal order of the day to oppose those who oppose to give in before the mighty enterprise of “investment-development” sponsored by foreign monopoly capital owned enterprises and their Indian political representatives. The corporate media loves to dance according to the investor’s and advertiser’s music. So Jallikattu ban becomes a news, not the drought hit villages of Tamil Nadu, killing of two peasants during the Bhangar protests became a news, not the entire course of a fierce struggle against the atrocities of Mamata’s special stooge Arabul Islam and his coterie.
No one would ever force the South Kolkatans to vacate their homes and leave their source of livelihood at gun points, no one will break down their offices to build up a dam, or run bulldozers over their houses to mine the minerals beneath the soil. They are safe. Even the high tension wires that passes throughout the countryside while creating huge electromagnetic fields that adversely impact the health of the people and the livestock as well as the natural surroundings are far away from them. Their kids aren’t victims of electromagnetic effects. They are lucky.
As they are lucky so they have the privilege, unlike the people of Bhangar, Nandigram, and Singur, to justify the gross injustice meted out to the people and advise them to be submissive to the mighty corporations. Arabul Islam’s land acquisition at gun point isn’t something that these Bhadraloks should condemn and oppose. The violence used by Arabul Islam or Laxman Sheth are “pro-development” violence and hence the government remains mum, the media overlooks gross injustice, and the Bhadraloks don’t give a damn.
The godfather of Bengal’s corporate media, Ananda Bazar Group is continuously carrying out a propaganda campaign against the Bhangar land movement with a specific goal to vilify those who participated in the movement; it kept presenting concocted tales using fabricated details of arms haul and criminal - left nexus, to match the government’s version of the story, that blames the Maoists and other left-wing organisations for the violence.
The Bhadralok community remained aloof from any anti-establishment movements since the beginning of the neo-liberalisation era, because it got its share in the pie of “development” that followed the foreign capital’s infusion into the country’s economy. The share, of course, came at the cost of the poor people’s plight. It didn’t bother the Bhadralok community, whose aspiration to ascend higher on the ladder of success by appeasing the masters, i.e. the foreign monopoly and finance capital, to consider the havoc that was wrecked on the broad masses by the neo-developmental drive of the ruling bloc.
It’s a fantasy to expect the Bhadralok, the mobile and isolated Bengali middle and upper-middle class to integrate with the mass movements against corporate aggression on the land, water, resources, livelihood, environment, and the labour of the country. The movement rests on those for whom it’s a question of life and death, for whom it’s a burning question that will shape the future of their future generations. The Bhadralok isn’t one of them.
