Khela Hobe!

The game is afoot in West Bengal, but what is being played?

Gopal Krishna Gokhale -- an early 20th century Indian social reformer and a proponent of selfrule is widely considered to be a rare liberal voice in the sub-continent’s political tradition. He greatly admired Bengal, and famously said: “What Bengal thinks today, India will think tomorrow.” 

Well, when it comes to Hindu nationalism, (the Indian/Hindu/West) Bengal is definitely not a front-runner. While the Hindu chauvinist BJP gained parliamentary strength in New Delhi throughout the 1990s and formed successive governments during 1998-2004, West Bengal continued to vote for communists.  

The Left Front ran the state for 34 years to 2011 -- the longest stretch of democratically elected communist rule anywhere in the world. Even as the Modi wave swept the rest of the country, West Bengal held out under Mamata Banerjee’s steadfast opposition to Hindutva.

Then, earlier this year, the Indian prime minister was handed his biggest electoral setback when the West Bengal chief minister was re-elected with a resounding majority in the legislative assembly. 

Khela hobe -- the game is afoot! 

That was the viral rallying cry of Banerjee’s supporters before the election.

And she has kept up the tempo -- khela hobe -- she continues to say. But what exactly is the game? 

Of course, political animals know that the zinger is from our side of the Radcliffe Line. A colourful politician from one of our cities, someone with the height, gait, and swagger of Amitabh angry-young-man Bachchan, once upon a time challenged his political opponents to meet him in the street -- khela hobe! 

The video went viral in 2013, and became an election ditty across the border in 2021.

This wasn’t, however, the only link with Bangladesh the election campaign had. Banerjee had used the slogan Joy Bangla -- associated with the 1971 War of Liberation in general, and Awami League in particular -- in several public meetings. She had also expressed her admiration for Bangladesh’s founding president.

What exactly is the game she is playing?

Meanwhile, the losing side also had Bangladesh connections. Far more disturbing ones. 

Narendra Modi visited Bangladesh, ostensibly to mark the country’s 50th birthday. But he also visited the temple of a particular caste that was apparently expected to play a crucial role in several marginal seats. 

And Modi’s party ran videos that used images of atrocities committed by Pakistan Army in 1971 and claiming that Banerjee was soft on Muslim terrorists, or something like that. 

This was one ugly campaign. And worryingly, whatever game is being played over there, it’s probably far from over.

In the 2019 national election, Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party captured 16 of the state’s 42 seats to the Lok Sabha (the federal legislature), up from 2014’s two, and the highest ever scored by a Hindu nationalist party in the state. Banerjee’s Trinamool Congress lost ground, but still had more seats in 2019 than a decade earlier. The Left Front, in contrast, went from 15 seats in 2009, to two in 2014, to zero in 2019.

In the newly elected state assembly, Banerjee’s party has 213 seats, not that different from 211 won in 2016. Modi’s party lost the election decisively, bagging only 72 seats. But five years ago, there were only three BJP legislators in Kolkata.

Meanwhile, the mighty Left that ran the state for so long, dwindled to, wait-for-it, zero seats in both 2019 and 2021. 

That is, the only parliament with a Bengali leftist member is the one in Sher-e-Bangla Nagar!

What is going on here? Did the Bengali communists become Hindu chauvinist in the span of a decade, as might be implied by a straightforward reading of these results?  

Following on the footsteps of seminal works on 20th century Bengal by JH Broomfield, Joya Chatterji, and Partha Chatterjee, Ishan Mukherjee has argued that the late but eventual rise of BJP in West Bengal is a reflection of evolving political choices of the bhadralok elite. 

Broomfield depicted the bhadralok in the classic 1968 book on pre-partition Bengal titled Elite conflict in a plural society: twentieth-century Bengal” as:

…a socially privileged and consciously superior group, economically dependent upon landed rents and professional and clerical employment; keeping its distance from the masses by its acceptance of high-caste proscriptions and its command of education; sharing a pride in its language, its literate culture, and its history; and maintaining its communal integration through a fairly complex institutional structure…

Broomfield’s thesis was that the Calcutta-based, predominantly Hindu, bhadralok were opposed to democracy in pre-partition Bengal, and this opposition to majority rule contributed greatly to Muslim separatism, eventually leading to partition.  

A quarter century later, Joya Chatterji showed the role the bhadralok played in partitioning Bengal in the groundbreaking book Bengal divided: Hindu communalism and Partition, 1932-1947.  

Partha Chatterjee continued the bhadralok‘s post-partition political choice in an article titled ‘Partition and the Mysterious Disappearance of Caste in Bengal’. Mukherjee draws on Chatterjee and argues:

…. bhadralok interest was never expressed in terms of the interest of a privileged caste elite. It was always presented as the interest of the society as a whole, which would be realised under an enlightened “cultured” leadership. It was an elite that was supposed to be non-parochial, selfless and rooted in what was best in Bengal’s heritage—the true champions of progressive values in public life. Theoretically, with the right kind of education and refinement, anyone could become a member of this elite. But for all practical purposes, it remained a closed group that carefully monopolised all avenues to access such cultural resources.

While Congress was the initial political home of the bhadralok, they eventually gravitated leftward:

The strategy was to plant party members into all kinds of local groupings—from panchayats and municipalities to local youth clubs and even committees for organising public religious festivities. This subordinated the social to the political. Political power, tightly controlled by a caste-elite leadership of a centralised party machinery, flowed from its centre in Calcutta through tentacles that ran deep into the districts. This gave the urbane, cultured bhadralok of Calcutta an unprecedented amount of power over the entire territory of West Bengal. And the language of politics remained rooted in left-wing progressivism—non-parochial, pro-poor, even universalist.

With the implosion of the Left Front, the bhadralok now need a new home. On one hand there is Ms Banerjee, whose project is articulated by Garga Chatterjee as:

The Hindu Bengali majority political entity of West Bengal is a product of the 1947 communal Partition of Bengal. The public opinion shaped around 1946-47 for a partition of Bengal envisaged a permanent Bengali Hindu majority homeland. The official stance of West Bengal being just another appendage of the secular Indian union is far from how West Bengal was conceived by its proponents as a place for Bengali Hindus to flee to escape religious persecution.

This idea that West Bengal is the refuge of last resort for Bengali Hindus is something that is widely held, just like East Bengal (in its political form as the sovereign People’s Republic of Bangladesh) is the permanent Muslim Bengali majority homeland (and demographically increasingly simply a Muslim Bengali land). The gulf between constitutional official-speak from above and tacitly understood people’s conceptions from below is obvious. Mainstream political discourse with its set of lakshman rekhas necessitates the usage of codes, private pronouncements and the usage of signals that put forward ideological stances without publicly spelling it out. While the Trinamool doesn’t have overt Hinduness as its political ideology, being a mass-party, it also draws upon this understanding, not in the communal, exclusivist, anti-Muslim, hard-majoritarian undertone of the Hindu right, but as a near universally-shared conception in West Bengal of West Bengal being the fountainhead of Bengali Hindudom globally.

And pitted against her is Modi and Hindutva.

How will (Hindu) Bengal think tomorrow what (Hindu) India thought yesterday?

Regardless of the answer, the consequences will be profound. 

It appears that three-quarters of a century after the unholy days of bloodshed in Kolkata, Noakhali, and Bihar, games are again afoot over there. Khela hobe. Definitely. It’s just that Bangladesh will feel the effects of a game that it has never sought to play!

There may well be an ill wind blowing from the west, such a wind as never blew on Bengal yet. It may well be hot and dusty, and a good many may wither before its blast. And I doubt a cleaner, better, stronger land will lie in the monsoon when the rain eventually washes away the dust. 

A version of this was first published in Dhaka Tribune.