2024-08-31 05:56:30
Author: Benjamin Zachariah
Massive clashes broke out between protesters and police this week during a march to the state secretariat Nabanna over the rape and murder of a female junior doctor at Kolkata’s RG Kar Medical College and Hospital. Earlier, after details of the heinous crime emerged and the police’s inaction, people across Bengal and other parts of the country took to the streets demanding ‘reclaim the night’, that is, the freedom to move around fearlessly and safely even at night. But the protests were met with some organised violence and incidents of targeted vandalism at the hospital where the crime took place attempted to destroy the possibility of gathering credible evidence. We still cannot know for sure what the young woman had discovered that led to her brutal silencing. The Chief Justice of the Calcutta High Court condemned the ‘failure of state machinery’. But the mob is itself a part of the state machinery. Note that the ruling Trinamool Congress has distanced itself from the violence of its alleged workers, and tried to stand by the demands of the protesters.
Hooliganism as a political tool
The control of local violence is a key feature of Bengal politics, evident at least since the infamous Calcutta massacre of 1946, when calls for violence by the Muslim League-led ruling coalition resulted in the killing of thousands by goonda-operated gangs. Goons remain the pivot of party politics in the state. This is as true for the Left Front as for the Trinamool.
Earlier, the Bengal Congress had openly used intimidation practices under then CM Siddhartha Shankar Ray, who ran a regime of informal and state-sponsored violence against the Naxals. By now, Bengal had become a natural habitat for goons. A goon is a person with political connections and capable of organising workers into informal violent force. In the Marxist language of the Left Front government, goons organised the ‘lumpenproletariat’ and so in their eyes, the party was justified in deploying them, following the path of the Congress. Lumpenproletariat is part of the Communist vocabulary meaning a group of criminals, vagabonds and the unemployed who lack awareness of their collective interests as a disadvantaged class. Goons formed the main support base of the next government.
Goons settled in the system itself
One cannot access local services, run a small business, or go about everyday life without appeasing the local goons. A goon defecting is an early warning of a change in political currents. A loyal Left Front ‘bhadralok’ explained that goons can be relied upon to keep things in check, thanks to the bourgeois fear of the ‘people’. Often the threat of violence is more important than the actual violence. Stories of local violence, which is part of intra-party feuds, which may include rape or cannibalism, are widely exaggerated.
The Trinamool’s rise to power in Bengal was attributed to dissatisfaction with the previous CPM government among Bengal’s intelligentsia, who began deserting it in 2007. They felt the Left had been in power too long and had turned its back on its middle-peasant voters and turned to Chinese-style Communist-controlled capitalism. A group of old Naxalite Maoists also joined the left, following violence prompted by the CPM’s attempts to evict peasants in Nandigram and Singur.
A legacy of violence
Soon the Trinamool turned on those who had brought it to power. While siding with the then Congress-led coalition at the Centre, it unleashed state-level violence against the Naxals with its harmless name Operation Green Hunt. And the Trinamool did not inherit the CPM’s intelligentsia but it did inherit a large chunk of the Left cadre and its methods of political intimidation. The CPM’s intellectuals had long since deserted. The cadre itself in West Bengal, which frequently switches sides, is at least potentially a cross-party phenomenon with illicit activities and loyalties within and outside the party.
well running machinery
Trinamool has shown no restraint. The use of extortion, violence, rape and murder by cadres as reward for party loyalty has been largely allowed. Similar to many populist political parties in India and around the world, Trinamool’s unlawful use of violence is carried out by a party cadre whose affiliation with the party can be denied if necessary, especially if they go too far or are caught. The benefits of the potential use of violence against the civilian population often outweigh the actual use of violence. And yet the troubling question remains: what made society so quickly hostile to women, so eager to use rape as an everyday form of political violence, why did the threat of rape become so common in everyday conversations? Was this a repressed tendency that would emerge occasionally, and only be fully realised once the repression was lifted?
(The author is a historian at the Einstein Forum, Potsdam, Germany.)