WEST BENGAL: In the world's largest democracy, a kingdom of authoritarian decay. (Part II)
An election poster of Mamata Banerjee with supporters showing their fingers marked for voting.
Please see the previous installment for background on West Bengal's troubled history up until the election of Mamata Banerjee.
When swept into power in 2011, Mamata Banerjee and the Trinamool Congress (TMC) and United Progressive Alliance that it was a part of vanquished the Communist Party of India (Marxist) or CPI(M) in an election that upended the political order in a state that had long been consistently ruled by the political left. On the national level, the TMC at the time was aligned with the India National Congress ("Congress") and its national government at the time led by Manmohan Singh. From 2009 to 2011 she had served in Singh's government as Railways Minister.
District map of the 2011 West Bengal Legislative Election when the TMC wiped out the Communist Party's 24 year majority.
Many TMC members had once been members of the Congress party, including Banerjee herself who was elected to the nation's lower house of parliament, the Lok Sabha, in 1984. By the late 1990s the Congress's internal rot from being in power during the vast majority of the years since independence led to the victory of the more Hindu nationalist ** Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)** in 1998 under Atal Bihari Vajpayee, and as a direct result some "reformist" elements within INC in West Bengal left the national party under Banerjee and created the TMC. But on a policy level the TMC does not differ very much from the Congress. Both are secular left-wing nationalist with a democratic socialist economic agenda. To this day the TMC and Congress have a love-hate relationship with the Congress. In 2017, TMC's Derek O'Brien, a member of the Rajya Sabha (the upper house equivalent to the US Senate), was at pains to explain who was more to blame for the failure of the alliance of opposition to the BJP: the Congress, TMC, or the CPI(M)? Host Karan Thapar of The Wire called her a "shrill middle-aged woman".
Accomplishments
When she came into office, Banerjee had to contend with a number of political crises that the CPI(M) under Buddhadev Bhattacharya had failed to resolve:
- The Ghorkhaland regional separatist crisis in the north, where the ethnic Nepali Indian minority wanted greater administrative control over their remote region.
- Teacher labour disputes were resolved by guaranteeing pay on the first of every month and lowering the retirement age for the profession.
- In an accomplishment that seems dubious to outsiders, Banerjee had the district of Nadia declared the first "Open-Defecation Free" area in all of India.
Iron Lady
Mamata Banerjee came to power under the slogan "Ma Mati Manush" (Mother, Motherland, and the People) which led to a book, song, and other symbolic tributes to her.
What has tainted Banerjee's reign has been the perception that like the CPI(M) regimes before her she is developing into an autocrat and proliferates the same corrupt and autocratic brand of politics as the Congress has on the national level in the past. Under Bhattacharjee the economy had grown steadily after 2004, but the criticism was that notwithstanding the Communists' supposedly proletarian beliefs the majority of the prosperity went to plutocrats. Prior to Partition, Bengal had been the location of the jute fabric industry as the plant was grown in the east and then milled in the west into fabric. However, in 1977 when the CPI(M) came to power the state received another blow as labour violence led to a fall in its industrial output as part of India.
In 2016 after five years in power there was ample praise of how under Banerjee the state's economy had grown at rates greater than India at-large (10.5% vs. 7.5%), that its per capita GDP growth was remained at more than double the national level, and that the capital Kolkata was growing at a rate faster than any other major Indian city besides Chennai.
However, while the state's economy seemed to be booming, its government was besieged by allegations of corruption. In 2013 the Saradha Group financial services and chit fund firm fell apart as it was revealed as a Ponzi scheme that had duped investors out of between Rs 200-300 billion ($4-6 billion). Chit funds are a type of savings and investment plan popular in India. Among the individuals arrested in the Saradha Group scandal was Transport Minister Midan Mitra, as well as other TMC legislators. This scandal especially tainted the state government due to the cozy relationship between Sudipta Sen, the owner of Saradha Group, and the Kolkata government that even included using police motorcycles to drive around the city. According to some Congress insiders at the federal level, it was due to police investigations from outside of WB that Banerjee took the TMC out of the United Progressive Alliance.
Three years later this saga had still tremendously hurt the reputation of the chit fund model which had been a popular option among India's poor in areas that lack banks or financial services as well as among middle class professionals looking for a practical investment option. Unfortunately in January 2017 another TMC politician MP Sudip Bandyopadhyay was arrested in connection to the Rose Valley chit fund scam.
The Saradha Group was no mere blip on the screen of TMC corruption; in 2011 the investigative journalist group Tehelka published a story by Mathew Samuel in which he implicated members of of parliament accepting bribes from him in his undercover role as a senior official of the fictional company Impex Consultancy Solutions. To this day the scandal, known as the "Narada sting operation" continues to be investigated by the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) in relation to CM Banerjee of West Bengal and her counterpart in nearby Odisha (Orissa) Naveen Patnaik. One of the reasons the Narada scandal cannot be as directly attributed to political persecution is that Samuel had in the past exposed the rival Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) of corruption in Operation West End in the early 2000s.
Secularism - Not as harmonious as one would think
The Students Islamic Society India (SIMI) and the Hindu Bajrang Dal organization are portrayed in this illustration as twin elements in an effort to destroy Nehru and Mahatma Gandhi's vision of a secular India. But many Hindus Indians, whether religious or not consider the secularist Congress to be all too willing to betray India's heritage in the name of appeasing minorities.
Institutional corruption is not the only reason that Banerjee's time in power is considered to be a period of malaise. Like the Congress on the national level, Banerjee's TMC promotes a secularist vision for West Bengal that supposedly integrates Muslims and Hindus alike into a cohesive society. This idealistic point of view has been difficult for Hindus to continue supporting in the face of the history of wars with Pakistan, terror attacks by home-grown Muslim groups, as well as inter-community violence throughout India including West Bengal. Whereas the separated nations of Pakistan and Bangladesh explicitly reduce religious minorities to a status that is effectively second class, India has attempted to maintain at least the semblance of separation of state and religion.
In historic Bengal, itself divided along religious lines as discussed in Part I, this remains a major issue given the deaths of as many as 3 million people, many of them Hindus, during the Bangladesh War of Liberation from Pakistan. During that conflict the East Pakistan government relied on the help of local Bengali Islamic fanatics like Ghulam Azam's Jamaat-e-Islami and the collaborator militias known as the Razakars in order to perpetrate a reign of terror on the separatists, in particular the Hindus among them. The bloodshed, though not as well documented as other genocides, attracted the attention of US Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-MA) and British musician and Hindu convert George Harrison who penned the song Bangladesh.
Between partition in 1947 and the liberation war in 1971, millions of East Bengali refugees had fled from the Pakistani enclave for various reasons whether it was the 1964 East Bengal riots in response to the theft of the Holy Relic of Hazratbal in Kashmir or general lack of civil rights led to the flight of an estimated 5 million to West Bengal and the rest of India.
As suggested above in the late 1990s the nation's Hindus that compose almost 80% of the population began to sour on the Congress and secularism alike and the BJP was able to gain a significant foothold and dislodge them by embracing Hindutva. This religious and nationalist movement remains controversial as grassroots Indians of the Hindu religion tend to identify with it whereas the media elite shun it as backward. In fairness, Hindutva militants of groups like the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) have contributed to much of the communal violence from the time of British imperial rule through the modern times. Yet the demonizing of Hindutva has caused a counterculture of those calling for the exposure of the bloodshed in India not only under the British but previously under the Muslim Mughal emperors starting with Timur in the middle ages. The Belgian Flemish anthropologist Koenraad Elst, one of the most prominent western authors on the Hindutva phenomenon, has called the secularism embraced by Banerjee, the Congress, and others as Negationism and likens it to Holocaust denial.
In West Bengal, the issue of inter-community violence has cropped up repeatedly between Muslims and Hindus under the TMC several times from the Canning riots of 2013 caused by the murder of a local Muslim cleric to Baduria in 2017. The latter incident was caused by the arrest of a Hindu youth who had shared a meme deemed offensive to the Prophet Muhammad. A mob of of 5,000 Muslim rioters gathered outside the police station to demand he be turned over to them and then ransacked surrounding Hindu shops and homes in frustration.
While the TMC has been in power, the Union government has bristled at the state's turning of a blind eye toward illegal immigration of Bangladeshis that in 2016 was numbered at a staggering 20 million people. West Bengal's own population as of 2011 numbers about 91 million people making this massive group of illegal immigrants a substantial portion of the general population. Ahead of the 2019 general election the issue of Bangladeshi immigration is predicted to be a major plank of the Modi government in its reelection campaign to attract new voters in the traditionally left-wing West Bengal. Among citizens of the region this willingness to tolerate the new influx is viewed as a strategy to earn the votes and can be seen in parallel to similar illegal immigration issues in western countries like the US and France.
Death squads for Mamata?
Photo of BJP worker Dulal Kumar hanging from an electric pylon in West Bengal. (Deccan Chronicle)
While the BJP's popularity in West Bengal appears to be growing so is the suspicion that its activists are now a target for a violent campaign of voter intimidation the likes of which Americans would probably say is reminiscent of 1960s Mississippi. Only this time the motivation is not racial but purely political. On May 30 a youth of the Dalit (Untouchable) caste was found hanging on a tree with a placard declaring that he was "punished for working for the BJP". On June 3 a 30 year-old man named Dalal Kumar, also linked to the BJP, was found hanging from an electric pylon in the town of Purulia. This series of suspicious deaths has led the BJP on both the state and federal level to point fingers at the TMC for trying to shore up Banerjee's shaky rule by any means necessary.
If true that these deaths are homicides committed by TMC loyalists, it is a sign that Banerjee's legacy has become tainted to the point where they fear any political opposition. In 1977 Indira Gandhi (see below) lifted a state of emergency in India. "The Emergency" had been declared in response to increasing unrest due to her prior authoritarian attacks on the private sector and judiciary. In response, the public voted overwhelmingly for her opponent Morarji Desai, the head of the Janata Party, the precursor of the modern day BJP. The TMC is also facing several investigations against Banerjee and several of her ministers and acolytes in relation to the Burdwan terror plot that killed two Islamic terrorists building a bomb in their house as well as for the Narada and Saradha corruption probes.
A "first" only as long as everyone else is forgotten
Indian PM Indira Gandhi meets Benazir Bhutto, daughter of deposed Pakistani Premier Zulfikar Ali Bhutto and herself a future two-time prime minister of Pakistan. Photo likely taken in 1972 during the signing of the Simla Agreement ending the 1971 Indo-Pakistani War.
Some would say that Mamata Banerjee is a trail blazer, but in the Indian subcontinent women leaders since the Partition of 1947 have been a point of pride for both citizens of those countries and observers from abroad. She is following a well tread path cleared by others during far more tenuous periods of their nations' histories. In every country that was once part of the British Raj there has so far been at least one female head of state or government:
- Indira Gandhi, daughter of the founding prime minister of India Jawaharlal Nehru, became prime minister on the death of Lal Bahadur Shastri and served from 1966 to 1977 and then again from 1980-84 when she was assassinated by her Sikh bodyguards Beant and Satwant Singh. Though an iron-willed stateswoman, she abridged civil liberties and imposed socialist controls that held India's growth back for decades while ethnic and religious tensions simmered under her emergency rule.
- Sirimavo Bandaranaike, the widow of Sri Lanka's iconic leftist Prime Minister SWRD Bandarainake succeeded him on his death in 1960 when her country was still a Dominion realm of Great Britain and served a total of 18 years in office during three nonconsecutive terms, guided the nation to republic status, and served as the matriarch of one of the country's most powerful political dynasty. Her status was so great that her daughter, who served briefly as prime minister in 1994, deferred to her after the election that year allowing Sirimavo to serve until her death in 2000.
- Benazir Bhutto, daughter of Pakistan's deposed and murdered president Zulkifar Ali Bhutto was the controversial leader of the Pakistan People's Party (PPP) and prime minister from 1988 to 1990 after the end of the Zia ul-Haq military dictatorship and again from 1993 to 1996. She was also wrapped up in numerous scandals, especially given her marriage to the shadowy son of a Sindhi tribal chief Asif Ali Zardari, and after her assassination in 2007 he was elected president and served five disastrous years in office.
- Khaleda Zia, the widow of Bagladeshi President Ziaur Rahman, was prime minister twice (1991-96 and 2001-06). Although renowned for bringing the country to economic prosperity, Zia was convicted on corruption charges in 2018.
- Ironically Zia's main political rival is the current female prime minister Sheikh Hasina who succeeded her in 1996 and has served in office from 2009 until today. Their rivalry is called the "Battle of the Begums". Begum is a female title of high nobility or seniority in Turkish, Persian, Hindi, and other regional languages.
- In 2016 Aung San Suu Kyi was elected the first State Counselor of Myanmar (formerly Burma). Though not an integral part of the Indian subcontinent, Myanmar is a formerpart of the British Raj and continues to share a tenuous border with both India and Bangladesh. Due to the conflict with the Bengali-speaking Rohingya Muslim minority in the northwest, some western leaders are calling for the revocation of Aung's Nobel Prize that she earned for leading a decades-long effort against the nation's military junta. The world's focus on the Rohingya, while perhaps appropriate, is not reciprocated toward the non-Muslim population in Bangladesh that has fled to West Bengal that is primarily Hindu and represents a refugee population ten times as large as the Rohingya.
Outlook
In rural West Bengal polling violence marred elections to local village councils in April and May 2018 (NDTV).
In just under a year India will go to the polls to determine whether Narendra Modi's BJP government will continue in power. For Mamata Banerjee political survival may depend on how well she can balance the interests of the TMC's political affinity to the opposition Congress led by Rahul Gandhi with the likelihood that Modi will be reelected and she will have to continue dealing with the Hindutva government in New Delhi. But the TMC will also have to defend its own Union (federal) level seats in the Lok Sabha (lower house) and Rajya Sabha (upper house). If the BJP makes inroads in local polling the question will soon become whether the election will be free and peaceful. In April and May2018 violence marred panchayat (village council) elections leaving at least nine people dead on election day. The Chief Minister's nephew Abhishek Banerjee has been credited with stoking much of the violence by calling for several regions to be rendered opposition-free.
West Bengal may continue to be one of India's most developed states, but with the encroachment of an authoritarian corrupt government, religious sectarian violence and illegal immigration it may prove to be the most problematic one in the world's largest multiparty democracy.