Durga Puja is to Bengal what Ganesh Chaturthi is to Maharashtra and Navratri is to Gujarat. It is the biggest and most popular festival for the Hindu community in and from the state. Bengali diasporas around the world celebrate Durga Puja. Rarely does it happen anywhere that the festival, which is held according to a religious calendar published annually in the form of a ‘panjika’ or almanac, is interrupted by the state machinery…except in West Bengal. There, for the past three years, the festival has been disturbed by the state government headed by Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee.

In 2015, the festival was scheduled to be held from October 19-23. Normally, the last day of the Durga Puja, called Vijaya Dashami or Dussehra, is followed by the immersion of idols, called visarjan. This is supposed to start from sunset on Vijaya Dashami.

That year, as had happened on several occasions in the past, Durga Puja and the Shia Muslim commemoration of Muharram coincided. Mamata di or Didi, as the West Bengal CM is popularly known, decided in her wisdom that it would be best if the Durga Visarjan was postponed by two days to allow for Muharram to proceed unhindered.

Both Durga Visarjan and Muharram involve processions of large numbers of people, mainly men, and apart from the traffic nightmares that would doubtless result from two processions hitting the streets, there was also a fear of communal clashes being sparked off by some small altercation or accident.

Her decision did not elicit much of a reaction from the Hindu Bengali community beyond a few murmurs. The Durga Puja visarjan is largely left to rougher elements anyway; bhadraloks don’t really participate in it.

The following year, the dates of Durga visarjan and Muharram again coincided. Didi repeated the formula of postponing Durga visarjan. This time, there was a stronger pushback at the postponement, and three petitioners – two households and an apartment complex who organized pujas – went to court against the decision. The Calcutta High Court pulled up Didi’s government and ordered that the Durga visarjan should be allowed to proceed unhindered. In his order, the judge, Justice Dipankar Dutta, noted that Muharram had been held on the day after Vijaya Dashami in the past, “but no restriction of the nature impugned herein was imposed”.

“The state government has been irresponsibly brazen in its conduct of being partial to one community, thereby infringing upon the fundamental rights of people worshipping Maa Durga”, the judge said, adding that the festival’s dates could not be advanced or postponed according to the government’s whims. “There has been a clear endeavour on the part of the state government to pamper and appease the minority section of the public at the cost of the majority section without there being any plausible justification. The reason, therefore, is, however, not far to seek,” the court said.

Oops, she did it again

Despite this, Didi has gone ahead and announced yet again this year that Durga visarjan will once more be postponed for Muharram. The Durga Puja this year is from September 26-30. The visarjan would normally begin from the evening of September 30.

The Bengal government now wants it to start from October 2. Didi clarified on Twitter that “This year Durga Puja & Muharram fall on the same day. Except for a 24 hour period on the day of Muharram immersions can take place on October 2, 3 and 4.”

There is an administrative aspect to the immersion of Durga idols that cannot be denied. The state government has a responsibility to maintain law and order. There is a civic responsibility as well, to ensure that there is minimal traffic disruption. In order to do this, it is common for state governments in places where such festivals involving the immersions of large numbers of idols take place – such as Maharashtra during Ganesh Chaturthi and West Bengal during Durga Puja – to stagger the process over a number of days. All idols are not immersed on a single day due to logistical issues.

The real trouble with Didi’s decision is therefore one of symbolism. To understand the politics, a bit of context is essential.

The back story

Imagine the 10th day idol immersions of the Ganpati festival in Maharashtra being postponed for Muharram. It is unimaginable; it would not happen. The reason is that, quite apart from the likely blowback from the Shiv Sena, it would be politically suicidal for any party that attempted such a thing. Similarly, one cannot imagine interference by any party in the cultural practices of Tamil Nadu, such as Jalikattu, or of Punjab, such as Baisakhi.

Didi’s Trinamool Congress is primarily a Bengal party just as the Shiv Sena is mainly a Maharashtra party. The difference in political posturing between the two is a reflection of ground realities in these two states.

The Hindu Bengali is a relative nonentity in today’s Bengal. The state has a 27 per cent Muslim population and is electorally powerful as a block. The political muscle also comes largely from the Muslim and Bihari underclasses. Big business is controlled by powerful Marwari seths. The Bengali bhadralok, the traditional exemplar of the polite Rabindra Sangeet-singing middle class, matters less and less with each passing year. With neither money nor muscle, his views don’t really matter outside his drawing room. In any case, the typical bhadralok has long been stereotyped, with some justification, as being politically liberal, socially conservative, bookish and timid.

Bengalis – more Hindus than Muslims – opposed the 1905 Partition of Bengal and had it undone. There was even a proposal at the time of independence, mooted by the Muslim League’s Huseyn Suhrawardy and Subhas Chandra Bose’s brother Sarat Chandra Bose, for a united and independent Bengal.

Eventually, though, the British divided India in a tearing hurry and left. In 1947, East Bengal became East Pakistan in a Partition accompanied by millions of horrors. So many people died. So many families became refugees. The tragedies in Punjab were memorialised; they even have a Partition museum. The tragedies in the East were largely forgotten, even in Bengal itself.

Silence as psychological defence

Political psychologist Ashis Nandy has remarked on this in his foreword to Mapmaking, a book on Partition stories from the two Bengals. Silence, he wrote, had become the main psychological defence of the generation that witnessed Partition. “Few have had the inner courage to confront the violence,” he wrote. In eastern India, according to him, “it has been a case of cultivated aphasia, not negligence”.

Partition in the West was a quick cut, a jhatka. It saw the trains with their cargoes of dead bodies crossing the new border in both directions. Then the survivors were left to pick up the pieces. In the East, it did not happen quite so abruptly. It went on in East Pakistan, after 1947. There were riots in 1948, 1949, and through the 1950s and 1960s. The 1950 Barisal riots were particularly severe. Apart from thousands killed, lakhs of Hindus became refugees. In 1964 again, there was a major round of rioting and another few lakh people were forced out. All of this led up to the 1971 genocide in which an estimated three million Bengalis were killed by the Pakistan army. Hindus were targeted in the genocide, which counts as one of the worst in world history.

It was all a very long way from the bonhomie of 1905.

Bengalis were very differently affected by these events depending on where they were from. The Hindu minority of East Bengal underwent a series of tribulations, so much so that every family has a story…but it is one that is buried under the cultivated aphasia that Nandy diagnosed. The Hindus of West Bengal did not suffer the tragedies of Partition or 1971. The Muslims of East Bengal were the biggest beneficiaries of Partition. The Muslims of West Bengal, unlike the Hindus of East Bengal, did not face persecution.

On the contrary, the 27 per cent Muslim vote has been important for all political parties that have ruled the state so far, with the result that the minority was actively courted by all.

The political message that Didi’s latest move conveys is not hard to interpret. Indeed, even the Calcutta High Court last year had indicated as much. It’s apparent to any unbiased observer that Muharram takes precedence over Durga Puja in Didi’s Bengal. By extension, the Muslim takes precedence over the Hindu. This is the message Didi probably seeks to convey, since she would be keen to retain her hold on the Muslim vote against her competitors from the Left and the Congress.

At a social level, there is general amity between Hindus and Muslims in Bengal. Many Muslims participate in Durga Puja. It would have been a fairly easy matter for the state government to work out an even-handed formula that did not give precedence to one community over the other. This was not done.

Didi has a soft corner for the fundamentalist elements in the Muslim community in Bengal, rather like her predecessors, the Leftists. Writer Taslima Nasreen was banned from the state by the Left Front government and remains banned under Didi. The person behind Nasreen’s eviction, Idris Ali, is now a Trinamool MP. Didi’s government also includes a minister, Siddiqullah Chowdhury, a hardcore Deobandi who reacted to the recent triple talaq judgment of the Supreme Court by saying the court had no right to interfere in the religious practices of Muslims, and that they would live by Sharia laws.

Her partisan support of Muslim religious fundamentalists and people who are in and out of jail on corruption charges may help her win one more election. In the long run, though, Bengalis, both Hindu and Muslim, may pay the price for her political ambitions in the currency that they have done so many times since 1905: blood.