The missing ‘A’ word in media narratives on Bengal violence

In times when the charade of political correctness often directs journalistic accounts towards prudishness, the latest spate of communal violence in Basirhat region of North 24 Parganas district in West Bengal (WB) comes across as a stark reminder of the a-worded elephant in the room, which a section of Delhi-based national media has been refusing to register. It’s unlikely that the word would enter its vocabulary any time soon.

That’s primarily because its words have been carefully chosen to weave an alarmist narrative around the victimhood of minorities in the country. As the allegedly offensive Facebook post of a 17-year-old Hindu boy triggered a trail of violent attacks by Muslim mobs, the usual free speech brigade beat a hasty retreat in the face of reports that called out the aggressors without the camouflage of political correctness. But what was equally evident was the reluctance to see the larger pattern of political patronage to such thuggery in the state. Last year in October, the judiciary didn’t pull any punches in spelling out the word.

On October 6, 2016, the single-member bench of Justice Dipankar Dutta in Calcutta High Court observed:

“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 made these remarks while hearing a case in which for four consecutive years, 300 families in Kanglapahari village in West Bengal’s Birbhum district were denied permission to organise a Durga puja in their village following objections raised by 25 Muslim families of the village. In an unrelated development, the West Bengal government had set limits for Durga idol immersion on account of Muharram.

The most plausible explanation for the Trinamool Congress government’s opting for such limits is significant as a tool of appeasement. The same year, for instance, there were communal clashes at Naihati in North 24 Parganas district. The violence was traced to one of the celebratory Puja firecrackers allegedly landing on a Muharram taziya procession. With swords in hand, a Muslim mob reacted by desecrating the Durga idol and damaging the visarjan paraphernalia. Such acts of vandalism at visarjan were followed by communal clashes in the town, with Hazinagar area being the epicenter of the violence.

Large sections of the national media looked away from the clash, only to be punctuated by a report in The Indian Express. Interestingly, even sections of the Bengali press led by Anandabazaar Patrika were preoccupied with naïve cosmopolitanism about Hindu-Muslim bonding in North 24 Parganas while the district was witnessing violent clashes between the communities. No wonder, the daily’s sister publication The Telegraph hasn’t much to say about the political accountability of appeasement in the latest incidents of violence in Basirhat.

In January 2016, the emasculation of state police was evident in how a Muslim mob got away after torching the police station in Kaliachak in Malda district. Somehow having an uncanny resemblance to the latest round of violence in Basirhat, the mob was protesting against an offensive remark about the prophet. In an apparent bid to hush up the incident, the police station underwent quick repair work and most of the police personnel at the station staff were transferred. The signal from the state government was clear enough.

The fact remains that police action, or rather the lack of it, has seen a systematic alignment with Mamata Banerjee’s brand of appeasement politics. Her political calculations take into account the fact that 27.01 per cent of the state’s population is Muslim — a segment which can be consolidated to vote en masse. Such figures go as high as 51.27 per cent in border districts like Malda, while districts like Uttar Dinajpur and Birbhum have 49.92 per cent and 37.02 per cent Muslim population, respectively. This demographic consideration, it seems, has been too tempting for Mamata to resist.

That, to a large extent, explains why West Bengal has become a volatile site for clashes in recent years. Ranging from Malda to Dhulagarh (Howrah district) in December 2016, the list of recent incidents of communal rioting in the state is disturbingly long: Jalangi (Murshidabad), Chandannagar and Harsha (Hooghly), Bhagabanpur (East Midnapore), Kharagpore (West Midnapore), Kaliachak and Chan Chol (Malda district),  Hajinagar and Kanchrapara (North 24 Parganas), Sankrail and Dhulagarh (Howrah), and Katwa, Jamuria and Kanksha (Burdwan).

Interestingly, though not surprisingly, at a time when West Bengal is grappling with real issues of communal violence, a section of Delhi-based national media chose to invent imaginary demons of communal politics in the state around the Ramnavami procession. Such script had a narrative that the English media had woven in the wake of the unprecedented Ramnavami celebrations seen in West Bengal this year. The obvious naivete and hypocrisy of such an alarm were something I addressed in a different piece for this site. Clearly, the media had learnt something about how common such pomp in Ramnavami celebrations is if they had an idea about processions in the neighbouring states of Bihar and Jharkhand.

The search for convenient narratives, it seems, ceases to end in the reporting of latest clashes in Basirhat too. Sample the strap of this report in The Hindustan Times. It informs us about a Hindu man Kartik Ghosh stabbed to death (the first fatal casualty of this riot). However, the strap for the report goes: “Hindu mobs attacked a dargah and vandalised shops with Muslim owners, forcing the police to resort to caning and firing tear gas shells.” It’s remarkable that none of the headlines or straps in the newspaper’s reports about the ongoing clashes identified the vandalising mobs as “Muslim”.

What, obviously, is equally of concern are the repercussions of such appeasement on questions of national security. The view is gaining ground that the Trinamool-governed West Bengal has been soft on the infiltration of jihadi forces sneaking in from Bangladesh. In recent months, even the Bangladesh government has been claiming that Islamist terrorists of the Harkat-ul-Jihad al-Islami (HuJI) and the Jamaat-ul- Mujahideen Bangladesh (JMB) are finding safe haven in West Bengal and Tripura. In fact, this figured in summit talks the visiting Prime Minister of Bangladesh, Sheikh Hasina, had with her counterpart during her four-day visit to India in April this year.

Such considerations, obviously, are too much to ask for from the electoral battle-hardened expedient brand of TMC politics in which appeasement occupies the centrestage. That leaves one somehow fondly hoping that the flag-bearers of convenient narratives in national media have that moment of inconvenience, and spell out that a-word.

The author can be contacted on Twitter @anandvardhan26.

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