Hindutva vs Hilsa in West Bengal: How Mamata Banerjee will counter Amit Shah's saffron surge
As Bengal gets more and more polarised with the arrival of the BJP as a potent political force, identity politics too seems to be gaining momentum in the state. For long, Bengalis have considered the BJP as a party of the Hindi heartland, catering to the cow belt. The party had mostly limited itself to the non-Bengali (expat Marwari, Bihari) vote bank in the state.
But now with Amit Shah declaring Bengal as the final frontier, BJP is aggressively wooing ethnic Bengalis using Hindu nationalism, raking up issues like minority appeasement, Bangladeshi immigration, etc.
"BJP has governments in 19 states. These states do not matter as long as the party does not have a government in the land of its founder Shyama Prasad Mookerjee," Shah said at his recent rally in Kolkata.
Of late, the party has been keen to highlight Mookherjee's legacy – as one who saved Bengali Hindus during partition. This renewed stress on Mookherjee was to reach out to the Hindu Bengali middle class. For a state like Bengal, with its painful history of partition, the BJP’s polarisation agenda has brought to the surface deep wounds that had always existed, but mostly remained subliminal during the decades of Left rule.
Over the past two years, a jittery Mamata has asked her party men to engage with the Hindu community over religious events like Ram Navmi and Hanuman Jayanti, the two religio-political planks being used by members of the Sangh Parivar to spread its influence in the state.
However, the Assam NRC report has provided the Trinamool Congress supremo with a unique opportunity to counter the BJP's communal narrative, by playing the language card. Opposing the citizenship drive, the TMC has termed it the BJP’s “ploy to drive out ethnic Bengalis from Assam”.
"Out of the 38 lakh Bengali speaking people discarded from the list, 25 lakh are Hindus and 13 lakh are Muslim Bengalis," Ms Banerjee has recently stated after meeting a delegation of Bengali community leaders from Assam.
While the BJP wants to gain from the rift between Hindus and Muslims in Bengal, Mamata hopes to tide over the communal divide using the Bengali ethnic identity by whipping up cultural nationalism. She aims to push a larger Bengali secular narrative, where the community unites based on its linguistic identity, casting aside the religious divide.
With the firm backing of the TMC, suddenly pressure groups like "Bangla Pokkho" have sprung up in West Bengal which champion the greater cause of the Bengali speaking people, while vociferously campaigning against the BJP. They talk of Bengali cultural identity, linguistic pride in an attempt to bury religious fault lines and blunt BJP's narrative.
"Dilip Ghosh has threatened one crore Bengalis, this because Bengalis do not vote for a party of outsiders and communal fascists and riot mongers like BJP. If a party of outsiders, riot mongers, and money bags steps on the holy soil of Bengal to foment trouble then Bengal and Bengalis will give them a response that their 14 generations will not forget," says Garga Chatterjee, a professor at Indian Statistical Institute and convenor of the group.
Even a section of pro-TMC intellectuals have come out to openly slam the BJP over NRC. As part of her new strategy, Mamata has taken a slew of measures to stress on Bengal's linguistic identity – be it her decision to change the state's name to Bangla, her opposition to countrywide NEET exam in English or the state education department's decision making Bengali language compulsory in all government schools.
During Amit Shah's recent rally in Kolkata, TMC had put up posters terming BJP as an anti-Bengali party, forcing Shah to retort strongly.
"How can we be anti-Bengal when the founder of our party Shyama Prasad Mukherjee is a proud son of Bengal?" Shah questioned Mamata, adding that as devotees of Ramkrishna Paramhansa and Swami Vivekananda, his party aims to tread in the path set by them in Bengal.
With the BJP leadership attempting to reconnect with its past in order to find the Bong-connect, Mamata seems to have found a new weapon to target the saffron brigade.
"Amit Ji does not eat Hilsa, but we do! It is found here as well as in Bangladesh. So let me ask, is Hisla an illegal immigrant too?" she quips, happy to use the most quintessential symbol of Bengaliness – the fish.