With less than a month for polling to begin in West Bengal, violence is a given. Intimidation, dread, injury, blood and death are commonplace and are experienced as the inevitable cost of political contests. In fact, the people of the state are so inured to violence now that no one’s shocked that the Election Commission has ordered flag marches by central security forces not just in constituencies mapped as disturbed in remote rural locations, but in the posh streets of South Kolkata. Instead there is resignation – what will happen once they leave if we vote against the ruling party?
The anxiety over West Bengal’s endemic violence is reflected in the Election Commission’s arrangements for the Assembly elections that begin on April 4. The state’s 294 constituencies will vote in six phases over seven days. A month before the first polling day, the Election Commission had already deployed 200 companies of central security forces all over the state. The confidence-building measures the poll body has initiated like flag marches and house-to-house visits by central security forces and observers, and a close watch on what political parties are up to, is a measure of the Election Commission’s apprehensions about guaranteeing free and fair voting.
EC alert
Complaints have already started pouring in. The Communist Party of India (Marxist)-led Left Front has accused chief minister Mamata Banerjee of issuing a veiled threat at a public rally to an already cowed electorate. The Election Commission has requisitioned footage of that rally. Even if the poll body does not fault the Trinamool Congress leader, the fact that it wanted to verify what she said is a pointer to the tensions of elections in West Bengal.
Video footage, photographs and news reports all confirm that violence is routine in West Bengal, especially during elections. Goons brandishing guns and bombs and party workers being killed while making rudimentary bombs are accepted as part of the intensely competitive politics of the state. Violence also manifests itself in bizarre ways. In Kolkata, the former associates of a man who said he had lost faith in the Trinamool Congress left him unconscious on the railway tracks and he lost his legs after a train ran over him. There have also been several smaller clashes across the state leading to injuries, both major and minor.
In Nandigram, where political violence crossed all limits 10 years ago, there is a difference this time – the police is now being targeted. In Kolkata’s Alipore, Champdani in Hooghly, Bolpur in Birbhum – Trinamool Congress mobs trashed police station premises. In Malda’s Kaliachak, mobs carrying Anjuman Ahle Sunnatul Jamaat banners and the Akhil Bharatiya Hindu Mahasabha clashed, and then set fire to the police station and about two dozen vehicles. According to the CPI(M), about 180 Left cadres and supporters have been killed in political violence since 2011. The Congress and the Bharatiya Janata Party have their lists of casualties too.
It’s common for security forces to seize arms and ammunition ahead of elections. In the past week, a farmer was arrested after he ploughed up a hoard of guns and cartridges in West Midnapore as he was working in his field. Stockpiles of bombs were also recovered from cow sheds and abandoned huts in Nanur in Birbhum district.
Violence the new normal
Between elections too, violence is accepted as the everyday casualty of doing politics in West Bengal. So inured is the population to violence that it is on only rare occasions and for very particular incidents that there is shock followed by an outcry. Amra akranto or “We – the attacked” is one such exception. Its members are victims of violence by the Trinamool Congress after it captured power from the Left in 2011. Its members include Jadavpur University professor Ambikesh Mahapatra, who was arrested for circulating a cartoon of Mamata Banerjee on the Internet, and Pratima Dutta – widow of Trinamool Congress leader and environmental activist Tapan Dutta from Howrah who was shot dead by his party men metres from his home last year. The Congress and the Left Front have set aside seven seats for Amra Akranto, whose candidates will contest as Independents supported by both sides.
Elections are like extreme weather events in West Bengal. Almost every one of them in the last 50 years has left a trail of death, destruction and desecration of the citizen’s right to freely choose her party and candidate. Since 2011, when the Trinamool Congress took charge, elections have turned into a confrontation between the institutions that guarantee free and fair polling and the ruling regime.
State Election commissioner Mira Pande’s epic battle in 2013 over the conduct of the panchayat elections – when she requisitioned central security forces to ensure peaceful and fair polling – which went up to the Supreme Court, was the most public example of the clash between the institution, the Constitution and the ruling regime. This was followed by another battle in 2015 between State Election Commissioner SR Upadhyay and the West Bengal government during the Kolkata and Bidhan Nagar Municipal Corporation elections. These experiences have perpetuated West Bengal’s habits of converting elections into a political combat with cadres and mercenaries doing their worst, and the state administration exerting itself through the bureaucracy and the police to protect the ruling party’s turf.
