During a recent rally, Home Minister Amit Shah spoke about removing “them” from Bengal, “those who have four marriages”. Meanwhile, Prime Minister Narendra Modi has been the more benign face, snacking on jhaal mudi (spicy puffed rice) and taking boat rides on the Ganga. He has also been campaigning for Ratna Debnath, the mother of the 2024 RG Kar rape victim contesting as a BJP candidate from Panihati. While the party has been spinning her reportedly voluntary candidacy into its ‘nari shakti‘ rhetoric, the move has met with a lukewarm (to say the least) response from those who had fought for Abhaya, the victim.
The brutal rape and murder of the young doctor sparked the fuse of a protest that was, at its core, “a fight against the political ideology of both the TMC and the BJP, and their culture of impunity that only empowers the powerful”, as a “Reclaim the Night” protester told The Quint, requesting anonimity. “The BJP or TMC reaping any benefit from the Abhaya tragedy would be the height of irony”.
For many, therefore, this vote has come down to picking the lesser of the evils.
Ankita Ghosh, a former student of Jadavpur University who now works with a bank in Mumbai, has flown back home to vote. “I’m an executive class migrant and my privilege cushions me from the larger impact of any regime change that those in more constrained positions face. For me, question of regime change is then a matter of ideology,” Ghosh states.
Meanwhile, Samserganj’s Sultan Sheikh, a migrant worker from Murshidabad who spends most parts of the year in Kerala working as a carpenter, also came home because he wanted to vote. But he was not allowed to vote, as his name was under adjudication following SIR.
Sheikh and the thousands of voters in rural, Muslim-populated belts of West Bengal lining the Bangladesh border who have been struck off from this year’s voter list, now feel a threat to their identity, making the question of ‘Who is a Bengali’ much more pertinent to the community.
“We know that the BJP has tried to portray Muslims, especially the poorer migrant-worker population in Bengal’s border districts, as Bangladeshi. They have called our language “Bangladeshi language”, even though every one knows there is no such thing. We speak in Bangla. It is definitely a way to show us as outsiders, which puts our future existence in the country under jeopardy,” Sheikh states.
On the other hand, many especially among the Hindu community have been demanding development and see the BJP as the only vehicle that can roll in “unnayan” (development) and bring in Central funds essential for said development. There is also a growing anti-incumbency against the TMC government, which has been in power for 15 years. While some amount of anti-incumbency would thus be natural, the party faces allegations of corruption and syndication from the ground up. Irrespective of communal or caste make-up, every constituency that The Quint visited was plagued with complaints against the ruling party’s “high handedness” and corruption. Thus owning the Bengali identity question, as Jawhar Sircar mentions, is just as essential for Mamata as it is for Modi.
