Since the days of British rule, Kolkata had been both famous and infamous for being the michhil nagori (city of protest march). The Hindu upper caste middle class, known as bhadralok, used to have a big presence in those marches because, apart from their own troubles, they had fellow feeling for the poor, downtrodden. All that rapidly changed after liberalisation in 1991.
The Bengali bhadralok, now upwardly mobile, started losing touch with the poor. The only relation that remained between the two classes was of master and domestic help, or master and driver of the car brought on loan. To this new middle class – whose earlier generations had stood like a rock behind leftist movements in the state – words like strike, protest, rally, march and Brigade (a ground owned by the Indian army, that hosts huge rallies of all political parties) became dirty words. From the 1990s, the Bengali middle class started believing that all of the above meant loss of time and working days. Only ‘jobless’ people – as if jobless because of their own fault – went to rallies and protest marches. The big newspapers published from Kolkata always wrote more about how many people missed their flights because of a protest march, than about what necessitated that march. Whenever there was a rally at Brigade, the papers would invariably run stories about people from rural Bengal visiting Alipore Zoo or Victoria Memorial after the rally. The suggestion was that they actually came to Kolkata for sightseeing sponsored by the party that called the meeting. The meeting at Brigade was a sideshow.
Thus, even as the Left Front extended its winning streak, Kolkata became deeply anti-protest as a city, and West Bengal, an anti-protest state. The last Left chief minister of West Bengal, the late Buddhadeb Bhattacharya, played no mean part in this political emasculation of the people’s strength. He went as far as to say that he unfortunately belonged to a party that calls for strikes.
The Mamata Banerjee-led Trinamool Congress has been making full use of this anti-protest, therefore anti-politics, psyche since 2011.
There have been multiple cases of rape and government denial since Banerjee became the chief minister. But the outrage remained local, at best spilled on to social media. Also, during her rule, the state has seen unprecedented corruption in the highest ranks of the ruling party (as Sarada scam, Narada scam, the School Service Commission scam etc bear out) but no large-scale popular movement against the government. Not only that, two consecutive panchayat elections (2018 and 2023) were literally stolen from the people. Even filing nomination became a matter of life and death for opposition candidates. In 2018, West Bengal broke a record. TMC won 20,076 seats out of 58,692 – the highest in terms of percentage since the first panchayat elections held in 1978. The number dipped last year but there were allegations that government officers played active roles in ensuring TMC win even during the counting of votes. The Calcutta high court suspended government officers for this.
Students of colleges have long forgotten what students’ union elections look like. Barring a few exceptions like Presidency and Jadavpur University, the last elections were held way back in 2017. Bengal has not seen a mass movement despite this. Almost three decades of vilification of protest politics had achieved what two centuries of British rule could not – making Bengalis silent sufferers who do not shout back.
All that has changed in last one month.
The stupor is over. It is sad that an aspiring doctor from an urban middle-class family had to go through inscrutable pain and die to impress upon the people of West Bengal and its capital the usefulness of protests. The fact that there are things more important than somebody being able to follow their daily routine has finally dawned on the bhadralok and bhadramohila (ladies and gentlemen). Sitting in stranded buses and cars, the very people who used to curse political parties and mass organisations are now looking for protest marches to join.
However, a section of the opinion-shaping urban middle class of Bengal is still averse to joining any protest held by the political opposition to Mamata Banerjee. Even though BJP is the main opposition party in the assembly, socio-culturally RSS-BJP is still unacceptable to many Bengalis. Even the BJP leaders know it. That is why they held a Nabanna Abhijan (seize the secretariat) programme under the banner of a ‘Paschimbanga Chhatra Samaj’, a name nobody had ever heard of.
On the other hand, it is still not deemed cool to march under the red flag of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) or other Left parties that were part of the Left Front government. Therefore, leaders of #ReclaimTheNight movement in and around Kolkata have declared that they would not allow any political flags in their programmes. Notwithstanding this arguable decision, their movement is drawing huge crowds. First held on August 14 night as a one-time protest, it has grown into a full-fledged movement and is catching on in rural Bengal. This became clear on the night of September 4. Ironically, at many places, it is the CPI(M) or its youth wing/students’ wing or the TMC that is egging people on to participate in these non-political marches.
Alumni associations of educational institutions, pensioners’ associations, local clubs and even school students are taking to the streets all over Bengal. Many of them find political parties nauseating. August 14 leaders of #ReclaimTheNight are on record, saying their movement is against rape culture and not just for justice in the R.G. Kar case. Rimjhim Sinha, one of the women who initiated the protest, said on a Bengali TV channel that no political party has created a safe environment for women. So, they have no faith in parties.
Under these circumstances, I was curious to know how successful the Left Front’s September 3 protest march against the alleged cover-up of RG Kar rape and murder case could be.
Even today, a large number of people turning up for something called by the Left Front or CPI(M) is common in most parts of Bengal. However, election results, particularly since 2016, have shown that those numbers hardly mean anything in terms of support. Therefore, I was keen to find out what kind of slogans were being raised, what kind of people had come to walk the talk and how the people outside the march received it.
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The slogans were expectedly more directly aimed at the government than the abstract ‘We want justice’ or ‘Justice for RG Kar’ that are heard in the so-called apolitical marches. Those two slogans were not done away with. But in this rally flaunting red flags, some slogans promised a long vigil for the deceased doctor in polished Bangla, others demanded catching the kingpin of the RG Kar case in more mundane language. The more interesting part of the march was the composition of people. There were urban elites clad in branded attire as well as rural people in cheap shirts and trousers. Over-dependence on the former class and alienation from the latter have been major reasons for the Left’s decline in Bengal and the process started when they were in power. Bengal’s poor have been identifying Mamata Banerjee as one of their own for almost two decades now. As a result, their presence in left front’s protest marches in the last few years have not been as common as they should be. Hence this was something to take note of.
I could not reach the starting point (Rajabazar Tram Depot) by bus because so many people had started to gather that traffic had to be halted half-a-mile away. Experience told me that the passengers of the bus I was on would start cursing the organisers of this march, with the common refrain “They destroyed West Bengal with all these meetings and marches for 34 years. Here they come again.” But to my surprise, everyone got off without a word. A boy returning from school was telling his mother “I’m too tired. I can’t walk from here.” The mother scolded him “Of course you can. Try and adjust for a day.”
Right from the start of the march, I was looking at the roads that meet APC Road from both sides. APC Road is among Kolkata’s busiest arterial roads and once it is blocked, traffic comes to a halt on all those connecting roads as well. On a Tuesday afternoon like that, I expected a lot of irked – even angry – faces among the bike riders, car drivers and bus riders. There were none. On the contrary, many were shooting videos of the march.
The nearer the march got to the end point, the crazier the scenes on both sides of the road became. Families standing on the balconies of multi-storied buildings were shouting slogans at full pitch. Mothers, bringing their children home from school, stood by for the march to pass. A man from the march went and handed one of the children a big flag. The child found a high stool to stand on and started waving the flag with all the strength he had, the mothers sloganeering at the top of their voices. Working class people employed in the shops on the footpath poured on to the street and started sloganeering.
But the fiercest support came from palpably poor women. They had come to show their support, leaving whatever they were doing. Some were carrying their small children. Some had rushed out in the middle of housework. They joined in with the sloganeerings even more ferociously than those walking. At one point, their participation felt like a loud guard of honour to the walkers.
Mind you, this group is the core voters of TMC. These are women who have to work from dawn to dusk – just to survive. They are the prime beneficiaries of the TMC government’s pet project – Lakshmir Bhandar (purse of Lakshmi) that provides them with Rs 1,000 every month (Rs 1,200 for women of the Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribe communities). The influence of TMC in those areas could be seen from the party’s flags hanging from the buildings behind those women. Near Khanna crossing, there is an old building waiting to collapse. On its first floor stood some women leaning over the rusty railing, jostling for space and shouting slogans, throwing fists in the air. They had so much energy that I feared the balcony would fall at any moment. Interestingly, a triangular flag with angry Hanuman painted on it, was hanging from a rod.
It seemed to me that these women, at least for now, have no qualms shouting for the red flag. It could well be the case that they do not mind who carries which flag. They only know which flag they dislike today. This should set alarm bells ringing in the TMC. On the other hand, the Left Front should realise that this is the class they had abandoned.
Originally published on The Wire
