Lok Sabha Elections 2024 | Why Justice Abhijit Gangopadhyay joining the BJP in Bengal is significant

Lok Sabha polls 2024: Suvendu Adhikary and Justice Abhijit Gangopadhyay seem to be a good combination for the BJP in Bengal—an earthy streetfighter and a sophisticated urban achiever. (Image credit: ANI)

On 5 March, Justice Abhijit Gangopadhyay announced his resignation from the Calcutta High Court, five months before his due retirement. He then joined the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). He will definitely contest in the coming Lok Sabha election. This has set the cat among the pigeons in West Bengal politics.

Justice Gangopadhyay fits the role of an authentic middle-class hero and is seen as a courageous and honest man. He relentlessly pursued corruption charges against the Mamata Banerjee-led Trinamool Congress (TMC), even in the face of death threats. In 2022, the people of the state were shocked by revelations that over more than a decade, TMC politicians may have taken what could be hundreds of crores of rupees in bribes to hire thousands of completely undeserving candidates for teaching jobs in government schools all over the state, including many who scored a perfect zero in the recruitment examinations.

In July 2022, the Enforcement Directorate (ED) arrested Partha Chatterjee, one of the government’s seniormost ministers, with several portfolios including education. The ED raided two homes owned by Chatterjee’s lady friend, a minor Bangla film actor, and found around Rs 50 crore in cash and gold and jewellery worth several crores.

Subsequently, the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) arrested several TMC leaders in the top echelon of the state’s school education department.

TMC has been in a tizzy ever since Justice Gangopadhyay’s BJP announcement. He has been attacked almost on an hourly basis by TMC leaders with what can only be termed as rank personal abuse. They have attacked his character and his morals with no evidence to back these allegations up. One of them has even asked for all his High Court judgments to be rescinded because they were politically motivated. But why is the TMC so rattled?

One, the jurist’s entry into politics lets the BJP define the terms of the election campaign around one of the two burning issues in Bengal right now: corruption. The other is law and order—I shall come to that later.

A senior state bureaucrat whom I met some months ago told me that the teacher recruitment scam was only the tip of the iceberg. Most entry-level state government jobs, from peons to policemen to clerks, were up for sale, he said, and this has been so for quite some time. The system was elaborate and well-oiled. If you were asked to pay Rs 5 lakh and didn’t have the funds—no problem, there was a man who would lend you the money but of course at an insanely high interest rate. So you take the loan, get the job, and it is absolutely imperative for you then to be corrupt from Day 1, take bribes, so that you can get rid of your debt burden. This sets off an endless cycle of corruption that subverts the very moral basis of any society.

If true, this is horrifying. And government recruitment is just of the many scam allegations plaguing TMC leaders in the last few years. These include sand, coal and cattle smuggling and ration distribution. Mamata Banerjee’s unease may be because most people in Bengal, other than diehard TMC supporters, see Justice Gangopadhyay as an uncompromising anti-corruption crusader.

The second reason why TMC may be worried is that Justice Gangopadhyay can be a crucial piece of the jigsaw puzzle that has eluded BJP in Bengal till now. The party had never really managed to find a well-educated and cultured face that the urban bhadralok instinctively related to. Most of the well-known Bengali “intellectuals”—from film directors to poets and academicians—have been virulently anti-BJP. Justice Gangopadhyay is the classic urban bhadralok. He ticks all the boxes, including speaking perfect English, an important criterion.

Overnight, BJP does not look like a party comprising only uncivilized non-Bengali boors, one of the main planks that Mamata Banerjee used to win the 2021 assembly election.

The second burning issue in Bengal in law and order, where too, Gangopadhyay, as a former judge, may have powerful symbolic value. Bengal’s worst-kept secret is that violence and industrial-scale extortion by TMC thugs have become the new normal. The matter has come to a head with the Sandeshkhali affair.

Sandeshkhali is a village in the North 24 Parganas district, a mere 75 km from Kolkata. Some two months ago, an ED team reached there to raid Sheikh Shahjahan, the TMC lord and master of the area. The team was attacked by his goons, and three of the officers were seriously injured. And suddenly, the covers were blown off from over an incredibly sordid tale.

Hundreds of Sandeshkhali women have been taking to the streets and revealing details about Sheikh Shahjahan’s reign of terror. For nearly a decade, Shahjahan and his henchmen were involved in every criminal activity one can think of. These were not limited to physical intimidation, extortion, loot, vote rigging and selling public distribution system rations in the black market. He and his thugs would pick up any woman they liked, gang-rape her and send her back home after a night or two of pleasure. Any man who protested was soundly beaten up and threatened with death. If anyone approached the police to file a charge against Shahjahan, the police told them to go and ask Shahjahan for permission.

After the ED attack incident, Shahjahan went into hiding and the police apparently could not find him for 50 days. This is of course ridiculous. Finally, when the public outrage became too much to ignore, the TMC leadership possibly asked Shahjahan to be “found”. But the video of his being brought to a police station is stunning. He strides in confidently, followed by policemen at a respectful distance, as if they were his retinue.

When the Calcutta High Court was asked to transfer his case to the CBI, the court agreed. But immediately, and perhaps not so surprisingly, the state government appealed the decision in the Supreme Court. The apex court summarily rejected the appeal and Shahjahan was reluctantly handed over to the CBI.

Bengal’s police force is perhaps the most compromised one in the country. No one in the state really expects much action or justice from the police, and none at all if you are complaining about a TMC-connected person. The police will not file your charge and will, in all probability, report your audacity to the local TMC overlord. You will face the threat of extra violence.

Will Justice Gangopadhyay have an impact on the Lok Sabha polls? It is true that the TMC is discredited in the eyes of much of the public and has never been so vulnerable as it is right now since it came to power 13 years ago. Suvendu Adhikari is the most energetic leader the state BJP has ever had and draws big crowds to his rallies. But the bhadralok find him uncultured and some of his Bangla pronunciation grating on the ear. These things matter in Bengal. So, Suvendu Adhikary and Justice Gangopadhyay seem to be a good combination—an earthy streetfighter and a sophisticated urban achiever. I speak only about the BJP because the Left and the Congress are currently spent forces in the state. Yes, Gangopadhyay will certainly have an impact. Yet the election ground realities are disquieting.

Every election, the Election Commission sends possibly more per capita central paramilitary forces to West Bengal than to any other state. But days before the elections, all across rural Bengal, TMC thugs visit suspected non-TMC-voting households and threaten them with death or worse if they even went to the polling booth. In many cases, just to make sure, their voter cards are taken away. Post-poll violence, including murder, as an instrument of political reprisal, is routine. Of course, the state police is of no help.

To give TMC a scare, Bengal’s voters have to be reassured that they can come safely out of their cycle of fear.