Society | Roots of emerging Bengali middle class communalism

Subir Roy

In the last one and a half years or so I have repeatedly come across clearly communal feelings expressed in social gatherings of friends and relatives. This has come as a great surprise, as I had thought that communalism among the educated (therefore enlightened) had been banished for good from West Bengal during three decades of left rule.

It is this latent, but now out in the open, communal sentiment which the BJP is banking on to sharply improve its performance in the ongoing parliamentary elections. Irrespective of whether the BJP actually does as well as it claims it will, it is necessary to explain this return from the dead of a sentiment that had led to horrendous riots and killings as Bengal got divided and India became independent.

The animosity towards Muslims among a section of educated middle class Bengali Hindus is premised on the spectre of illegal migration from Bangladesh, leading to a change in the demographic character of the state. Figures do not rule social conversations, subliminal feelings do. And when the odd figure is cited, it is difficult to ascertain the authenticity of its source in these times of fake news.

As the whole phenomenon is happening in the region of the mind, it is necessary to go back into a bit of history to find out when the seeds were first planted. This history is dramatic in the way it changed course during its journey in the first half of the twentieth century to bequeath the sentiments that we have today.

Joya Chatterji of Trinity College, Cambridge, recalls in her book on Hindu communalism and the partition (Bengal Divided, 1995) that when Curzon partitioned Bengal in 1905, it created such a storm of protest that the government was forced to rescind its decision in six years. This put Bengal in the vanguard of Indian nationalism and upset the ‘settled fact’ of partition.

But there was a sea change in under four decades and when Bengal was eventually partitioned in 1947, along with rioting between Hindus and Muslims, there was hardly a murmur of protest. In fact, the partition of Bengal came at the head of an organized agitation demanding a separation on the basis of religion. This movement was led by the same section of Bengali society which undid the first partition of Bengal, the so called bhadralok or respectable people. In under a half century bhadralok politics had come full circle, moving from ‘nationalism’ to ‘communalism’ or parochial concerns.

How did this happen? Can knowing this help understand the present situation and try to foresee what course the future will take? The change of heart, on the part of the bhadralok who led Bengali society, took place at a time when society was changing rapidly and the balance was tilting away from the erstwhile elite. The bhadralok, who were the rentier class, saw their rent incomes dwindle at a time of agrarian depression. Plus, two political decisions, the “Communal Award and the Poona Pact, deprived the bhadralok of political power” even as it “gave new opportunities and power to some Muslims.”

The Communal Award of 1932 allotted Hindus, including the depressed classes, fewer seats in the new provincial Legislative Assembly than their population numbers warranted. This reduced them to a vocal minority in the House. The Poona Pact which followed the award further reduced high caste Hindus to a smaller minority.

The Communal Award sought to divide power in the provinces between rival communities through distribution of seats in the Assembly. In Bengal, Hindus were given 32 per cent of the total seats in the House when the 1931 census said they constituted 44 per cent of the total population. Muslims were also under represented in terms of their share of population (54 per cent), being allotted 47.8 per cent of the seats, thus putting them ahead of the Hindus.

On top of this came the Poona Pact which reserved a portion of Hindu seats for scheduled caste candidates. It was decided that of the 80 Hindu seats, 30 would be reserved for scheduled caste candidates. This reduced the proportion of seats for caste Hindus in the Assembly to 20 per cent.

The impact of this arrangement went beyond numbers. If, as a result of the pact about half of Bengal’s Hindus were depressed classes, whose members were not untouchables but of a lower social order, “this exposed the hollowness of bhadralok claims to represent a single Hindu community, unified by a superior cultural tradition.” What happened then to the idea of an overarching Hindu identity?

The irony of all this is that the Muslims of Bengal, whose supposed growing numbers because of illegal migration from Bangladesh is emerging as a political issue, are far different from many other groups of Muslims. They are not of Saudi Arabia backed Wahabi persuasion, the latter being behind a lot of Islamic terrorism across the globe. Bengal’s Muslims are influenced a great deal by Sufism, which is a gentle faith.

And the greatest irony is that their forebears, who were lower caste Hindus, converted to Islam to escape from the caste tyranny of Hinduism!

To come back to the present, whatever social position that the educated middle class Bengali, or the bhadralok, enjoyed ended with the demise of left rule. The tone of public life in West Bengal is today dictated by the rough and tough young men who are part of the support base of the Trinamool Congress. And the tone of electoral debate indicates that BJP and Trinamool campaigners are trying to outdo each other in the crudest of exchanges. Whatever the outcome of the elections, public life and discourse in the state will get more and more coarse.