Bhodroloks flirting with fascist forces? Disrupting the Bangla fabric is both tough and dangerous!

Bhodrolok (the Bangla word for gentleman) is not something that exists only among Bangalis and like many think is the ego of all Bangalis is also not true according to me. However, there lies a very major difference and that lies in who are considered to be part of the bhodrolok society or if I may put, people who are looked up to and are considered as social leaders in a Bangali society and many other parts of India. Bhodrolok here has nothing really to do with money although there might be many who have it but again they are considered bhodrolok for the intellect, for the knowledge, and maybe also for their degrees and secular midset. I would not say that Bangali society is the only society in India who believes in this but surely is one of the few and that is why fundamentalist powers and polarisation politics have failed to make a mark time and again. Like what we are seeing in the case of Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), Bengal is like their last frontier and most probably they did not fight the Lok Sabha elections as aggressively as they are doing for the Bidhan Sabha elections of Bengal.

How did this change in the Bengal fabric happen? Was it always very secular? Was caste always away from the politics of the state? I would not be able to talk very extensively about the history of caste politics in Bengal but to my knowledge, it had been largely absent for the longest time and that is not just politics, in society in general. Regarding the secular thing, Bengal and Punjab were the only two frontiers who suffered partition and that wound was deep enough to communalise people and build up thoughts that were anything but secular. However, with years of secular powers in rule especially the 34 years of the Left Front government, religion and caste and other such archaic thoughts were never brought into mainstream politics and no one went out begging for votes based on these. It is not the first time that BJP is trying to break into Bengal, it was never successful in all of the previous attempts. The thing about Bengal like I said was a sleeping giant called communalism, the giant who had slept for the good, the wounds of partition which had healed and while the rest of the country kept fighting for whose religion is greater, Bangalis celebrated Durga Pujo, Eid, Noboborsho, Christmas and everything you can name together.

Besides festivals, Bangalis have this huge appetite for all kinds of food and they never stopped at anything, be it paayesh or cake, bhaat or biriyani, beef or pork, but now suddenly there has been an infiltration of communal powers and slowly the politics of Bengal has seen a drastic change where people are chanting and abusing to get votes. Chanting from religious texts and abusing people from other religion and opposition parties. Bengal is seeing elections being fought over temples, mosques, religion and caste. The bhodrolok politics of Bengal was always about fiery speeches and slogans, about long marches and victory cries but never about polarisation and slurs, about abuse and majority appeasement just to create fear among minorities.

Hinduism is perhaps one of the vastest religion on earth where the meat and alcohol loving naked goddess Maa Kali is worshipped, the fruit and weed-loving skimpily clad Mahadev is worshipped who just has a tiger skin wrapped around his waist, and at the same time Bishnu is worshipped who loves the grandeur, be it in food or clothes. Just look at the diversity! We worship Radha and Krishna as the gods of love and they are not even husband and wife and what do Hindu fundamentalists do? They create anti-Romeo squads to frighten couples in public places. We worship Ardhanarishwar and the entity is neither male nor female and what does the fundamentalist government at the centre do? They stand against LGBTQIA+ rights. We worship Maa Durga, the powerful of all, the one who is the amalgamation of all the powers and she is not a male god but what does the patriarchal, misogynist Hindutva power believe in? That women are best kept at home and protected and are not meant to be left free because women are not meant for freedom. How much more do we need as examples? Can the worshippers of Maa Kali and Maa Durga suddenly be subdued in the ocean of patriarchy and misogyny? A democracy is as good as the condition of its minorities! But then, why when blaming Trinamool Congress, the focus is on minority appeasement when the reality is that there has been a lot of development when it comes to Hindu temples, Hindu pilgrimages, Durga Pujo celebrations and other such things across Bengal during Mamata Banerjee's rule? Why are people suddenly getting swayed away by the politics of the temple? Since when did keeping the minorities safe and happy become a sin? 

The basic problem of Hindutva forces is that they want everything to be homogeneous (which beyond anything else is against the basic law of nature), suddenly one Ram is above everyone and has become the Hindu identity for the fundamentalists. How? What exactly explains this anarchy? What wrong has Durga, Kali, Saraswati, Lakshmi done? Or are women not worshipped in the Hindu nation that these people visualise? Today, when I see many bhodroloks flirting with these fundamentalist powers, these powers of polarisation, I feel scared, I feel scared of what will happen if the sleeping demon wakes up! If communalism is a game, no one other than Bengal and Punjab can feel it and play it better, but what will happen because of that? No one will be left out, no one will be left untouched and no one will recognise Bangla as it is recognised today.

In the end, one thing is for sure, it is not easy! It has taken years of the right knowledge, the right education, the right mindset and the toil of many people to come where we stand today so I feel it will never be easy to destroy the whole Bangla fabric and that the people will stand up for themselves always and forever like it did during Indian independence. Today when someone tells me, Bangalis are very calm and cool, I just look at them, smile and think, “Pray that they are because if you have read history, you will never want that them to get back to tearing everything down once again!” 

If only a clarion call to Ram could have generated employment or drove away Covid19 or even got food on the plates of the poor, I would have myself gone out and asked everyone to do so!