The Spectre of the NRC and the Weaponisation of Ignorance in West Bengal

Political violence has always been an integral part of Bengal’s history. The forms of such violence – over time – have mutated and transformed themselves. In the series Bengal: Genealogies of Violence, The Wire attempts to capture some of the milestones that mark the narratives of political bloodshed spanning more than eight decades. Read the other articles here.

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“ ‘Muslimke bhara di-i na!’ Sohore basa khujchhen Nishat” (Do not rent out to Muslims! Nishat searching for a home in the city) — News headline on the front page of Anandabazar Patrika, August 11, 2018, that reports a Calcutta house owner refusing to give rent to Nishat, a Muslim student who was looking to rent a place in Kolkata]

In their seminal work Histories of Violence: Post-War Critical Thoughts, Brad Evans and Terrell Carver observed that given the contemporary normalisation of violence in our everyday culture, the most important question that we all need to address in any analysis of contemporary violence is: “How does violence function politically?”

In the aftermath of the National Register of Citizens of India (NRC) controversy in Assam, Bengal has made it into the headlines, with chief minister Mamata Banerjee vigorously taking up the NRC issue, accusing the Central government of playing murky “divisive politics,” leveraging the NRC.

Subsequently, political battle lines in Bengal have been sharply drawn, with hostilities along party lines escalating by the day. Given the violence during the recent panchayat polls and also the long history – especially since the early 1970s – of political violence in the state, one can imagine the rutted road to the 2019 general elections.

Notwithstanding the state’s largely syncretic culture and its much talked-of progressive politics, that Bengal has a dominant history of violence is undeniable. The right wing's recent attempts at theologising the Bengali public sphere have to be situated against the backdrop of the state’s long-standing culture of fierce political antagonism. The current political bitterness arising out of poll-driven allegations and counter-allegations on the NRC, evident in Amit Shah's rally in Kolkata on August 11 this year, evokes important socio-political questions. Questions that relate to human rights, politicisation of ignorance and violence.

Shadow lines of division

During this period of intense debate around the NRC, words such as ‘deportation’, 'ghuspethia' have been frequently bandied about in political deliberations and on television shows. Border states in the eastern and north-eastern parts of India such as Bengal, Assam and Tripura, where mass refugee influx took place during the partition, had panicked reactions over the manifestation of such official hostility towards those who migrated to India leaving their own lands and properties in Bangladesh. All these states have a porous border, and many households in Bengal even today can look out at the pastures of Bangladesh from their windows.

The 'shadow lines' of international division appear more tangible in the aftermath of the NRC final draft. Without going into the rationality behind such menacing forms of border sentiment, this essay attempts to looks into the political aspect of such neo-jingoism. In this context, Bengal may emerge as our primary frame of reference, especially if we are to believe the BJP leaders who claim Bengal to be the next minefield for NRC-fication. This calls for an inquiry into the complex mechanism of political violence, something that indoctrinates and impels ordinary citizens to adopt or witness violent acts with scant regard for its consequences.

Read more: The Changing Faces of Political Violence in West Bengal

The act of 'witnessing' is significant in this context, for, as a concept, it can take active or passive form. While active witnessing may refer to suffering as a victim or a close watcher of the suffering, someone who experiences the suffering as her/his own, the passive variant makes the witness an inert and thoughtless receptor of violent actions. As ordinary citizens, the ‘majority community’ that expects to remain unaffected in this whole debate over the NRC might ‘function’ like the passive witness of the act, even expect to extract benefit from it. One may recall here the work of Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben, who, in Remnants of Austwitz, argues that the only person entitled to be the real witness is the dead or the victim of violence.

The strategic politicisation of terms like 'deportation', 'outsiders', 'gaurakhshak', 'illegal intruders', etc., leads to weaponisation of ignorance. Many Indians now blindly conform to the dictates of a 'knowledge-democracy' – driven, among others, by popular gimmick and nationalist rhetoric and deepened by Aadhaar’s  dataism – something that is distinct from a 'thinking-democracy', characterised by active and thoughtful participation of the people.

Hannah Arendt's distinction between information (knowledge) and thinking as separate categories becomes crucial here to analyse a totalitarian regime. Media-driven misinformation can easily be passed off as information in a country where majority of people are ignorant of their democratic rights and democratic responsibilities. This explains the whipping up of internal squabbling among communities and groups in the name of identity, nationality and authenticity – concepts potent enough to lead to fear, insecurity and consequent violence

This debate around the authentication of legal citizenship in Assam has travelled to Bengal with the BJP hoping to use the deportation of illegal intruders or ‘outsiders’ as a ploy of polarisation. As mentioned earlier,  provocative and calculated demands have been raised to launch similar NRCs in other states such as West Bengal. This has generated panic among many in Bengal itself.

People check for their names on the final draft of the state's National Register of Citizens after it was released. Credit: PTI

The very word ‘deportation’ evokes memories of forceful deportation and extermination of millions of helpless people in Europe during World War II. The incidences of mob lynching, organised trolling, circulating hatred through fake news, strategic rumour mongering, and minority persecution that India has witnessed after the 2014 Lok Sabha elections portend serious constitutional and institutional crises. This leads us to consider whether India is fast becoming an ‘ethnic democracy’ in which the supremacy of one particular majoritarian community is slowly taking place with the help of overt and covert political and legislative measures. The Sangh parivar is deepening communal divide at the micro level to trigger social unrest so that the public sphere can be communally transformed.

Political violence has a long history in India and in Bengal. When the proponents of Hindutva talk of staging an ‘Assam’ in Bengal through a proposed NRC, they are aiming to capitalise on the deeply entrenched wounds wrought by Partition and post-Partition violence in Bengali psyche. Apprehensions on a possible 'civil war' and 'bloodbath' as a fallout of the NRC might be far-fetched and possibly a bit too premature, but in a country where an old Muslim citizen is mercilessly lynched in Rajasthan or a Muslim boy is stabbed to death in a packed local train allegedly for his Muslim identity, political violence can take any virulent manifestation even in a state like West Bengal. It must be pointed out that, despite occasional communal tensions and sporadic political violence (the recent panchayat poll exceeded the usual levels of violence), both the communities have been living in a reasonably peaceful condition so far. So the question remains: How is the Bengali mind, relatively 'non-communal' so far, being saffronised today?

The politics of religion

The CPI (M) in its thirty-four year rule ignored the religious questions and left them unaddressed. The growing saffronisation and theologisation of the Bengali public sphere, evident from the violent and reactive celebrations of Ram Navami and Hanuman Jayanti in West Bengal, would bear out such a hypothesis. There is a need for comprehensive critical engagement with the growing presence of religion in public sphere, with the Left and liberal forces failing to address crucial socio-religious questions and the far-right misappropriating and usurping these spaces. As the Left parties have been reduced to a pale shadow of their former self in Bengal, the political void, caused by the virtual decimation of the 'Left hemisphere', has been hijacked by the Right.

During the Left rule, the state virtually discouraged official participation in religious matters. While the present Trinamool Congress regime has been accused of resorting to 'soft Hindutva' and 'appeasement politics', the overall ambience of this state has so far stayed relatively calm and peaceful.

Despite the 1947 communal riots and sporadic inter-religious feuds in some areas, West Bengal has not witnessed large-scale incidents of engineered religion-based hate-mongering. To the Right wing, Bengal provides a new turf to create trouble upon for electoral gains. But the question arises: If Bengal is different from Uttar Pradesh, why are we so apprehensive that the Right will make a dent there? The overall general opinion in the country still holds, that the Bengali bhadralok will find it culturally difficult to embrace aggressive Hindutva politics. Nurtured in Tagorean and other traditions of syncretic liberalism, the average Bengali, it is popularly believed, will be repelled by religious fascism.

Also read: The Unholy Nexus of Land, Development and Violence in Bengal

In such a context, witnessing children walking in religious procession, armed with swords, sticks, trishuls and daggers in their hands in the name of Rama, is indeed an unfamiliar phenomenon. Deciphering the factors contributing to the growing saffronisation of Bengal’s public culture is a challenge for social observers, civil society stakeholders, political pundits and academics.

What does this trend imply for Bengal politics? Has the bhadralok tradition collapsed or is it on the wane? One could offer a narrative account of how the Bengali public sphere has been taken over by a 24×7 commercialised media culture and nationwide normalisation of low-key xenophobia, and the extinction of progressive Left-liberal space that had kept communalism at bay in West Bengal for so long.

Bengali society has nurtured subterranean communal tension

Constructive engagement with the everyday, including popular religion as prescribed by Ashis Nandy, to address our now almost ‘lost’ but still somewhat ‘retrievable selves’ – selves that are likely to connect to the quotidian and communitarian culture – is necessary. Otherwise, the far-Right would easily hijack public sentiments on communal lines, as they are already doing. Consider, for instance, that an office bearer of the Bengal BJP assures Hindus and non-Muslims that they have got nothing to fear from NRC. So this bogey of the ‘outsider’ as a menacing threat is already working. Four young Muslim doctors in Bengal were asked by their Hindu flat owner to vacate the flat during the recent NRC flare-ups. If we delve deep into the Bengali psyche, we realise how Bengali society, popular for its so-called cosmopolitanism and intellectual bent, has nurtured subterranean communal tension.

Ironically, the same fear is being generated today by resuscitating the memory of dislocation, by virtually dislocating a large chunk of people on the question of legitimate citizenship. So, the failures of the present Central government in almost all sectors are tossed aside by foregrounding the polarising non-issues, to play upon the imagination of 'ignorant' citizens.

Although religion has not in the past been used in Bengal's politics the way it is being attempted now, political sectarianism and consequent bloody political feuds of different forms were part of Bengal's culture.

During the Naxalite Movement (which itself adopted violence as revolutionary means), police informers used to spot young Naxalites – the 'outsiders' as they were called – entering a locality for secret strategic meetings and give them away to the authorities. This is vividly depicted by writer Mahasweta Devi in her legendary novel Hazar Churashir Ma. Young 'outsiders' the novel shows, were brutally killed by the state police in fake encounters.

Today, India is in the midst of yet another virulent process of political and social ostracisation. And Bengal may be swept up in this tide of hatred. Cases of lynching have taken place in Bengal as well, and even the mentally challenged have not been spared. This makes us rethink and worry whether some kind of psychological and social mutation has already taken place in the public mind and the public sphere in recent times. One may recall here Michel Foucault's cautionary view that knowledge and truth not only “belong to the register of order and peace” but can also be found on the “side of violence, disorder, and war.”

Anindya Sekhar Purakayastha is associate professor at the Kazi Nazrul University, West Bengal. Subhendra Bhowmick is assistant professor at the Sidho Kanho Birsha University, West Bengal.

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