West Bengal Chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee invited the Army over within hours of minority community rioters taking over the streets of Kolkata. He hadn't done so in a Nandigram simmering with tension for over 11 months.
For once, it was evident, that he didn't want the state police to get the blame for firing on Muslims. A reckless government was frightened out of its wits that the minority vote was finally slipping away.
Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee and his party apparatchiks were terrified. And the violent scenes of Kolkata on Wednesday with arsonists torching buses, pelting stones at passing vehicles and hooligans aiming brickbats at policemen were seriously alarming.
The Muslim in West Bengal seemed to be announcing his grave disappointment with the Left. Idris Ali of the All India Minority Forum has long been associated with the Congress, running the party's state minority cell. He has been one of those perennial hangers-on in the Congress headquarters of Kolkata which had long lost its sheen and glamour after Mamata Banerjee walked out to become the principal Opposition force in West Bengal.
It must have warmed Ali's cockles to witness such a huge turnout for an otherwise muted protest call against issuance of visa to Taslima Nasreen. The controversial Bangladeshi author has made Kolkata her second home many years ago.
If the Kolkata Muslim harboured ill-will towards her, it would have been apparent on the streets of the metropolis much earlier. May be, the recent Hyderabad and other demonstrations against the author had instigated the Kolkata Muslim and he had recently imbibed that same grudge against her.
But Nasreen alone couldn't have sparked off a bonfire of public transport vehicles. The animosity towards the establishment that was expressed in large swathes of central Kolkata appeared to have been nurtured for a long time. You did not need a Sidiqullah Chowdhury of Jamat-e-Ulema-Hind to emphasise that his supporters had joined in.
The burning issue of Nandigram was stoking the fires in Kolkata. The Muslims have been viewing explicit footage of how their community members had been at the receiving end in secular West Bengal's Nandigram. Television channels and newspapers have been discussing gang-rape and other inhuman tales of atrocities perpetrated by the omnipotent CPI(M) cadre.
Nasreen may have been the trigger, the catalyst; but the fury has been building up after Nandigram. The Muslim sub-conscious has also not forgiven Kolkata Police for its alleged involvement in the mysterious death of Rizwanur Rahman, a young graphics designer with a bright future. The senior IPS officers had no business to intercede on behalf of an affluent Marwari family and get the couple separated.
The Kolkata Muslim is different from the Bengal countryside Muslim. The Muslim villager in Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee's Bengal is extremely backward, suffers from a serious lack of access to education and his religiosity never gets the better of him because he lives in extreme poverty.
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From Burdwan's Katwa region to North Dinjapur, the average Muslim is a landless peasant, who finds it difficult to fend for himself and his usually large family. In Kolkata, the story is a lot different. Neighbourhoods like Kidderpore and Park Circus have long been taken over by Muslims who had migrated from Bihar and eastern Uttar Pradesh.
There is also a relatively better-off Bengali-speaking Muslim middle class, which is very refined, educated and upwardly mobile. The Urdu-speaking Muslim in Kolkata is more prone to fundamentalist standpoints and had actively participated in the post-Babri December riots of 1992. It is a worrying sign that Taslima Nasreen's staying on is troubling this section of the minority community in Kolkata.
The CPI(M) has never been able to win over the Urdu-speaking Muslim. It does not have a single Urdu-speaking legislator or top party functionary. Assembly Speaker, Hashim Abdul Halim, may not be strictly a Bengali-speaking Muslim but he has long lost his non-Bengali credentials having contested for decades from a typical rural constituency in North 24 Parganas, not too far away from the Bangladesh border.
In 1992, this major deficiency showed up and CPI(M) lost control in areas where rioters went berserk. On Wednesday, two CPI(M) party offices including one on crowded CIT road were ransacked by rioters. The helpless party had no way of preventing them from entering its premises. The Kolkata Muslim has always been suspicious of the Communists and their flaunting of atheism as a virtue.
For that matter, the CPI(M), despite its secular boasts, has not been doing too well in the Muslim-dominated districts. Its organizational weaknesses have been exposed in central Bengal where the Muslim-dominated Murshidabad and Malda districts are not voting for the Left. There was a time when the RSP was a force to reckon with in Murshidabad district but now goon-turned-politician of the Congress, Adhir Chowdhury has displaced the Left's organizational prowess with his Robin Hood charisma.
External Affairs Minister Pranab Mukherjee has won his first election from the Jangipur parliamentary constituency in Murshidabad. The Ghani Khan Chowdhury family retains its hold on the Malda seat even after the patriarch's death. Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee's trenchant criticism of the madrasas as a breeding ground for fundamentalist thought has not been received well by the community.
Mamata Banerjee has learnt from her Nandigram experience that the Muslim vote counts in West Bengal and she cannot afford to thrust it aside. That is why she is slowly moving away from the BJP. Seldom have the Muslims voted en bloc in the province but if Nandigram, Tasleema and Rizwanur bring them together, she could well channelise that anger in her favour.
The CPI(M) may have to pay a big enough price for taking the minority vote for granted. In the end, the Muslim vote is not going to be swayed by a loud anti-American stance. Like minorities everywhere, they will assess how secure they are under Left rule.
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