Mrs. Mamta Banerjee as an upper caste (precisely Brahmin) has always had a soft corner for BJP. It was apparent when she was part of Mr. Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s cabinet. It is apparent now when her lone MLA is the part of BJP government in Manipur.
As we are all aware that this is the same Vajpayee who lured the RSS karsewaks into demolishing the Babri masjid by saying ‘Dharti ko samtal hona hoga’. As a political unit of RSS, BJP is always inclined in the direction of making India a one coloured and one religion dominated country.
Now let us try to understand the ideological or I dare say moral vacuum that has taken place in West Bengal. West Bengal has always been the hub of left-wing intellectuals. And it was the only intellectual opposition that the BJP was going to face in its conquest to West Bengal, be it on the political ground, TV studios, panchayat or assembly.
So from an RSS point of view, left-wing intellectuals needed to be eliminated first. But RSS was all aware that they can’t have a direct ideological fight with the intellectual left (This one has an interesting history when Golwalkar saw ‘commies’ a threat to India and proposed to help Congress eliminating them). So let’s get back to what RSS conspired.
They found a pawn in a charismatic Brahmin leader who could easily allure the so-called Muslim intellectuals to take on and uproot the left. The ‘easy-to-be-allured’ Muslim whose history of fighting left goes back to the Soviet-Afghan war when they fought for the capitalist against the communists.
The right or wrong of taking a particular side in a war is always debatable but what is undisputed is the foolishness of a particular community when it is not even able to bargain for itself. They get used again and again for scoring some brownie points. The points that can only be redeemed at an individual level. They do no good for the community.
Today it may seem that a Brahmin lady is putting a fight for you. But it will be a very myopic vision. If we try to analyse the situation by broadening our view we will find that an intellectual opposition has been eliminated.
Muslims have always been voiceless because of the lack of their true representatives but now they are just puppets with a pre-installed voice of ‘Yes Ma’am’ and nothing else. They have lost their bargaining capacity and now they can’t even stand against the wrongs that are being done to them. This has put the community in a vicious cycle of unending misery and backwardness.
As I am writing all these I’m getting reminded of a man again and again whose far-sighted vision has given me and millions like me to think and write by self-analysis. Yes, I’m thinking about Sir Syed Ahmed Khan because he would have never liked to practice politics by losing his own identity.
He didn’t have a long beard but before going to England he made sure that people recognise him as a Muslim. On the contrary, a Muslim of West Bengal is losing his identity for the sake of a petty chair in assembly. The Muslim community deserves a better rational leader than this.
