Successive electoral victories at various levels in West Bengal seem to have provided a cover for the Trinamool Congress (TMC) to indulge in brazen displays of violence in the recent civic polls. West Bengal’s ruling party openly defends its unruly cadres who engaged in irregularities. Had the TMC been responsible enough to accept that its sympathisers were responsible for the widespread vote-loot, it would have been reasonably easier for the party to publicly acknowledge that regulating the cadres is impossible once they believe that the customs of their tribe are the laws of nature, to echo George Bernard Shaw. However, as the scholar Gregory Benford theorised, “... stable societies oscillated between banquets and barbarism”, and the TMC’s management decided to let the cadres resort to the latter to ensure the party’s electoral success. Such barbarism in order to win an election, be it to the civic council or the State Assembly, is nothing new in West Bengal. What the Congress had done in the 1970s the Communists replicated in elections in the years that followed, especially when they faced the prospect of losing the mandate. In later years, the TMC used the inimitable phrases, ‘scientific rigging’ and ‘social engineering’, in order to embarrass the Left Front.
The Communists made way for the TMC after three decades in power; but no one would have expected the TMC to amend its predecessor’s formula of ‘social engineering’ to outright barbarism so very quickly. Thrashing senior citizens, targeting journalists and capturing booths, the TMC won conclusively. And its leaders refused to express any regret and blamed the Governor, the Opposition and even the State Election Commission for the mayhem in the Asansol and Biddhannagar municipal areas. In doing this, they seemed to overlook the fact that the electorate had earlier refused to countenance similar arrogance on the part of the Communist Party of India (Marxist). State violence in Nandigram and Singur united the anti-CPI(M) bloc to facilitate the TMC’s victory in the 2011 election. Soon after the first round of violence in Nandigram in March 2007, Kolkata had witnessed protest rallies by civil society activists : it turned out to be a shrill wake-up call for the CPI(M). This week, some journalists came together again to protest against targeted attacks made at them. Many who took part in the rally were close to the ruling party. Meanwhile, the TMC also lost in the Siliguri Municipal Corporation and Mahakuma Parishad. So the wake-up calls are loud and clear in the run-up to the 2016 Assembly elections.
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