When a large conglomeration of radical Islamist organisations managed to gather near one lakh people at a central rally in the heart of Kolkata to protest the trial of the 1971 war criminals in Bangladesh, this silence was at full display, again with honourable exceptions. These sociopaths were protesting the trial of Bengali Islamist collaborators of the Pakistan military in 1971. They were responsible for at least tens of thousands of murders, tortures, rapes, arsons, forced conversions, kidnappings and loot, at a scale unprecedented in Bengal – with Hindu Bengalis being predictably over-represented among the victims along with a huge number of victims who were Muslims. These collaborators, mostly affiliated to the Jamaat-e-Islami, figure among the real scum of the earth.

In the great ‘red’ city of Kolkata, the city of protests, the largest public assembly about Bangladesh was in support of war criminals. The media and the political class mostly acted as if this never happened, just like the murder of the Nadia five never happened. But it did. The power calculus that ties the hands of the powerful to call a spade a spade has ensured a certain rot in inter-communal situation in West Bengal’s Bangladesh border districts. When certain other flowers slowly start blooming in this rotten cesspool, ‘progressives’ lazily cry ‘fascism’. The blind-spots, tactical silences and alliances of the principal non-communal political parties of West Bengal will cost the ever-delicate communal situation of this post-partition region very dearly in the long-term. Elsewhere, the communal cauldron is being actively stirred with partition-era Hindu Bengali rioters like Gopal Pantha being commemorated as heroes in certain quarters. The early signs are not encouraging.

The Nadia clash and massacre is telling. Some people were returning from an annual mela of Dharmaraj (not the Vedic god Yama’s alter form Dharma), a god who is largely revered by non-savarnas of the region and whose priest class is also typically from the scheduled castes. The chanting-singing group was passing by a mosque. What happened next has happened many times in the subcontinent. Who attacked first is typically a contested version but the names of the murdered typically tell the story.

Merchants of death numbers are fast in their networks to show this as the latest incident where ‘Mamtaz Banoo’ (Mamata Banerjee) and her ‘Total Muslim Congress’ (TMC – Trinamool Congress) have surrendered to Jihadists. While this is a ridiculous charge, the TMC’s Muslim heart and mind management team include elements like Idris Ali (presently MP and booked for rioting in the past) and Haji Sheikh Nurul Islam (former MP and alleged to be associated with the 2010 Deganga riots) and selective promotion of khalis Kolkata-based Urduwallahs as Muslim faces of the party.

This is disrespectful to West Bengal’s Muslim Bengalis, who, at the end of the day, are a pitifully poor community that is often discriminated against. When a party choses the worst sectarian elements to represent a community for tactical gains, it also ends up painting its political constituency in an ideological shade that doesn’t help ‘communal harmony’ cause, to say the least. Grass-roots organising around issues that connect the oppressed across religious lines while not being patronizing about the lived categories of the oppressed is not something that seculars and their ‘intelligentsia’ seem to be interested in.

In the Nadia riots, the murdered belong to the ‘majority’ community. Houses were destroyed on both sides. No such ‘riot’ has happened in East Bengal in the last 50 years or more. False equivalences between the minority situations in West Bengal and Bangladesh do not fool anyone. When murder of poor people elicits different responses, silences, solidarity and indifference based on who did the killing, we have a problem. (IPA Service)