The Greeks may have felt this way after the sacking of Corinth, which signalled Greece’s capitulation to Rome. Centuries later, it was Rome’s turn to experience the same horror when the Eternal City fell to King Genseric’s sword. Now, aeons later, the consensus — despair — emanating from the drawing rooms (and social media accounts) of liberal Calcuttans is that the Bharatiya Janata Party’s ‘conquest’ of Bengal signifies not only the moment of the proverbial enemy appearing at the hallowed gates but also it battering through that protective barrier.
It might be instructive to identify the traits of the pristine kingdom that, the liberal narrative claims, would now be soiled. (Lost) Bengal embodied a realm of liberty, inclusivity, pluralism, a robust intellectual tradition; some of these elements constituted Bengal’s vaunted exceptionalism, which, it was hoped by the liberal fraternity, would be enough to shield the state from the minders of a republic that has been made to take a divisive turn. In this context, Bengal’s liberal constituency seems to be echoing the Romantic tradition in politics. Emerging in response to and as a vocal critic of Industrial rationality, the Enlightenment and its emphasis on empiricism as well as materiality, political romanticism found its moorings in the tenets of imagination, ideals and — this is significant to this discussion — the primacy of the idea. Unsurprisingly, the philosophies of Jean Jacques-Rousseau, an endorser of feeling and moral intuition, as well as of Thomas Carlyle — he argued that the idea was the engine that propels the march of civilisation — were some of the brightest epistemic orbs in political romanticism’s intellectual firmament.
Indeed, the centrality of ideas — progressive idealism — as catalysts of political mobilisation and change in Bengal cannot be denied. The earliest political triumph of the progressives, arguably, was the success against Lord Curzon’s patently communal attempt to partition the then undivided province in 1905. Pluralism, championed by Calcutta’s intelligentsia, including the Tagores, won — but only for a while. Independence brought the enchantment of India and Bengal with a new set of ideas championed by the Congress that were, essentially, the building blocks of Nehruvian socialism. Three decades later, the Left rose with its own ideological seductions: land reform, decentralisation of power, and secularism being the principal ingredients. Next, Mamata Banerjee, the Left Front’s nemesis, repackaged much of the Left’s economic and social agendas into a kind of robust populism and wielded the political sceptre for 15 years.
Yet, none of these public movements or political reigns and their attendant ideas could, in the end, survive time and its tides.
Only a few decades after inclusion and amity, the kernels of resistance that undergirded undivided Bengal’s resistance towards Curzon’s evil ploy, had reached their acme, the province, like many other parts of India, lay singed by the fire of communalism. Licence raj, economic strangulation, extrajudicial depravities, among other failings, led to the Congress being cast aside in this state by the late 1970s. Most notably, the Left, like Goya’s Saturn devouring his son, turned against the masses it had pledged to deliver, having impoverished Bengal and strangled the liberties of the people, poor and rich, with the help of the tentacles of that dreaded, Orwellian Party-State apparatus. Banerjee’s downfall can also be attributed to the gathering of a similar carcinogenic rust — entrenched corruption, localised but brutal intimidation, sustained economic stagnation — that eroded her Teflon-coated appeal.
Each regime change in Bengal blows a significant hole in the argument — and faith — of the proponents of the liberal/romantic lore regarding the immutability of their ideas. That, with the help of some magic wand, liberal views would trickle down from the topsoil of Indian polity and enrich and entice subalterns. But ideas do not exist in a social vacuum; they respond, shape-shift, to altering ground realities. A good example of material conditions eclipsing progressive instincts in relation to Bengal could be the differences in the responses of the libertarian classes and hoi polloi to the Trinamool Congress regime’s embrace of and profiteering from corruption, one of the principal factors that, political pundits are saying — in hindsight — ushered its downfall. Moral indictments were issued periodically; but Bengal’s intelligentsia, mindful of the sectarian threat on the horizon, chose not to act electorally against the deepening malaise. This is because this segment of the citizenry, protected by privileges — economic, intellectual, even ascriptive — is in a position to keep itself immune from the predations of everyday corruption. Ordinary people do not have such a luxury. So they chose to act, 15 years later, in the only way available to them within a democracy — the ballot — which had been preceded, undoubtedly, by the creation of an uneven electoral turf.
This brings us to a tantalising question. Is Bengal’s prioritisation of institutionalised corruption and economic stagnancy, among other failures of Mamata Banerjee, in this election over equally potent threats, such as sectarianism and, not to forget, orchestrated disenfranchisement, suggestive of a complete collapse of its compact with pluralism?
The jury is still out on this one.
And even if the answer is in the affirmative, liberal voices cannot shrug off the blame for such a failure. A perceptive critique of political romanticism came from Carl Schmitt, a political theorist, who pointed out — caustically — that the political romantics’ Achilles heel is evasion. Tethered to emotive and aesthetic principles, the romantic resists pragmatic intervention, favouring status quo. One wonders whether Bengal’s progressives, complicit in a similar inertia, can escape Schmitt’s censure. Many pundits point to the BJP’s handsome harvest in the 2019 general election as the first evidence of its potential as a challenger. But the Bengal chapter of the Hindutva ecosystem has a far longer, instructive back story. Where this apparatus excels is its patient, long-term investment in altering political and ideological terrains. The ground had been shifting, slowly, for decades, in Bengal and what was needed, but did not materialise, was a pragmatic counter-mobilisation that would democratise and thus deepen the roots of the progressive ethos.
One peculiar aspect of Bengal’s electoral trajectory has been the long periods of incumbency. The Congress and, then, the Left Front and the TMC benefited from that. This is often attributed to the potency of their respective ideological frameworks. This inference, too, is suspect. As Anandajit Goswami wrote persuasively in The Policy Edge, “Party networks in Bengal have long mediated access to welfare, dispute resolution, and everyday interaction with the [S]tate. This creates forms of embedded loyalty that can endure even when governance outcomes are uneven… Over time… these arrangements come under strain. As welfare delivery expands beyond tightly controlled local channels and aspirations shift… the alignment between political networks and voter expectations begins to weaken. Perceptions of access and fairness become more salient across groups… The urban middle class tends to shift more gradually… but its eventual alignment with broader dissatisfaction can signal a wider turning point. When these pressures converge across organisational, material, and perceptual dimensions, electoral outcomes change with surprising speed.”
In other words, the electorate’s engagement with regimes, mediated by and refracted through multiple factors — ideology is only one among these — is decisive to electoral outcomes.
Another possible factor that offers an insight into Bengal’s predilection for prolonged incumbency is the persistent subliminal history of fear, pertinent, once again, to this frontier state with embedded traumas in relation to not just Partition but also marauders from other empires. This lingering psycho-social anxiety, not ideological fidelity, makes Bengal seek succour in stable incumbencies.
Now the BJP is baring its own ideas to the state. Many of these have been criticised, over the last 12 years, for falling in the twilight zone of the constitutional vision. The resistance — it is inevitable — will begin. But the BJP’s opponents must remember that harnessing their ideas to material — real-life — conditions that are being altered at a furious pace would hold the key. The failure of liberals to achieve such a synthesis has abetted Hindutva’s many triumphs — electoral and otherwise.
uddalak.mukherjee@abp.in