On the "Bhadralok vs Subaltern" Narrative in Bengal'21

One of the many narratives that emerged in the run-up to the epic West Bengal Assembly Election 2021 was that, this is going to be a contest between the genteel, upper-caste, left-leaning Bengali "bhadralok" and the earthy "subalterns" - mostly the OBC, dalits and Adivasis who had been marginalized too long by the former. Most of those who subscribed to this narrative implied two more things: i) the subalterns, being closer to the ground realities, will readily accept the religious appeal of BJP, and ii) being numerically larger, they would propel their favoured party to win. This, in turn, would finally break the stranglehold of the bhadralok over the society of West Bengal, and also lead to its "political mainstreaming" with the rest of India. Many commentators noted that this is a unique situation, as in other parts of the country it is usually the upper castes who prefer the BJP and subalterns prefer Congress or other regional parties.

Was this narrative accurate? Clearly not, as the results now indicate. Yet, there are also elements of truth in it. First of all let us examine the case of the Bhadralok. In the imagination of the proponents of this narrative, the bhadraloks live mostly in Kolkata and other cities, read Rabindranath, Shakespeare and Marx, watch Satyajit Ray and Akira Kurosawa movies, and vote for the Left. They  have completely dominated the cultural, social and political life of West Bengal since at least a century, and equally detest the backward castes and the right-wing communal/religious assertion. They consider themselves as the only authentic Bengalis and the cream of India, definitely superior to the "uncultured northies". Out of all these characterizations, only one is necessarily true: that they have dominated the cultural, social and political life till at least 2010. But the rest do not appear to be true. While the stereotype of "cultured communist Bengalibabu" is common in India, from personal and anecdotal evidence, I can say that there have always been a wide range of political opinions and social choices among the Bengali bhadralok. There have been dedicated atheist and secular communists, middle class folks suspicious of all politics and politicians, broadly liberal modernists, religious traditionals who despise the communists, those who value economic and material development over everything else, and yes, also right-wing hindus - like SP Mukherjee. There is also a large politically un-opinionated category, who can be influenced through media optics, and also rank opportunists who align themselves with the powerful of the day. Culturally too, there are many bhadraloks who prefer Bollywood over Satyajit Ray and Pink Floyd or Sunidhi Chauhan over Manna De. 

The point that the genteel bhadralok of Kolkata have always prefered Left is only a myth. Consider the 5 parliamentary seats around Kolkata. Even at the height of Left rule in 1996, 4 of them went to Congress. In 1998 and 1999, 4 went to TMC and Dum Dum went to BJP. Similarly in 2009, 2011, 2014, 2016 and 2019 TMC swept all. Only in 2004 and 2006 Left won Kolkata while 2001 had a fractured verdict - north Kolkata to Left and South to TMC. Political preference of the bhadraloks was often determined by issues different from ideology. The "Bangals" or partition-era immigrants from East Bengal were mobilized by the Left since 1950s, and they stood behind the party loyally for decades. But the original inhabitants of West Bengal - the "Ghotis" - often preferred Congress/TMC and looked upon the Left as a threat - not because of communist ideology but because of their "Bangal" supporters whom they considered as usurpers. The "Bangals", despite largely supporting the Left, were not necessarily wedded to communist/leftist ideology, and memories of riots and partition co-existed uncomfortably with the Left's call for secularism. No wonder, many "Bangals" and their descendents have shifted to BJP these days, as the out-of-power Left can no longer patronize them. On the other hand, deep misogynist and elitist instincts exist among many of them, as manifested by their disgust for Mamata Banerjee whom they consider as uncultured and "jhee"-class.

While it is known to all that Bhadraloks have dominated the social and cultural spheres of West Bengal, it is rarely realized that this is no longer true. Bhadralok stranglehold over West Bengal's public life has dissipated over the past 10 years or so, not because of any political change but simply because of the large-scale out-migration  of Bhadraloks, especially the most talented and capable ones. Since the 1980s, well-educated Bhadraloks have started migrating to other parts of the country or abroad, for career advancement. After economic liberalization in India, bhadraloks have largely abandoned their interest in politics and culture, and responded to the call of material success. The state government's inability/unwillingness to let the private sector boom in the state has meant that the exodus has been exacerbated. Around 2006 Buddhadev Bhattacharya deviated from his professed communist ideals to attract private capital in West Bengal, but his high-handed approach boomeranged and he lost power. But the continued exodus of talented youngsters has meant that West Bengal is visibly less vibrant today than 15 years earlier. For example, the youth-driven Bengali Band Music had become immensely popular in the state during the 2000s decade, but it is now nowhere to be found. Anecdotal evidence suggests that the educational institutes today have less talented faculty/students than earlier. No prominent icon has emerged from the state after Sourav Ganguly, in any field - sports, cinema, music, art, literature, science or politics. In fact, if we consider the posh localities of Kolkata like Lake Gardens, Alipur or Bhowanipur, these days we may find more Hindi-speakers than Bhadraloks. Little wonder, in 2019  BJP was leading in the Rashbehari assembly segment - a posh residential area. Many bhadraloks who have settled down in Delhi, Bangalore, London or New York for years, have now merged with the population there and lost interest in the state's affairs.

Now let us come to the "subalterns". It is a fact that bhadralok, during their heydays, looked upon them with disdain and looked to marginalize them, while sometimes romanticizing certain groups like Santhals. Satyajjit Ray, a cultural icon of the state, expressed fascination for adivasi life in his movies like "Agantuk" and "Aranyer Dinratri", but failed to conceal upper-caste pride in his works. However, as the bhadraloks migrated from the state and vacated public life, the "subaltern castes" started taking over. It has been observed by many academics that the caste compositions of public university students has completely changed over the past 20 years, and bhadraloks are now a minority. TMC government's decision to categorize most muslims as OBC has opened up their participation in government education and jobs through reservations. This has had the unfortunate effect of the growth of "structural islamophobia" in the state, as backward caste hindus and muslims are often vying for the limited number of government jobs and college seats. Amid such fierce competition, calls to communal identity can be particularly potent. This is how the state's society has become communalized. The great secular ideals once cherished and celebrated by sections of the bhadralok have unfortunately never been communicated to the "subalterns", due to the snobbery of the bhadraloks. The subalterns, who have co-existed with muslims in the villages for many decades, are familiar with a simple syncretic culture which is definitely secular. However, in some situations material interests end up trumping culture and ideology. This hypothesis can be  validated by the post-poll surveys after the 2019 election where BJP made huge inroads in the state. It was found that a large fraction of subaltern hindus have voted for BJP, not because they believe in RSS-style hindutva ideology but only to protest against what they considered as preferential treatment to muslims. If the TMC government can astutely manage this "structural islamophobia", the state can be salvaged. 2021 results indicate that this is already in progress.

If there is one section of the West Bengal populace which is and will remain with BJP, it is the young, less-educated and less-employed Dalit youth. Having never been nurtured by the bhadralok-ruled society, nor mobilized by any political party till 2014, they remained on the fringes. With high aspirations but limited prospects in life, they are ready material for BJP who has mobilized them through Ram Navami rallies and the like. They often travel to the rich western states like Gujarat and Karnataka to work as cooks, labourers or artisans, where they learn Hindutva culture and spread them in West Bengal when they return. It will require special efforts by Dalit leaders like Manoranjan Bapari to recover this demographic from the BJP.

And finally there are the remote rural areas, in places like Jalpaiguri, Alipurduar and Malda, where the state is weak, and RSS has stepped into the vacuum to influence the local populace through sustained social and religious activities. A special case is Habibpur in Malda, where a RSS training facility has existed and grown over many years. Even during the Left rule, this was a seat where BJP often came second with 20-30% vote. Now it is full of saffron flags, religious songs and a BJP stronghold. It will require a new social movement to wean away these populace. 

On the role of the Grand Alliance in 2021 West Bengal elections: an analysis

 The most awaited election of 2021 in West Bengal is finally over, with quite unexpected results. Most surveys indicated that among TMC and BJP, one will get 150-170 seats and the other, 100-120, while the Left-Congress may win 20-40 seats. Finally TMC swept the election by a margin no one had come anywhere close to predicting, except their own strategist Prashant Kishore, who was ridiculed by almost everyone for his super-confident assertion. The biggest losers in the election are clearly the Left and Congress, who fought in an alliance along with a new party called ISF. For the first time, both of these two former heavyweights of state politics have 0 MLAs. But given the extraordinary circumstances of this election, this should hardly be surprising. 

First of all, most elections in West Bengal have always been bipolar, with a third side rarely putting up a competitive performance. West Bengal has 42 Lok Sabha seats, and each of them consists of 7 assembly seats, thus we have 294 assembly seats. In this analysis, we will consider all elections in terms of assembly seats only. In 1998, 2001, 2009, 2011 and 2016 the winning side won/led in around 190-220 assembly seats, while the runners-up side won 60-80. In 2006 and 2014 there was one hugely dominant side with 220+ seats, while the remaining 70-odd got split between multiple smaller formations. Slightly different were 1999 and 2019, where the winning party was less dominant by winning 160-180 assembly seats, but even then the elections were largely bipolar with third force Congress leading in 20 and 9 seats respectively.

Ever since losing power in 2011, the Left has tended to align with Congress. They had a "seat-sharing deal" in 2016, a partial understanding in 2019, and a full alliance in 2021. If we consider the elections in 2014 and 2016, most of the seats won by these parties were concentrated in the "Middle Bengal" districts of North and South Dinajpur, Malda and Murshidabad, along with some smatterings elsewhere. Incidentally, these are the places with the highest concentrations of minorities in West Bengal. Cut to 2019, and the picture changes completely. Left and Congress fought separately in 2019, but for clarity let us consider them together by adding up their votes (though perfect vote transfer doesn't happen in alliances). In 2019 we saw massive reductions of their vote share everywhere, and in many places like Northern (Jalpaiguri, Cooch Behar, Alipurduar etc) and Western Bengal (Purulia, Bankura, Medinipur etc) their combined vote share was below 10%. This loss was mostly of the Left, as Congress were anyway weak in these places, except Purulia. Only in the Congress bastions of Murshidabad and to a lesser extent Malda we saw the alliance retain winnability, where they won 2 parliamentary seats and led in 16 assembly segments. The only places where the Left was somewhat in the game were in the Jadavpur region of Kolkata, including Behala, Tollygunge, Sonarpur and Baruipur, and to a lesser extent in the Dum Dum region to the North of Kolkata. Incidentally, these are the areas with high concentration of the 1947-era refugees from erstwhile East Bengal, a demographic which provided huge support to the Left since the 1950s.

On seeing the 2019 results, a major question arose - where did the former voters of  Left and Congress go? Empirical and anecdotal evidence makes it clear - muslim voters went to TMC and hindu voters to BJP. The latter has been famously described as the "baam theke Ram" or "left to right" phenomena by many journalists. The reasons for such a shift seems to be twofold: political and social. Firstly, many former leaders and cadres of the Left have been at the receiving end of harassment from the TMC cadre and state police ever since 2011. Understanding that BJP is in a much better position to offer them protection from such violence than their own party, they defected in large numbers. This is especially true in places like Birbhum, Bankura, Purulia and Medinipur where politics is quite violent. On the other hand, the former Left supporters from the marginalized castes (mostly SC and ST) were attracted by i) BJP's money power, ii) religious/communal mobilization by RSS, iii) BJP's promise of resolving citizenship concerns of Matuas in the Bongaon-Ranaghat region and Rajbangshis in North Bengal. These castes had always existed on the fringes of Bengali society, and their presence was hardly ever acknowledged by the  Bhadralok-dominated Bengali society under Left. The BJP and RSS had given them the scope of self assertion (through Ram Navami rallies etc) and dreams of material success. In 2019, this shift from Left to Right greatly harmed TMC, especially in the western and Northern parts of the state where TMCs roots are not deep enough. It may be noted that these places had remained with the Left even in 2009, even as Buddhadev's government became very unpopular. A statistical analysis shows that TMC did much better in those assembly segments where Left-Congress retained some amount of votes, say about 20000 (roughly 10%). But in the places where they collapsed below 10000, BJP often fell heavy on TMC.  On the other hand, the Muslims who supported Congress and Left may have had problems with TMC, but they did not want to vote BJP for obvious reasons. They hung on with Congress wherever it was strong enough (Malda and Murshidabad), and elsewhere they unwillingly voted for TMC.

It is against this backdrop that Left and Congress approached the election of 2021. Their defeat was so deep in 2019, that it would take a miracle for them to win and form a government. No sane person should have considered this as possible, especially given that BJP was throwing in the kitchen sink for winning the election, and TMC was also fighting a determined war. In such a situation, the aim of Left/Congress should have been fairly straightforward: Bring back as much as possible their former voters who have drifted towards BJP - this would simultaneously solve their selfish need of surviving as parties, as well as the ideological need of weakening BJP. However, this was difficult - as the practical and emotional reasons for voting for BJP were strong enough. It would have required a sustained ideological campaign in the hinterlands - reaching out to those people and convincing them about the need to defeat BJP. It would have taken time, but they had time: 2years. Unfortunately, CPM did not do that. Instead, this task was done by young boys and girls from various progressive/left-leaning organizations, but they lacked the framework which a party like CPM could have provided. Another thing which Left/Congress could have done is to focus on only a small number of seats (40-50) and concentrate much of their strength there - not only for election but also for social activities. While Congress did this to an extent - their leader Adhir Chowdhury put in tremendous efforts in Murshidabad, Malda and North Dinajpur, no such strategic focus was seen from the Left.

So, what all did Left do during this period? In my opinion, they did two good things: maintain a mechanism of social service during the lockdown and Amphan (Shramjeevi canteen etc), and brought forward a number of young candidates to contest the elections. Unfortunately, both have limitations. The scale of their social service was not large enough to translate into votes in such a short time, and similarly the young candidates did not get enough time to establish bases in their respective constituencies, which would have taken at least 1 year of sustained efforts on the ground. The results for the young candidates were partially encouraging. Their innovative campaigns through music and dance, as well as their honesty and sharpness impressed many people. In some cases they translated into votes also. In Bally, Dipsita Dhar increased the alliance's votes from 16000 in 2019 to 22000 in 2021. In Diamond Harbour, Pratik-ur-Rahaman doubled the alliance's votes from 19000 in 2019 to 38000 in 2021. Srijan Sengupta in Singur pulled them up from 19000 in 2019 to 30000 in 2021. Other former MLAs who are popular in their areas, such as Sujan Chakraborty in Jadavpur, Kanti Ganguly in Raidighi, Tanmoy Bhattacharya in Dum Dum Uttar, Ashok Bhattacharya in Siliguri, Nepal Mahata (from Congress) in Baghmundi etc got decent number of votes, but not enough to win.  However, the limitations of this approach got exposed in many cases - most notably in Nandigram. Amid a bullfight between heavyweights, CPM's youth leader Minakshi Mukherjee earned praise from localites for her energetic campaign focussing on jobs, social security etc, in stark contrast to the bluster by the heavyweights. Yet, she got only about 6000 votes, even below the 10000-odd votes in 2019. This illustrates how most people in the state saw the election as a binary: for some it was yes-Mamata or no-Mamata, for others it was yes-BJP or no-BJP. Many people felt that voting for the alliance would be a waste in the larger scheme of things, and even if they got a good MLA from the alliance, this won't help the region as (s)he will most likely be in the opposition. This binarized thinking is consistent with the previous elections in Bengal, most of which were bipolar as discussed above.

Did Left-Congress not understand all these problems? Congress may have understood it, and quietly prioritized defeating BJP while fighting alongside the Left. Their central leadership largely stayed away from the campaign, and when Rahul Gandhi did show up in West Bengal for campaign, he attacked only BJP without mentioning TMC. Even though Adhir Chowdhury did put in a tremendous amount of effort in campaigning, it is not impossible that he strategically laid low just before the elections in the strongholds of Malda, Murshidabad and Dinajpur, thereby allowing his supporters, including many Muslims, to silently transfer their votes to TMC in order to stop BJP. But Left mostly remained confused about strategy and aims, and finally ended up tying themselves into knots. Many of their leaders seemed to believe that they too are potential winners of the elections. They refused to concede that BJP was a bigger enemy than TMC. They even refused to acknowledge the key problem - that their former supporters had voted for BJP in 2019 and may repeat in 2021. Instead, they went along pressing the "Bijemool" theory - that BJP and TMC are essentially the same and one cannot be defeated without defeating the other. This may have actually been an astute campaign slogan - telling the former Left supporters that voting BJP to stop TMC won't help as the same people who tortured them as TMC leaders would return as BJP leaders. This may have been a short-cut way of winning back their former voters, without any sustained ideological campaign on the ground. However, it seems that many Left leaders, especially the younger social media-savvy ones, themselves believed the same propaganda! This disconnected them from the ground realities, and in effect they ended up campaigning in front of the mirror. They even ridiculed senior communist leaders from hardcore groups like CPI(ML)(Liberation) who advised them to distinguish between enemy and competitor. A few senior CPM leaders like Manik Sarkar from Tripura did go around asking people not to bring in a shark (BJP) to drive out a crocodile (TMC). However, it was probably too little, too late. Most of the former Left voters who had voted for BJP in 2019 did the same this time. Those who did realize the danger from BJP, ended up voting for TMC as the most potent anti-BJP force.

While Left and Congress drew a blank each, their new alliance partner ISF managed to win 1 seat - Bhangor. Their presence in the alliance had raised many eyebrows among their well-wishers - from staunch secularists to closet Islamophobes - who contended that the presence of ISF in the alliance would mean that no one (read Hindu) would vote for them. This does not seem to be true. People had many reasons for not voting the Left alliance, but ISF's presence was surely not one of them. ISF actually fielded 50% hindu candidates, and some of them did quite well. ISF remained far away from the news headlines as the election dragged on and on. However, their victory in Bhangor is a point to be noted. This was a seat where there had been a long agitation against land acquisition by TMC government, and this agitation was led by far-left CPI(ML)(Red Star). Like the CPI(ML)(Liberation) which recently won a stunning 12 seats in Bihar, Red Star too is an uncompromising communist party. Had they been invited into this alliance, they could have fought and won Bhangor, and we would have had a dedicated, uncompromising communist leader in the Assembly. Instead, we will have a semi-religious leader from ISF. 

Overall, it can be said that the Left's obsession with their 2011 defeat to TMC resulted in stubbornness and refusal to see the extraordinary context of this election, which led to their downfall. For Bengal's future, it is imperative that they rise very soon. They have to continue to invest in their young promising leaders, but they urgently need to turn away from memories of past and focus on the current context with ideological clarity. Some of their saner leaders have already called for the same.