West Bengal Notes: Travelling Through A State Amid Election Frenzy

Two back-to-back journeys into West Bengal during February and April have proved to be a tipping point for me. It seems as if I have lost all my sense of propriety in decoding the psyche of Hindi-speaking Bengalis, upon which the Bharatiya Janata Party has rested its probable win.

Take a young cab driver, for instance, who comes from Muzaffarpur in Bihar. He was working in Chennai before 2020. After COVID, he came to Kolkata for petty jobs. Then started driving a cab. Who is winning the polls? He says, ‘Yehi log, Daaini’. What Daaini? The Witch! He explains, “…she has such a hold over people that the BJP cannot defeat her”. But he wants the BJP to win.

He moves on to personal experience when he was stuck during COVID in Chennai, “…the Jharkhand government ensured its people return home safely, but this daain never helped us in coming back to Bengal. My family is here. I managed somehow to return”. But Jharkhand CM is not from BJP, so? A moment of silence and again, “… so what? See, what happened to Bihar. BJP has now come to power. The same must happen here for cleansing Bengal”. True, but they have made Samrat Chaudhary CM, what about that? Are you happy?

“Ye galat kiya Modi ji ne… padha-likha aadmi chahiye tha. Vo to gunda hai”. He prefers Chirag Paswan for the CM post. He is also scared that if the BJP comes to power, it will make someone like Rekha Gupta or Samrat Chaudhary Bengal’s CM. “This is not acceptable”, he says. Then? Yogiji! (He has never been to Uttar Pradesh)

Come to the Moon Bar in the Damdam area. A smart guy is sipping beer, sitting alone in a corner. A few journalists, including me, are talking over elections, etc., on another table diagonally opposite to him and somewhat far. Then something pops up, and he intervenes abruptly. He suggests some good places for shopping in Kolkata, claiming that he is a local. His Hindi is good. He is a Hindi-speaking Bengali born and brought up here only. He works in Noida in the software industry. We invite him to the talk. And he is on top of the world announcing to the invisible, “Yogiji bhagwan hain. Jaa ke UP dekhiye, sab gundai khatm ho gaya hai. Yahan saala sab nark bana ke rakha hua hai.” 

Move to Jadhavpur, near Vijaygarh Jyotish Ray College, at a tea stall. A youth is lighting a cigarette. We are talking politics i.e. me and my octogenarian friend who is an elite Bengali from Jamshedpur. My elderly friend was already infuriated at the Hindi-isation of college’s name from “Bijoygarh” to “Vijaygarh” after the huge infiltration of students from Bihar and UP. Suddenly, his attention is caught by the photos of an esteemed actor, poet and filmmaker Saumitra Chatterjee printed on this youth’s T-shirt. He starts a conversation about Chatterjee and his films striking a chord of acquaintance with the youth. Some cultural nostalgia first, then the youth sighs, “Bengal has gone to the dogs!” My friend mistook him and nodded.

Now the youth says, “President’s rule is the only option”. What are you saying? My friend is taken aback. How can you say this? This is against democracy. Youth says, “Fuck Democracy. Bengal needs a dictator now. Full cleansing. Saala. Poore Bengal ko Afghanistan bana rakha hai”. My old friend is agitated now. He says do you know who you are talking to? How can you have the audacity to talk like this on the roadside? The youth turns back and ignores us like anything after uttering his last words, “Don’t teach me. I am a journalist. I know everything”. He is not a local, as told to us by the tea shop owner.

There are dozens of stories like this. Not all are reckless, bullying or high-pitched. Take, for instance, a Bihari migrant who starts his conversation with the mention of an English story that he has read in translation. The story is a famous tale by HG Wells, “The Country of the Blind”. Obviously, the narrator does not know it by the author’s name. He establishes an analogy of Bengal with the island described in the story. He is in pain that people are not allowed to speak freely. He seems a sensitive man at first sight.

Then Bihar comes into the picture, and he says. “Samrat Chaudhary jaisa anpadh aadmi hi chahiye yahan jo bina kuchh soche samjhe itna peet peet ke theek kar de sabko”. He sincerely believes that local Bengalis need a good thrashing. That is why the BJP needs to win. When confronted with the policies of the party and the state of human rights in other BJP-ruled states, he first gets confused, then contemplative. His last sentence is like this, “Better if we are gone. No point in living. None is better. All are the same. Just a couple of years in this work and then I will pray to God to let me die”.

I have a case of a government servant in his late forties who hails from Bihar but works in Kolkata. He is well-versed in Bengali. He is very anxious about the government premises being used by RSS-BJP for campaigning purposes. He talks about this in a low tone. He even complains about his boss, who is supposedly a cabinet secretary-level officer and an RSS cadre, “…bataiye bhai sahab, kya haal bana rakkha hai. Poora sansthan kabzaa liya hai”. We appreciate his gesture and admire his courage. But then he changes gears immediately. “dekhiye, main bhi Savarkar ki vichardhara ka anuyayee hoon, sachcha rashtrabhakt hoon, lekin ye sab mujhe theek nahin lagta”! I look at his determined face and am compelled not to form any judgement immediately. Maybe something more lies there! And finally, when he says in my ears, “main bhi vaampanthi tha, ab bhi hoon, lekin naukri ki apni majbooriyaan hain. Fir bhi ham log jitna ban sakta hai desh ke liye karte hain.”

Let me says this that he is a PhD and has written a few books too.

While we were discussing these clinical sorts of cases in the train, we came to the conclusion that there is an immediate need for a Schizoanalysis of Hindi-speaking Bengalis. I have not been able to form a coherent view of this constituency this time. I don’t know what has happened in the last five years with this lot because this was not so in 2021. People were talking from their mouth, heart or belly, whatever, if not from their mind. Now they talk their minds out, and their minds are full of mediated opinions, pictures, perceptions, stories, slogans. They are themselves missing from what they talk.

In the interaction between a therapist and the schizophrenic, Peter Sloterdijk had asked and answered the question, “Where is the individual?” He says: First of all, and most often it is part of a couple.” (2) This is not just a physical couple per se, though it can take on this form; it is the coupling with the ‘self’ and the ‘other,’ various manifestations of alterity that the self relates to. The ‘individual’ becomes a question of space, but a non-physical space of ‘inbetweenness’ situated at the fluctuations between one thing and another.

This fluctuation is disturbing for a participant observer. It is not easy to narrate all the cases that I encountered in Bengal during long and short personal conversations with Hindi-speaking Bengalis. But I am sure that something fundamental is getting ruptured in Bengali society as a whole. This is the first time when people don’t know what they desire and what they are talking. The sheer lack of sense and purpose in a section of citizenry may give way to neo-fascist trends, despite who rules the roost.

Abhishek Srivastava is an independent journalist. He can be contacted at guruweltschmerz@gmail.com