Mask of syncretism off, Bengal can no longer ignore social fault lines
There have been several reports and anecdotal evidence of discrimination against Muslims when it comes to renting houses in Kolkata and other cities of Bengal
Two recent incidents that largely went unnoticed exposed West Bengal’s communal underbelly like never before.
A family in Nadia district last week declared their daughter “dead” and performed her “shradh”, the Hindu last rites, because she married a Muslim man.
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In another eye-opening incident, a government-run school in the state was found to be practising religious segregation for about two decades without anyone batting an eyelid.
Deep-rooted communalism
These twin incidents manifest the existence of deep-rooted communalism behind the facade of West Bengal being relatively peaceful in terms of religious conflicts, at least till the emergence of the BJP as a major political force in the state.
The school in East Burdwan district had been cooking and serving mid-day meals separately to Hindu and Muslim students since the inception of the scheme in the early 2000s — when the state was ruled by a Communist government.
Abhorrence to inter-religious marriages is also not new. It has existed in the state for a long time, without much ado. A 2013 study, conducted by the International Institute for Population Sciences (IIPS), noted that, at just 0.3 per cent, West Bengal had the lowest percentage of inter-faith marriages in India.
Not isolated incidents
“The shradh in Nadia and the segregated meals in the East Burdwan school are not one-off cases; they are distressing symptoms. They reveal a West Bengal where the ideal of syncretism conceals deep-rooted and often institutionalised prejudice,” noted Debashis Chakrabarti, political commentator and Commonwealth Fellow.
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Nadia and East Burdwan districts also made headlines recently for long-standing caste-based discrimination. For the first time, Dalit families were allowed entry into the Gidheshwar Shiva temple in East Burdwan and the Bairampur Shiva temple in Nadia in March, ending a nearly 300-year-old exclusion.
“Such discriminations have always existed in the state. But they are now coming to the fore because caste and religious identities have gained legitimacy in political discourses and narratives. People are no longer hesitant to assert their identities, whether for justifiable reasons or otherwise,” Anwesha Sengupta, an assistant professor at the Institute of Development Studies Kolkata, told The Federal.
Shrinking minority space
The erstwhile Left Front regime had succeeded in keeping these biases hidden under the garb of class politics, said Sengupta, who has worked extensively on the complex Hindu-Muslim relations in post-Partition Bengal.
There have been several reports and anecdotal evidence of discrimination against Muslims when it comes to renting houses in Kolkata and other cities and towns of.
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Sengupta highlighted the shrinking minority space in post-Partition Kolkata in one of her essays. She pointed out that the city, once known for its cosmopolitan character, became predominantly Hindu as a result of the Partition.
According to Sengupta, “Muslims responded to this process of minoritisation in various ways. While many educated, elite Muslims relocated to East Pakistan (now Bangladesh), poorer Muslims moved into designated ‘Muslim pockets’ within Kolkata or to other districts in West Bengal. This marked the beginning of a broader process of ghettoisation in both the city and the state.”
No more social taboo
Despite the persistence of such biases, electoral contests in the past were largely centred around political ideologies and economic issues. However, that scenario has now changed.
Communal fault lines, which were earlier considered too private or sensitive to discuss within a social context, are no longer treated as a social taboo, said Israul Mandal of the West Bengal Madrasah Education Forum.
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Sharing a similar perspective, Ram Prasad Das, general secretary of the Ravidasia Mahasangha, remarked, “Had this marriage taken place a decade ago, the Nadia family might have quietly disowned their daughter. They wouldn’t have made such a public spectacle of her social exclusion by performing the shradh ceremony, as they did last week.”
A similar shift in expression, this time aimed at challenging insularity, was evident when parents of minority students at the East Burdwan school chose to resist religious segregation, breaking their silence after quietly tolerating the practice for over two decades. Their outrage forced the school to scrap the discriminatory practice on Wednesday (June 25).
With the veil of progress now lifted, the underlying fault lines can no longer be ignored.
