The Kolkata Police’s ‘advisory’ (read ‘warning’) to SalmanRushdie to stay away from the ‘cultural capital of India’ was not based onanticipation of Muslim volatility in Kolkata (or, indeed, any other part ofWest Bengal): It was based purely on political exigency as the police’s bossesin the Writers’ Buildings perceived it. It had nothing to do with law-and-orderprecaution. It had everything to do with the Trinamool Congress grabbing anopportunity to regain the fast-vanishing trust of the Muslim vote bank, whichhad been central to its ascendance to power.
The Muslim vote bank comprises 30 percent of the stateelectorate, and almost 80 percent of it votes in unison. There is barely anytime left before the panchayat elections scheduled for May 2013 ” the resultsof which can either make the Trinamool’s day or ruin its life ” and for whichthe party hasn’t even cranked up its jerry-built, malfunctioning machine ofmass engagement. The news of Rushdie’s whistle-stop visit, therefore, came as agift to Chief Minister, Mamata Banerjee from a heaven that had lately beencold-shouldering her.
The sequence of events that led to the Kolkata Police’sstay-away caution to Rushdie says it all. News that he would make a guerrillaappearance at the ongoing Kolkata book fair made its way to Pirzada MohammadToha Siddiqui, the highly-politicised maulana who calls himself “chief anddirector” of one of the country’s most important Sufi pilgrimages, the FurfuraDarbar Sharif just outside Kolkata in Hooghly district.
Siddiqui has had a rollercoaster of a relationship withMamata Banerjee: as recently as January 17 this year, he had given her anultimatum to fulfill her promises to the state’s Muslim community, saying, “Ifyou still don’t make amends, this is only quarter-final, after three and a halfyears of your tenure, I will play semi-final and after four and a half years,there would be final... It is highly unfair and a lie on the part of the CM toclaim that she had done 99 percent of whatever she had promised to the Muslimsof the state.”
His words carried the clear threat of an engineered,consensual Muslim electoral desertion of the Trinamool not only during thepanchayat election but also the 2014 Lok Sabha elections and the 2016 Assemblyelections.
Siddiqui’s rebellion gave the Trinamool a panic attack. Itwas entirely unexpected: in January 2011, when Mamata Banerjee was the unionrailway minister, the maulana had cheerfully ‘convinced’ people in his domain ”some of the most impoverished in West Bengal ” to surrender land for theconstruction of a new 19-km railway line from Dankuni to Furfura Sharif. He hadalso applauded Banerjee’s cynical announcement in April 2012 of a monthlyhonorarium of Rs 2,500 to each of the state’s 30,000 imams to be routed throughthe Muslim Wakf Board.
None of this lasted long, of course ” Banerjee’sjob-for-land promise, which drove land acquisition for the Dankuni-FurfuraSharif line, came to a sorry end in August 2012, when she realised that shedidn’t have the wherewithal to fulfill it; the honorarium for imams was handedout for two months before it petered out after three installments as her urbanprettification policy began emptying the state’s coffers.
Toha Siddique began to steam.
When Rushdie’s impending visit became known, Siddiquiimmediately phoned urban development minister Firhad ‘Bobby’ Hakim, who isBanerjee’s Muslim-action go-to guy. Hakim called her ” and she spotted the giftof reconciliation with Siddiqui, which came with no strings attached, or atleast strings such as opposition from Kolkata’s buddhijibi (intellectual) crowdthat she could afford to ignore. Immediately after it became public thatRushdie wouldn’t, after all, be gracing this embattled city, Siddiqui did theturnaround that Banerjee required of him and declared himself satisfied ” and,by extension, his huge flock, which extends as far as the Muslim-majoritydistricts of Malda, Murshidabad and Uttar Dinajpur and well into the 100Muslim-dominated blocks in the state.
The Rushdie fiasco wasn’t the result of a precedent set byTaslima Nasreen’s massively hostile eviction from West Bengal in November 2007;or of the Trinamool version of the reactionary quasi-secularism that infectsthe Indian polity today. It was the result of West Bengal electoral politics.What Mamata Banerjee doesn’t know is that this tactical cynicism and runawayminoritarianism is going to hurt her and her party for a very long time in waysthat she cannot even begin to imagine.
in association with Governance Now
