Grim Reckoning

The heckling of Trinamool Congress MP Abhishek Banerjee during the latter’s visit to Sonarpur is a stark reminder that fear has an expiry date. For years, West Bengal’s politics has been defined by intimidation. First the Communist, and later during Mamata Banerjee’s TMC regimes, the state’s political discourse has been overwhelmingly accompanied by violence, cadre dominance, partisan policing and a culture in which dissenters were expected to keep their heads down and their opinions to themselves.

Whether in villages, municipalities or university campuses, countless Bengalis, especially the Hindu community, have complained that political power was exercised not only through the ballot box but through fear during the TMC rule.

Against this backdrop, the scenes that unfolded during Abhishek Banerjee’s Sonarpur visit was a symbolic moment. The TMC political class that once inspired fear suddenly found itself confronting fearlessness and the ire of ordinary citizens. Trinamool leaders accustomed to hectoring and threatening the public were forced to face its ire as Abhishek was heckled and pelted with eggs.

The Trinamool Congress would be mistaken if it dismisses the episode as an isolated incident. Across West Bengal after the polls, there is a palpable anger against TMC leaders and their henchmen. That simmering rage appears increasingly difficult to contain.

For years, Abhishek Banerjee had projected himself as the heir apparent to Bengal’s ruling establishment, speaking haughtily with the confidence of a man convinced that power was permanently on his side. Now that the TMC is out of power, Sonarpur offered a starkly different picture. It showed what happens when politicians who are accustomed to commanding the public are suddenly confronted by it.

From the horrors of Sandeshkhali to the public fury unleashed after the R.G. Kar outrage, West Bengal witnessed episode after episode that laid bare the TMC’s intimidation and moral corruption.

The crowd that confronted Abhishek Banerjee at Sonarpur was venting years of accumulated resentment against a political culture many Bengalis had come to associate with arrogance, patronage and strong-arm tactics. They reflected what a significant section of the public has increasingly come to see as the moral bankruptcy of a political order that believed it could rule indefinitely through fear and organisational muscle.

Abhishek Banerjee, more than any other TMC leader, had became the face of that system. The hostility he encountered in Sonarpur was political payback delivered by a public no longer willing to whisper its anger.

While no civilised society should endorse mob violence, no politician can expect public sympathy after years of bullying and intimidating citizens. He or she must realize that political arrogance has consequences and that public anger, when it finally erupts, grinds even the most powerful dynasties to dust.

Abhishek Banerjee’s reception in Sonarpur may therefore prove to be more than an embarrassing political episode. It may become the defining image of Trinamool’s final decline and fall.