On the Brink

Mamata Banerjee’s cynical brand of communal appeasement has turned West Bengal into a powderkeg of sectarian violence.

West Bengal

Few Indian chief ministers have built a cult of personality quite like Mamata Banerjee. But fewer still have done so by playing with the matchbox of identity politics in a region already soaked in the kerosene of sectarian tension. West Bengal’s recent descent into deadly violence, sparked by protests against the Waqf (Amendment) Act, has exposed the dangerous underbelly of Banerjee’s political strategy - relentless minority appeasement dressed as secularism, and a studied ambivalence when the state’s integrity is under siege.

Three people, including a father and son, have been killed in Murshidabad as per reports. Police vans have been torched, stones hurled, roads blocked and security forces injured. The rule of law has taken a backseat to the rule of mobs – a familiar scene in West Bengal.

Banerjee, in typical defiance of the BJP-ruled Centre, has made clear the Waqf Act, passed by both Houses of Parliament and signed into law by the President of India, would not be implemented in West Bengal.

This is not a principled stance on federalism but a political calculation aimed at maintaining a carefully cultivated vote bank. This time, Banerjee’s declaration is no mere administrative defiance but an incitement cloaked in victimhood.

Her message seems to be that the law is Delhi’s burden which Bengal’s Muslims need not obey. Unsurprisingly, this was interpreted by radical groups as a wink and a nod.

In most of the country, protests over the Waqf amendments have remained peaceful or non-existent. But in Bengal, Muslim-dominated areas like Murshidabad, have exploded into violence.

Banerjee and her nephew, Trinamool Congress MP Abhishek Banerjee, have accused shadowy forces of sowing discord to malign Bengal. But it is their own politics of patronage, communal tokenism, and selective outrage that have eroded public trust. Their habitual finger-pointing at the Centre, rather than quelling unrest, has normalised it. Banerjee insists her hands are clean. Yet intelligence reports had warned of possible unrest and her administration did little to pre-empt it.

Over the years, the TMC, as part of its appeasement game has shielded radical clerics and turned a blind eye to the mushrooming of sectarian outfits, thereby encouraging a culture of impunity. Law and order, a constitutionally mandated responsibility of the state, is generally outsourced to central forces only after the house is already ablaze.

Banerjee, with her lethal politics, has turned Bengal into a laboratory for a perverse kind of secularism that tolerates intolerance so long as it comes wrapped in minority garb. When protestors burn buses and stone police, the state dithers. When Hindus are attacked in communal flare-ups, the government responds with silence or spin.

In refusing to enforce the Waqf Act, Banerjee has not only pandered to fringe elements but also undermined the authority of Parliament and the President. That her defiance came in the midst of violent protests is doubly damning as it legitimises lawlessness as a bargaining chip in electoral politics.

The BJP, for its part, has seized on the unrest to bolster its claim that the Trinamool government is appeasement-driven and anti-Hindu. But grandstanding alone will not solve Bengal’s deeper malaise with currently reels under a fractured civic identity, corrupted state machinery and a ruling party that sees governance as theatre and populism as policy.

West Bengal has long been a land of contradictions: intellectual yet combustible, proud yet divided. But under Mamata Banerjee, it is increasingly becoming a cautionary tale of how populism and identity politics, when cynically mixed, can rot the foundations of democracy. This is not the Bengal of Vivekananda, Tagore or Syama Prasad Mookerjee. It is a Bengal teetering on the edge - abandoned by its leaders, preyed upon by extremists and betrayed by the very state that claims to protect it. Unless CM Banerjee course-corrects swiftly, Bengal’s fire will not remain contained.