OPED | Tuesday, October 27, 2009 | Email | Print | 
A different class war
Shikha Mukerjee
Maoists play to middle class sensitivities in West Bengal
The unpalatable fact is that there was high voltage drama enacted by the Maoists, including its leader Koteswar Rao alias Kishenji, and the West Bengal Government as well as the Centre over one hostage —Atindranath Dutta. He, as the photographs will confirm, is a well nourished police officer in charge of the police station at Sankrail in West Midnapore district.
While two others died at the same police station, two other policemen were taken hostage — Kanchan Gorai and Sabir Mollah —from Dharampur and Pirkhana, also in the same district, there was no drama over their deaths and disappearance. Clearly there is a class divide between ‘us’ and ‘them’. Dutta is so obviously middle class that his being taken hostage commands attention. The others are so obviously not ‘middle class’ that the absence of attention is entirely customary.
Kishenji agreed to send Dutta back unscathed because otherwise ‘public opinion’ would have swung from sneaking sympathy to equally hostile antagonism. The public whose opinion matters and cannot be taken for granted, bludgeoned, brow beaten and condemned into cowering silence is that of the middle class. The rest, including most of 124 listed as “martyrs” in the poll and post-violence between March and October this year in West Bengal belong to that silent majority who do not inhabit that elite space defined theoretically as the ‘public sphere’.
Therefore, it was a duet that was composed between the middle class conscious Maoists and Marxists to broker a deal that could release one of their own, Dutta. The post-release performance of Dutta, media and family has been a three-ring circus. With their every move captured on camera, every tear and smile recorded for vicarious entertainment, the deliberate deflection of attention from two other policemen, Gorai and Mollah, it seems West Bengal has feelings only for its bhadralok.
If senior police officials are upset over the post-release drama, if they are frustrated because they were not allowed to at least attempt a capture or face off with Kishenji just when they had him holed up, pinned down and ready for the plucking on October 22 night, no one is acting on that. The shocker is that Dutta having done nothing, beyond as he claimed “kept his cool,” has become a hero and while he parades around in the harsh glow of flash lights nobody is asking why he is not back at work.
Old timers have quietly and privately questioned the action of the State Government in countenancing such unprofessional conduct. These same old timers have then shrugged and answered their own query: Everything that is done is based on electoral calculations. The point that old timers wish to make is that Dutta has not been checked over after his being taken hostage. If he were a policeman in the real sense surely he gathered some intelligence that may be of some use or at least can go on active files in a situation where the Indian state is, as the Maoist supremo Ganapati declared earlier this week, locked in a war-like situation and Operation Venus is underway.
The conspiracy of class includes the usually strident Trinamool Congress leader Mamata Banerjee. After condemning the hostage taking and the attack on the Sankrail police station, Ms Banerjee has fallen conspicuously silent. The day the attack occurred, she spat venom at the West Bengal Government, alleged that it was a so-called attack by the Maoists and questioned the capacity of the State administration to protect the police force. The irony of her demand that the police force be protected obviously escaped her as much as it escaped her admirers and critics.
The commonplace ‘normal’ that expects the police force to protect rather than be protected, that expects a policeman to be differently dutiful and less a celebrity baking in media attention are measures that no longer apply in West Bengal. The parameters within which the normal, the usual, the ordinary and the routine, function have changed. While many would lazily suggest that everything has been “politicised,” others would not even bother to wonder why the ‘normal’ is no longer applicable.
Critics of the CPI (Marxist) would vehemently assert that the ‘normal’ was distorted soon after 1977 when the party came to power in the State. Others less extreme would estimate that the ‘normal’ was distorted in the 1980s. To reckon when the abnormal became ‘normal’ is a matter that perhaps academics can explore; for the rest, an easy to grasp divide in before 2006 and after 2006, before Singur and Nandigram and the Trinamool Congress’s ma, mati, manush push, the spectacular revival of Maoist politics and violence and one major casualty, the Nano car factory.
Since 2006, the ‘normal’ has become abnormal. A nearly completed factory shut down because of an agitation led by one and supported by other parliamentary parties. Maoists via its fronts or perhaps infiltrated People’s Committees against land acquisition, against police atrocities have acquired an aura. Even though the Congress has questioned the Trinamool Congress’s association with organisations attached to Maoists, there has been no political reckoning on this.
Despite the puzzling political equations, the credit ratings of every organisation have remained blue chip. The rating agency that is most respected is that of the Maoists; by rejecting the Constitution, declaring themselves outlaws, condemning parliamentary parties and their politics, the Maoists have acquired a halo. Their judgment matters and it is sacrosanct.
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