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Trinamool Congress, Hindutva and Neoliberal Media: Points to Consider for the Bengal Elections

Trinamool Congress (TMC) arrived in Bengal in 2011, three years before the arrival of Modi, on the coattails of a neoliberal media intricately intertwined with the interests of capital. 

The neoliberal media in India, all the way from the vernacular media that propped up in West Bengal with funding from the predatory chit funds operated by TMC-related political and petty capitalist forces, to the Barkha Dutt New Delhi Television, to the Republic TV Arnab Goswami, have over the past two decades done the ideological work of promoting the interests of capital, attacking the organized Left. 

Simultaneously, the intellectual class has been organized to reproduce the agenda of capital. For this class commenting on the state of Bengal in the past decade and in the context of the 2021 elections, the rhetoric of TMC and its supremo Mamata Banerjee being the forces to stop Hindutva forms the essential resource of propaganda work. The language of “subaltern” and “popular politics” have been drawn up to offer some empirically bankrupt legitimacy to TMC hegemony. The euphemism depicting TMC’s popular politics obfuscates its politics of organized violence, large-scale corruption, and most fundamentally, collaboration with the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and the original mainspring of hate, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS). 

 For the liberal classes, the lie that TMC is the key, or the only political force to stop the spread of Hindutva in Bengal strategically turns away from the fact that since 2011, TMC has enabled the RSS organizations (shakhas) to take root across Bengal. 

In the work of my research team in rural West Bengal that has been carried out since 1998, we observed closely the number of RSS shakhas that sprouted across largely indigenous and dalit communities post 2011. The accelerated growth of the shakhas has been supported at the grassroots by TMC hooligans and political leaders. 

Even as Banerjee and her political hoodlums have supported the unprecedented growth of the RSS in Bengal, the violent machinery of the TMC has actively targeted the grassroots political infrastructures of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) [CPI(M)]. The past decade has witnessed large-scale political violence across Bengal. Grassroots workers of the CPI(M) have been targeted and murdered. Unprecedented levels of sexual violence have been carried out on CPI(M) supporters and in areas supporting the CPI(M). Many grassroots CPI(M) leaders and supporters have been uprooted from their communities with the threat of political violence. 

In our fieldwork, our research team has documented numerous incidences where CPI(M) supporters in rural areas have expressed their fears in even voicing support for the CPI(M). This culture of violence created by the TMC and its support for the RSS have made the grounds for the presence of BJP in Bengal politics in 2021. 




This organized violence carried out by the TMC has largely been erased from the discursive space. Both liberal intellectuals and liberal media love to hold up the fiery speeches delivered by Ms. Mahua Moitra in parliament as the hopes for democracy and as exemplars of Left politics. Her speeches talk about the necessity of courage in India’s democracy. Just speaking the truth Ms. Moitra reminds us in one of her viral speeches is an act of courage. Yet, Ms. Moitra and the neoliberal media that love her and her party the TMC as the forces to fight Hindutva conveniently fail to make mention of the decade-long organised campaign of violence carried out by the ruling TMC in West Bengal targeting party workers and the activists of the Left. 

Even as Ms. Moitra delivered her latest eloquent speech on courage, students protesting the large scale unemployment in West Bengal were mercilessly beaten up. 

The fact is that the TMC is cut out of the same cloth as the BJP. Both political parties are ideologically right-wing advocates of neoliberal capitalism. Ms. Moitra, a former Wall Street Banker, is categorically clear about her neoliberal economic politics, seeing the forces of the free market as the solutions to poverty. Ms. Moitra is also categorically clear about her commitments to an ideology that sees the forces of the market as the solutions to problems of development. 

The pundit class has offered a range of prescriptions for the everyday voters of West Bengal, with the suggestion that any support for politics outside of the TMC is support for the BJP. These prescriptions are disingenuous because they strategically un-see the violence perpetuated by the TMC. Even worse, when pointed out about this strategic erasure, they conveniently devolve into whataboutery about past violence, largely devoid of empiricism or analysis of scale. The prescriptions of this intellectual class are as undemocratic as the political violence carried out by the TMC. 

Ironically, this monolithic prescription mirror the totalitarian politics of the BJP, discarding the possibilities that are brought to the fore by the organized Left. The alternative policy platforms of creating employment, universal welfare, universal healthcare offered by the Left remain erased in the so-called claims to fighting the forces of Hindutva. 

 The politics of hate that fuels Hindutva needs to be resisted at an ideological level, and TMC is ideologically a collaborator of Hindutva. This collaborationist relationship in contemporary Bengal is a key element that is intentionally rendered absent by the neoliberal media and the liberal pundits.

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