Senior Congress leader P Chidambaram has blamed the BJP for ‘communalising’ West Bengal in a series of tweets on Saturday. Chidambaram claimed that the ‘polarization’ of the state is the ‘gravest tragedy’ that has befallen the state of West Bengal.
The senior Congress leader appears to have forgotten the partition massacres and the Great Calcutta Killings. Bengal suffered a partition in 1947 that was accompanied by mass slaughter of Hindus, rapes and terrible violence. After all this time, for Chidambaram to claim that polarization of the electorate in West Bengal is the greatest tragedy that the state has suffered is an insult towards the Bengali Hindu community.
P Chidambaram said, “I cannot believe that the land of Ramakrishna, Vivekananda, Raja Ram Mohun Roy, Ishwar Chander Vidyasagar, Rabindranath Tagore, Subhas Chandra Bose Satyajit Ray and Dr B C Roy can fall prey to the virus of communalism”. “Anyone who claims the legacy of these great leaders — as I proudly do — should shun and fight communalism,” he added.
The Congress leader’s comments, perhaps, were inspired by political strategist Prashant Kishore’s statements on the politics of Muslim appeasement during the explosive Clubhouse discussion.
“Major problem that we have to accept is that there have been efforts for the last 20 years to appease the minorities. Take the example of Bengal. The simple strategy here has been that whoever has the Muslims vote, will form the government. Be it the Left, Congress or Didi’s government, the strategy has been to garner Muslim votes. For the first time, Hindus have realised that there is a party for them. It is not as if there is something wrong with the society altogether,” Prashant Kishore had said.
He concluded, “This is the aspect that the BJP is exploiting. And this comes from the blatant use of minority politics by some of these parties. You and I cannot deny this reality.”
Chidambaram, nonetheless, appears more inclined than ever to deny the truth that is staring at him on his face. The truth is that Bengal has suffered partition along religious lines and all the horror that came along with it.
After partition, a cycle of minority appeasement politics ensued that has continued to this day. The brand of politics that Mamata Banerjee practices, with restrictions on Durga Puja and silence on the riots that Hindus have suffered in recent times, is only the most obvious face of it.
For a Congress leader to then blame the BJP for ‘communalising’ West Bengal and shaming Bengali Hindus for being concerned about their identity is the perfect demonstration of precisely why Congress is nowhere near in contention in the state and its political fortunes across the country continues to suffer.
Intriguingly, the Congress party is in alliance with the Indian Secular Front (ISF), which is ironically led by rabid Islamist Abbas Siddiqui. Abbas Siddiqui is the same peerzada who had prayed to Allah during the advent of the Coronavirus pandemic in India last year to send such a virus that it killed 50 crore Indians.
“If we do not come to power next time, they (Hindus) will rape our women in front of our eyes. Do you understand? You cannot do anything if you do not have power in your hands,” Siddiqui had said on another occasion.
Such is the person that the Congress party has allied itself with. And then, it blames the BJP for polarization in West Bengal. It is quite amusing, indeed.