Desperation leads to violence as history repeats itself

KOLKATA: Sanjit Pramanik, a Rabindra Bharati University student, was lured with a job to jam a polling booth in Nadia’s Shantipur where he was lynched. Sanjit’s case perhaps provides a key to the uncertainty and desperation among Bengal’s rural youth, somewhat different from the established Bengali bhadralok who is usually argumentative but law abiding, and doesn’t have a violent streak in his DNA.
With returns diminishing from the continuous fragmentation of land, many youths from villages migrate to other states for earnings only to come back during elections so that their families get the government doles — a bicycle, a dwelling unit, pension for their parents and so on. Those who stay back become cogs and wheels of the vote machinery to eke out a living. They run errands for the local political bosses, and act as their trusted soldiers for a pittance. Politics for them is a means of survival. They oil the vote machinery round the year, take to violence to crush dissent because their fortunes are linked to the boss’s ability to deliver. Any threat to the local political power makes them feel shaky and they overdo to set things right. However,this beneficiary system creates another group of youth — the “have nots” that Mamata Banerjee had identified during the CPM regime — who become desperate to bring a different party in power, resulting in violence.

In Bengal, political leaders are sometime driven by this desperation when they start nursing national ambitions. After staying in power for a term or more, these leaders in a bid to elevate themselves to the national level want maximum number of seats from their home state — be it in the panchayat or in the Lok Sabha. CPM took to the same tactic in Bengal when Jyoti Basu’s name started doing the rounds in the national corridors of power. It is not mere coincidence that the opposition didn’t get candidates to field in the 2003 panchayat polls. A monopoly in the panchayat was what the Left wanted to bag the maximum number of Lok Sabha seats in 2004. It enabled CPM to hold the lifeline of the UPA I government between 2004 and 2008. The desperate bid to gain a monopoly in panchayats perhaps explains the worst violence in the 2003 panchayat polls.
Time has come when Trinamool seems to be taking the same route. want maximum panahayat seats that can get fetch for the party all the 42 seats from Bengal. Trinamool wants this to help Mamata Banerjee lead the anti-BJP conglomerate. BJP, is also eyeing Bengal and Odisha after it has come to power in Jharkhand, Assam and Tripura. It’s a make or break for both Trinamool and BJP. Political desperation begets violence.
Bengal had practiced extremist politics during Independence struggle. But it was ideology-driven, good or bad. “Now we are heading for times when violence has no ideological or moral backing. It’s a means of survival,” said sociologist Prasanta Roy.