Bets are being laid in Bengal on how long Mamata Banerjee’s Trinamul Congress government will last. The speculation is not on the outcome of the 2021 assembly election but on New Delhi’s intentions. The present crisis over hospital closures shows how easily the Bharatiya Janata Party can give any controversy a communal colour.
The BJP’s national ascendancy rests largely on what Jawaharlal Nehru dreaded as the ultimate in communalism – the minority complex of the majority. It has pandered to the feeling that despite comprising more than 80 per cent of the population, Hindus have suffered a raw deal under a succession of secular governments at the Centre. As a result, the recent Lok Sabha election, when the BJP emerged as the winner in West Bengal resulted in a sharp polarisation of Hindu-Muslim sentiment.
The violence that has been simmering ever since then took a turn for the worse on June 10 when Mohammed Sayeed, a 75-year-old man from Tangra, one of Kolkata’s not very salubrious suburbs, died of cardiac arrest at the Nilratan Sircar Medical College and Hospital where he had been taken after a fall on the mosque steps. As his name proclaims, the dead man was a Muslim. His family felt he had not been properly treated at the NRS Hospital. Sayeed’s son-in-law, Mohammad Mansur Alam, who was present at the hospital when Sayeed’s condition worsened, is quoted in the local newspapers as saying, “We were running around looking for a doctor who could help us. We saw so many doctors in a room; they were chatting and joking among themselves.”
Alam continues, “Many of them were smoking. But none came forward to help us. They said my father-in-law was not their patient.” According to Alam, Sayeed stopped breathing after a doctor gave him an injection. “There was no movement. We knew he was gone,” he said.
The dead man’s angry relatives were soon joined by a mob of neighbours and Tangra residents who allegedly attacked junior doctors at the hospital, reportedly injuring two of them. The doctors and interns called a “cease-work” agitation in protest, and the demonstration snowballed to envelop all 13 medical college hospitals in the city and to at least six district hospitals. Many of them pulled down their shutters. Out-patient departments were closed in some places; emergency services suspended in others.
As it is, Bengal’s public hospitals are in poor shape. They are congested, unclean, under-staffed and often lacking in basic facilities. Pariah dogs roam the wards in some of these insanitary establishments. Yet they serve a crucial purpose. The poorer public is left high and dry when even these unsatisfactory establishments cease operating.
The BJP’s Mukul Roy lost no time in wading into the controversy and blaming members of a “particular community” for the violence. It is to Bengal’s credit that even some of the protesting doctors objected to Mr Roy’s attempt to give a “communal twist” to what they called “an act of hooliganism.” They know that he was in both the Congress and Trinamul Congress parties before joining the BJP; they also know that though he was Mamata Banerjee’s favourite at one time, they fell out and she had him suspended from the party for six years for anti-party activities before he switched to the BJP. “We will not let parties play politics and gain mileage out of this issue”, one young doctor declared. “The assailants are hooligans and they belong to no religion or community. How can anyone communalise such an incident?”
If the mercurial Mr Roy didn’t actually blame Muslims by name, Dilip Ghosh, who represents Medinipur in the Lok Sabha and is current president of the BJP’s West Bengal unit, saw no reason for being squeamish. “Wherever Muslims are dominant, trouble and unrest brews”, the one-time Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh pracharak had announced on an earlier occasion, much to the delight of hardline Hindutva addicts who see Ms Banerjee with her hijab and namaz and her special gifts for mullahs as a dangerous appeaser of Muslims.
Mr Ghosh actually named Mr Roy’s “particular community” and claimed Muslims were under police protection. Asked why his party was singling out a community, the BJP chief said: “It is the harsh truth of Bengal today.” It’s an observation that appealed to many Bengalis who accuse the Chief Minister of pandering to Muslims who comprise 28 per cent of Bengal’s population. They lapped up Mr Ghosh’s promise that the BJP would introduce in Bengal a National Register of Citizens, on the lines of Rajiv Gandhi’s innovation in Assam. Ms Banerjee has always been charged with allowing Muslim Bangladeshis to settle down illegally in Bengal to add to her vote bank, an allegation that was also levelled at Jyoti Basu and the Left Front. Lately, she has also been accused of succouring illegal Rohingya Muslim immigrants from Myanmar.
Having won 18 out of Bengal’s 42 Lok Sabha seats – against only two in the previous parliament – the BJP is naturally cockahoop. It may feel it has a sympathetic patron in West Bengal’s octogenarian governor, Keshari Nath Tripathi, a dyed-in-the-wool BJP politician from Uttar Pradesh, apparently with ready access to Narendra Modi and Amit Shah. But it seems unlikely that despite the clamour by Mr Ghosh, Mr Roy and their likes, President’s Rule will be declared in contentious circumstances. Mr Tripathi is trying to soothe the present unrest with a conference of Trinamul, BJP, Congress and Marxist representatives.
Given her present mood, however, a frustrated Ms Banerjee, disappointed in her hopes of heading an opposition coalition to be prime minister, might play into the hands of her opponents. Normally, a consummate tactician, she could have seized on the hospitals controversy to assert her political primacy, especially since the health portfolio is in her hands. Demanding her direct intervention, the protesting doctors sought “permanent security arrangements” in the hospitals. They would have liked her to visit the two injured junior doctors and express sympathy for them. She could have done so without alienating Mohammed Sayeed’s family and friends who are supposed to have attacked the two young doctors.
Instead, she left matters to her nephew, Abhishek Banerjee, whom many see as being groomed to succeed her, to Chandrima Bhattacharya, the Minister of State for Health, and to the health secretary, Rajiva Sinha. None of this could break the deadlock.
Meanwhile, the violence hasn’t stopped. Two BJP workers and one from Trinamul were murdered in a small town near Bengal’s border with Bangladesh only a few days before the hospitals storm broke. Further clashes can be expected as, its appetite whetted by its phenomenal Lok Sabha win, the BJP’s state unit continues to fan the flames of communal passion.
The writer is the author of several books and a regular media columnist.
