A week has elapsed since the dramatic Assembly election results of West Bengal and Tamil Nadu. This week has seen West Bengal experiencing large-scale post-poll violence and vandalism even as the BJP projected its SIR-engineered victory as a victory of trust over fear. At the receiving end of this terror campaign are ordinary Muslim lives and livelihoods, opposition party offices and activists, statues of Lenin and even those of Sidhu-Kanhu, the Muslim heritage of Bengal and memorials of anti-feudal anti-colonial revolts, and portraits of Bengal's great icons who are now liable to be smeared with saffron. Amid this triumphalist celebration, we are also witnessing an unmistakable reconfiguration of the state administration with a quid pro quo rewarding of officers who oversaw the SIR elections in West Bengal. Special observer Subrata Gupta is now principal advisor to the new CM and CEO Manoj Agrawal is the new chief secretary.
A mysterious exception to the general pattern and direction of violence is the killing of Chandranath Rath, a former IAF technical tradesman who had been working as an executive assistant of Suvendu Adhikari for the last six years. The murder of Chandranath Rath on 6 May rekindled the memories of three previous mysterious deaths of people working for Suvendu Adhikari in the past - Pradip Jha in 2013, Shubhabrata Chakraborty in 2018 and Pulak Lahiri in 2021. All these serial deaths have remained shrouded in mystery. Now that Suvendu Adhikari has become the Chief Minister of West Bengal's first BJP government, there should be a credible probe into this entire chain.
Suvendu Adhikari shot into national limelight before the 2016 West Bengal elections when a video of a bribe-taking sting operation on him went viral. Both PM Modi and then BJP chief Amit Shah invoked this video to campaign against the TMC. But following in the footsteps of his Assam counterpart Himanta Biswa Sarma who too was targeted by the BJP as an epitome of corruption before joining the BJP, Adhikari joined the BJP in 2020. Now Himanta Biswa Sarma in Assam, Samrat Choudhary in Bihar and Suvendu Adhikari in West Bengal, three politicians who began their careers in the Congress, RJD and TMC respectively and had serious corruption and criminal charges against them have been rehabilitated by the BJP as Chief Ministers of their respective states. And all of them have emerged as hate-spewing icons of the Yogi brand of bulldozer raj.
In Tamil Nadu, the Governor deviated from the constitutional norm of inviting the leader of the largest single party or pre-poll alliance and waited till the TVK could furnish written evidence of majority support. With support from the Congress, VCK, CPI, CPI(M) and IUML, the TVK chief C. Joseph Vijay has finally been sworn in as the Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu. There are also reports of a section of the AIADMK splitting and joining the new TVK-led dispensation. Early indications suggest that the TVK is positioning itself as a secular democratic force upholding the federal framework of the Indian republic. In this sense we can say that both Tamil Nadu and Keralam continue to reject and resist the BJP's electoral advance in the southern region of India.
Aside from the political ramifications of the May 4 results, we now also have to face the undeclared economic emergency imposed by the Modi government. Beginning with the massive hike in commercial cooking gas prices and its cascading effect across the economy, we now also have a whole new set of austerity advice by the Prime Minister. The Prime Minister who travels with a convoy of at least fifty vehicles and flies around in a 8,000 crore luxury plane wants people to work from home, use less petrol and even less cooking oil, and undertake no foreign travel for the next one year. The economic crisis has been deepened by the government's foreign and economic policy failures - especially the mortgaging of the country's foreign policy and trade interests to the US-Israel axis. And now the government is busy transferring the burden of the crisis onto the common people. The combination of this undeclared economic lockdown and blatant subversion of democracy and denial of the electoral rights of the people marks a new level of fascist aggression. Left, progressive and anti-fascist forces must be ready to face this heightened offensive with renewed energy, determination and unity.
