Bhangar : What is at stake?
Arup Baisya
But this is one side of the story. The social milieu
of West Bengal is agog with resentment or even surreptitious acts of protest or
revenge against the old patriarchal economic and physical power and this
becomes evident in the outburst of public fury on any issue of public nuisance.
The emergence of large scale wage
labourer and the erosion of feudal patriarchal control lead the society-in-transition
with restlessness. The society is waiting for class hegemony with new
dimensions. These are the Achilles heels for Mamata Benerjee and her party
which came to power in this void. But she so far failed to create a new
political leadership in the Gramscian sense from her rural support base in the
emerging classes. Mamata’s aid de camp and the TMC leaders who come to the fore
from the emerging class apply the same old method a la mode for blatant display
of patriarchal muscle power and economic power as property appropriator. The
national political issues and issues related with statecraft from above are
articulated by the few educated and sophisticated leaders, but to carry this
down to ground level, TMC still has to rely on the old-styled and old-fashioned
leaders who are suffering from gradual diminishing social credibility. This
diminishing credibility of rural leaderships is naturally prone to diminishing
return for political control of TMC over the masses.
The Bhangar imbroglio has unveiled this phenomenon
quite prominently. The accumulated resentment of the inhabitants of Bhangar
against the muscle power and the economic power of the leaders like Arabul et
el turned into rebellion. The argument that the TMC failed to convince the
people about the benefit of Power Grid Sub-station and line is not convincing.
The fact that the villagers could not get adequate compensation of the land due
to the middleman role of local TMC leaders who themselves acted as
land-grabbers is adequate to contemplate the narrative of accumulated ager to
get burst out with a triggering effect of Power Grid issue. Mamata Benerjee and
her party are making half-hearted efforts to nurture new alternative of
articulate political leaderships organically linked to the rural masses and
thus failing to build a sustainable hegemony over the masses for a long time.
This hegemony must be based on a cultural value that takes into account of the
denouncement of the masses to be obsequious to ‘your worship or master’ and on
indigenous industrialization route. Building
of alternative cultural hegemony is more urgent because of the fact that the
challenges are coming from an obscurantist all-out cultural hegemony of
Hindutwa.
If Mamata Benerjee does not understand this rule of
the game, her meticulously portrayed crusader image against the
ultra-nationalist fascist forces cannot be the cementing factor to bind the
people of West Bengal as a coherent whole behind her to fight the fascist
menace. In that case, she is destined to lose ground and to be dethroned in
near future.
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