One of the great paradoxes of modern nation-States is the pervasiveness of political violence that thrives alongside robust democratic franchise. In India, stranger still is the varied nature of this kind of violence – between clans, communities, faiths and castes. Yet, in Bengal – the state most notorious for violence around elections – these social cleavages melt away in front of the sharp divisions along party lines, which sparks a volley of low-intensity but high-frequency clashes. This is a phenomenon that is not new, and some historians trace it to the violent beginnings of modern electoral politics in the province more than a century ago, but the trend gets reinforced come every election season.
The latest addition to this unfortunate string of events is the 18 deaths in the run-up to the panchayat elections in West Bengal, which will be held on Saturday. Despite sharp censure from governor CV Ananda Bose and repeated interventions by the Calcutta high court, the violence has continued unabated in a state where the ruling party – from the Congress to the Left and now the Trinamool Congress – has always unleashed muscle power to establish their writ on the countryside.
Why is this the case? There are three reasons.
The first is historical. The violent antecedents of pre-Independence politics in the province and the upheaval caused by the carnage of Partition left deep scars on the socio-political psyche of the state. While, in time, sectarianism ebbed, the old links between violence and organised politics were never really severed. As the state slowly transformed into what political scientist Dwaipayan Bhattacharya terms a party society, these old fault lines bubbled back to the surface, and were used adroitly to capture ground.
The second is political. In a populous and largely rural state, the Left adopted land and resource mobilisation as an emotive issue, and used rural units as instruments of control, not just for elections but also for everyday life. In a state where rural bodies were up and running decades before the 1993 reforms operationalised panchayati raj across India, parties used the rural governance machinery as extensions of the party arm. As economic hardships rose, so did the importance of these bodies in distributing largesse and benefits. Parties understood that holding control of the countryside laid the foundation for power. When the Left wobbled after Singur and Nandigram, it first lost control of the panchayats. And when the Bharatiya Janata Party first found a toehold in the state, it did so by capturing panchayats in 2018. No wonder that the TMC is keen to consolidate its power this time around.
And the third is mathematical. As political scientist Neelanjan Sircar wrote on this page, contrary to popular perception, parties don’t pay an adverse cost for unleashing violence. In fact, there exists a positive relationship between seats that went uncontested (a good proxy for areas that saw violence meant to stop Opposition candidates from filing papers) and strike rates in polls. This is the instrumental reason for the persistence of political violence – it works.
Violence is antithetical to the democratic impulse because it is meant to stymie freedom of political choice. This is why the authorities have a moral responsibility to stop it. But unless the structural reasons are identified and weeded out, the root of political violence in Bengal will remain. Unfortunately, that will require political and administrative will, and that has always been in short supply.
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