Picking back up from where i left off in April, for this dispatch is also posthumous; on May 4th, the B.J.P. was declared the party in power at the West Bengal State Legislative Assembly. This sent shockwaves through the minds of the venerable ভদ্রলোক population, who asked, how could Bengal have elected a fascist government?, thereby demonstrating the Bengali middle class's capacity for amnesia, for you see, the progenitor of the भारतीय जन संघ, the precursor to the B.J.P., was a Bengali brahmin, Shyama Prasad Mukherjee. The election results were not an abberation, they were a homecoming for a party long estranged from its motherland.
I've already written about the S.I.R. and how it reconstituted the electoral rolls in a manner better suited to the election of the B.J.P., but i want to draw a little attention to two other incidents. First, the case of Sandeshkhali which took place in early 2024, wherein a T.M.C. minister under investigation for his involvement in a case of embezzlement was revealed to have been perpetrating systemic sexual assault against the women residents of the village. Second, the rape and murder of a young doctor-in-training at the R.G. Kar Medical College in Kolkata. The latter led to widespread protests in urban centers across the nation, the former, less so.
More importantly, both these incidents also brought the B.J.P. out on the streets to protest patriarchal violence against women, well, that was the pretense anyway, the B.J.P. was merely opportunistically undermining the existence of the T.M.C. as the party in power and mobilising mass outrage to capture said power in West Bengal. And it paid off, the Sandeshkhali constituency was won by the B.J.P. while the R.G. Kar murder victim's mother was floated as a B.J.P. candidate in Panihati, winning the Assembly seat.
Why am i bringing this up? Well, to put it simply, i want to demonstrate that the B.J.P., which has a battery of politicians entangled in sexual assault cases themselves, can quite easily exploit causes that are nominally 'progressive' to their own electoral benefit, and the Bengali middle classes swallow it unthinkingly, without questioning which categories of women the B.J.P. seeks to 'protect' and which categories they would themselves rape and murder on a regular basis, as part of the routine violence of preserving the Indian nation state. Of course, i should also point out that this is not specific to the B.J.P., any party in power in India, as long as it remains a bourgeois liberal democracy, will perpetrate sexual violence to maintain the nation state. Do you remember Kunan Poshpora?
The pattern is unmistakeable, every few years, a 'respectable' (read upper caste, middle class) woman is raped and murdered, it makes the news, middle class men and women across the nation step out to protest, the protests are widely publicised, but there is no concrete change in the patriarchal foundation of the nation state. In fact, the routine sexual violence against lower caste and working class women coninues almost unhindered — the fact that Sandeshkhali was publicised at all is still something of an outlier to me — the women targeted were largely Adivasis from peasant and proletarian backgrounds, and there were precious few urban protests mounted against this extremely clear cut case of systemic violence. The selective outrage is, of course, by design; India would not function without patriarchal violence, since it is an effective means of upholding private property, propagating the family, and maintaining caste. Only the upper caste Hindu, middle class, cis, heterosexual, (reproductively) abled woman is worthy of naught but the merest scrap of protection from the state, provided she remains loyal to the Hindu fascist agenda and subordinate to patriarchal authority, the rest of us don't even warrant the position of human.
You know, i intended for these little recapitulations of each month to be personal, but i fear the advent of fascism (ten year in the making, by the way) tends to be radically impersonal. We're in deep shit, here in Bengal, and i do not intend to minimise it.