This year’s general elections are about breaking the stereotype thinking about the political reality of West Bengal. The Muslim equation is one of them. The Muslims are considered to be one of the major social planks the Left vote bank is built upon, and the Left continues to harp on the benefits the Muslims derive from its rule.
To lay stress on this point, the CPI(M) has circulated a number of booklets and pamphlets highlighting the benefits accrued to the Muslims during the Left rule. Among those, the security concerns for the minorities top the list. This apart, there are claims about the various development projects taken up by the Left Front government in the areas of school and college education, vocational courses for minority students and making available bank credit to the self-help groups formed by the Muslim women.
The extra efforts taken by the Left to woo the Muslims points to two significant aspects: one, the Muslim community is considerable in number in the state (according to NSSO 2004, Muslim population in West Bengal is 28.62 per cent); two, recent panchayat and other elections have seen some visible shift of these Muslim voters away from the Left to the Opposition.
Rezzak Molla, the state land revenue minister, who realises the implication of the change in Muslim attitude, is a worried and angry man. He is angry because despite repeated warnings issued by them, the party failed to realise the importance of the land issue. A hardcore party member, Molla is lamenting the fact that all these campaigns are now falling on deaf ears.
Other than Murshidabad district, where the Muslims are majority in overwhelming numbers, there are significant vote banks of Muslims in Nadia, Hooghly, East Midnapore, North and South 24 Parganas and Kolkata, of which the last three districts will go to polls in the last leg of the elections on May 13. Molla himself hails from Bhangar in the South 24 Parganas, where the Left government first tasted the Muslim ire when the peasants chased away the government officials who went there to survey the land to be acquired for the proposed Barasat-Raichak Expressway.
The Buddhadev Bhattacharya government had invited Indonesia’s Salem Group to build the road along with a cluster of projects. According to Molla, Muslims and Scheduled Caste communities comprise the majority of farmers and landless peasants in the state. Yet, they were not taken into confidence when the government went for land acquisition bids. So, in Nandigram, Singur and elsewhere, Muslim peasants took active role in the resistance movement. The Sachar Committee report had only added fuel to the fire.
Since, Basirhat, Barasat and Bangaon in North 24 Parganas and Daimod Harbour in South 24 Parganas have a sizeable number of Muslim votes, the Left leaders are trying desperately to bring them back to their fold. Asgar Ali Molla, Sheikh Sazzad and a group of Muslim youth in Hasnabad, which fall under the Basirhat constituency, are talking of teaching a lesson to the Left. In Basirhat, Muslims comprise more than 50 per cent of the population.
The Left candidate, CPI’s sitting MP Ajoy Chakravarty, is pitted against Haji Nurul of the Trinamool Congress (TC). But all eyes are on a third candidate, Siddikulla Chowdhury, a Jamait-e-Hind Ulema leader who has been campaigning there with much fanfare. Two years back, Chowdhury first started his stir in rural Bengal on the Sachar Committee report and got very good response.
He also joined the Bhumi Uchchhed Pratirodh Committee (committee for resistance to land acquisition) in Nandigram. But when he tried to test the strength of his newly-floated political outfit, PDCI, in the panchayat elections last year, the Muslims did not oblige. The Mulsims were not swayed by his rhetoric, rather they chose to support the main opposition TC. The people in villages like Minakhan and Hasnabad are of the view that Chowdhury has been propped up by the Left to undercut the Muslim votes in Basirhat.
Elsewhere in the Jadavpur Lok Sabha constituency, Saifuddin Chowdhury, a former CPI(M) MP, is contesting as an independent candidate. Chief Minister Buddhadev Bhattacharya has already queered the pitch for him by saying that he would be glad to see Saifuddin back in the party.
Trinamool chief Mamata Banerjee did not waste this opportunity to brand Saifuddin as a “dummy candidate of the CPI(M)”. There are several Muslim pockets in Kolkata North and Kolkata South constituencies, and the Muslims in Rajabazar, Kalutolla, Park Circus, Tiljala, Garden Reach and Port area are mostly of north Indian Urdu-speaking community.
