Three decisions made by the British Raj, and one miracle by a Mahatma immediately after freedom in August 1947, have shaped the contemporary political map and mind of Bengal.
The seminal decisions were the Permanent Settlement secured by Lord Cornwallis, in 1793; the first census in 1871; and Lord Curzon’s partition of Bengal in 1905. A history of political infections is ancestor to the electoral shifts of 2021.
The Permanent Settlement, which partially mirrored Europe’s serfdom, altered the hierarchies of power and impoverished the landless cultivator by the terms of revenue collection through a new class of Zemindars. The number of Muslim Zemindars in Bengal was miniscule.
The pre-British Nawabs tried to ease any resentment among Hindu elites with accommodation in the administrative structure, and assuage mass sentiment with absorption into a common culture driven by the Bengali language and local customs.
By extension, Muslim rule also was diagnosed as an interruption to the golden age of India, whose revival became the objective of the intelligentsia.
The British scheme of partisan empowerment, in cyclical spells, succeeded in establishing a sense of alienation between Hindus and Muslims even as it encouraged sharp competition on the basis of religion. By the 1820s the British policy of an unfathomable Great Divide had got off to a sprinting start.
The results of the 1871 census should have been boring. Instead, they were startling. Till then, no one knew what the precise Hindu and Muslim populations of Bengal were. The first census of British Bengal revealed that Muslims were in a majority; their numerical advantage overwhelming in the eastern districts; and that most were peasants under Hindu Zemindars.
It was an economic problem which demanded an economic answer. Instead, the British used these revelations to inject the spark of religion into the brushwood of nascent politics. They recognized the implications, and with colonial speed institutionalized schism, diverting Bengal’s sentiments away from nationalism towards identity assertion.
The census of British India and its Feudatory States in 1871-72 found that Hindus and Sikhs added up to 140.5 million, or 73.5 percent; Muslims were 21.5 percent, or 40.75 million. The other roughly 20 million were tribals, Buddhists, Jains, Christians, Jews, Parsis or Brahmos [the sect founded by Raja Rammohun Roy in Bengal, which believed in monotheism].
Bengal was, however, sharply divergent: Hindus were only 64.5 percent of the population and Muslims over 30 percent. Moreover, the latter had a two-third majority in the east of Bengal. These Muslims were also converts from what were called the “lower castes”, which added another edge to their sense of social and economic deprivation.
What interested the authorities was the religious mix in districts like Furreedpoor, Dacca, Rungpoor, Pubna, Rajshahye, Tipperah, Burdwan, Jessore, Nuddea, Moorshedabad, Midnapoor [to use British spellings]; Hooghly [with Howrah]; and 24-Parganas, a district extending from Calcutta to the Bay of Bengal.
Once again, in the 2021 election, Bengal is at a turning point. It will be fascinating to watch the results on 2 May.
“It is remarkable that, of the 20.5 millions of Mussulmans in Bengal and Assam (forming the larger moiety of the Mahomedan population of British India), 17.5 millions are found in Eastern Bengal and the adjoining Districts of Sylhet and Cachar, where they amount to 49 per cent. of the total population; and in two districts, those of Bogra and Rajshahye, to about 80 percent. In that part of the country they comprise the bulk of the cultivating and labouring class, while in Chittagong and Noscully [Noakhali], they follow a seafaring life; and it seems probable that their preponderance is due to the conversion of the lower orders from the old Hindoo religion under which they held position of out-castes,” says the census report placed in the British Parliament. In Bihar by comparison, “the comparatively few Mahomedans, some 13 percent., belong to the upper classes as a rule”. Orissa was overwhelmingly Hindu. The politics of Bihar and Orissa, consequently, evolved on a different trajectory.
The key to British intentions in Bengal lay in the phrase, the “bulk of the cultivating and labouring classes”. What they did not add was that the destitution of these landless peasants and agricultural labour could be directly attributed to the Permanent Settlement; instead, they suggested that Muslims had lost out because they had lost power. It was a transparent attempt to convert peasant disaffection against Hindu landlords into a political weapon that would serve a foreign master’s interests. The 1871 census fed directly into the most pernicious instincts of divisive colonial rule.
The British took three inter-connected steps between 1905 and 1909 to create a template for a Muslim minority phobia and embed dual communalism into the pseudo-democracy of British India.
In July 1905 they formed a new “Eastern Bengal” province, with a two-thirds Muslim majority. In 1905, Dhaka became capital of Eastern Bengal. Hindus, enraged at the mutilation of united Bengal, refused to accord the usual address of welcome. The Great Divide deepened.
Partition done, the pre-eminent Muslim acolyte of the British in Bengal, Nawab Khwaja Salimullah in Dhaka, founded the All-India Muslim League on 30 December 1906. Then the Morley-Minto Reforms established separate electorates. Politics became firmly entrenched into religious grooves.
The 1905 partition, depicted in an iconic image of the severed body of Mother Bengal, provoked violent protests. In 1911, the partition was rescinded. But it left a scar.
For more than three decades the scar festered in Bengal, with the Muslim League as champion of separatism. In the 1946 provincial elections, the last held under British rule, the Muslim League won 113 out of 119 Muslim seats in Bengal, and Congress swept up 86 “general”, or Hindu-vote, seats. Any hope of unity vanished with the violence of riots that contaminated Calcutta and Bengal after the Muslim League formed a government in 1946.
1947 was an epic year in the world’s history; the age of colonialism, which had begun in India, began its retreat on 15 August with India’s freedom. Gandhi’s moral triumph had a significant consequence on Bengal’s demographics, and thereby on the future electoral map of the state. While Punjab witnessed a total exchange of populations, Muslims of West Bengal living alongside the border of what is today Bangladesh remained in their own land. Seven decades later, the largest density of West Bengali Muslims is in these districts. There is now an East Bengal in West Bengal.
There are over 100 seats in Bengal’s 294-member Assembly where the Muslim population can become the determinant of who wins; and their percentage rises sharply in the eastern districts from North 24-Parganas to Dinajpur. Murshidabad’s constituencies also reflect this pattern, as does North 24-Parganas on the southern border.
In past elections these figures did not matter too much, for the Muslim vote followed the general electoral flow, whether to re-elect a government or defeat it. When change came in 1967 and 2011, it came because both Hindus and Muslims changed their mind. Voters united to unhinge Congress in 1967. Now, a vote transfer is leaving the Left in the lurch as well.
There is a growing and perceptible consolidation of votes around Trinamool Congress and BJP making the elections of 2021 a straight two-party race. The alliance between the Congress and the Left could well turn out to be a vacuous arrangement. Nothing plus nothing can only equal nothing.
There were good reasons why the Left seemed impregnable for three and a half decades. The most important was the goodwill it earned among the peasantry when it first came to power as part of a United Front and then Left Front, and ensured that the landless of the Permanent Settlement, got the land they were cultivating as sharecroppers. They did this forcefully, for peasants of all communities.
It did not bother the Bengali Hindu or Muslim what the avowed faith of its ruling party was, as long as the people were left free to celebrate Durga Puja and Eid. The Marxists were self-avowed atheists. For a brief while they flirted with ideological consistency. Very soon they realized that this was political suicide. The pre-Marxist arrangement was restored. A party apparatchik was given the responsibility of organizing funds for Puja pandals, and normalcy returned.
Shibboleths were honored. Oxbridge educated Marxists like the iconic CM Jyoti Basu dressed in a Bengali dhoti. Their peasant leaders like Harekrishna Konar had slept on a rural charpoy.
The CPI[M] would not have been obliterated in 2011 without an electoral grassroots alliance across identity differences.
Perhaps the only section of Bengal’s electorate which lives a bit askance of its linguistic culture is the “Bihari” who speaks Bhojpuri or Hindi or Urdu. This community, yet another byproduct of British rule, arrived from the middle of the 19th century as labour for British plantations from Fiji to Mauritius to Latin America. One part of the flow stopped, to work in the new jute mills and iron factories the British were creating. This vote has some impact in Calcutta and its long river-shore suburbs to the north and south of Calcutta, but it cannot by itself affect decisively the final tally.
Once again, in the 2021 election, Bengal is at a turning point. It will be fascinating to watch the results on 2 May.
