Another one bites the dust

Adulteress to lover while enjoying post-coital smoke: “My entire life is a lie, and you are the only truth”.

Noted journalist Udayan Namboodiri once said that Jyoti Basu lived such a life. I would like to say that all politicians in Bengal lead such lives today. Lives full of hypocrisy.  While common people celebrate winds of change the underlying political current laughs at the naiveté of such a notion and continues with terror tactics that is so much a part and parcel of peoples’ lives in West Bengal for the last thirty years.  No one really knows how many people were tortured and killed in the communist regime of Jyoti Basu.

I once had a chance to broach this topic to a contemporary IPS officer while researching for the book Bengal’s Night Without End when he did admit albeit behind closed doors and in hushed voice that the number as contemplated is astronomical indeed. The sheer horror of everyday living such seeped in common people’s mind by the so-called protector of the poor, the communist, socialist government! You could still see the fear and distrust in the eyes of the local people in Garbeta, Lalgarh, Barasat…endless rural areas where political mafia goons dictate lives and living. All those lost lives who perished in the clutches of poverty, lawlessness, riots and political foolhardy are conveniently forgotten by the media.

The only reason why you could take a peek at Singur and Nandigram was because it was a political sham. It was meant to go public as conceived by the Trinamool Congress rivals so that people start believing in another eye-wash, a monumental lie. That of sustenance and better living with the change of government- a concept that people of Bengal had long forgotten.

This is exactly the sentiment where Mamata Banerjee built her political ambition on. But she went one step further. She adhered to the Divide and Rule philosophy that mercilessly tore Bengal and India as a whole once. To seal her unsure vote bank, she very tactfully fell in love with Muslim stereotypes. Of course they are the easiest and stupidest to appease. They don’t ask for educational reforms or economic alleviation or anything intellectual as a matter of fact. All she had to do was put a gigantic picture of hers doing namaz  in the party office and let the religious freaks do the same in the middle of a busy day, in the middle of a traffic stricken main road and that’s it! The Imams of the leading mosques puttied in her pelted hands. The hands of destruction, carnage and chaos. That’s what is happening.

The Muslim onslaught in Deganga is merely a trailer led by Trinamool Congress MP Haji Nurul Islam. The whole horror movie would commence. Next Year. Once Mamata Banerjee, the perceived messiah of the impoverished and the marginalized grabs the chair, to beef up the woes of, yeah you got it right, the impoverished and the marginalized!

The deluge waiting to happen.