The sacred agitations by a few groups of academic pilgrims, which took university campuses in West Bengal by storm very recently, demanding online examinations for all semesters, (after attending offline classes for almost an entire semester!) imported the plumb political slogan “khela hobe” into the academic arena.
It is no more a secret to the political community of this country that the current ruling party of this State endorsed and popularised this slogan during the last Assembly election to allegedly intimidate its political opponents with shaded threats of violence and political revenge.
Most shockingly, this contentious slogan was reiterated time and again. As an expected consequence, that election witnessed unprecedented assaults on the workers of political parties, including a number of election candidates. Many such cases of cruelty are still under investigation.
This episode has once again shown how delicate and devastating a political slogan can get and what serious damage it can cause to people, especially when it is being promoted repeatedly by people in the highest positions.
In fact, political leaders sometimes deliberately use and popularise certain multi-layered political vocabularies with definite political purpose. These slogans can be both constructive (like achchhe din) and destructive (like goli maro).
If khela hobe (will play) was used by the ruling party as a tool of intimidation, Bangla nijer meyekei chai (Bengal wants her own daughter) or Joy Bangla! (Hail Bengal!) was used by the same party as a verbal tool of cultural affiliation.
The second group of slogans worked more effectively and positively for the ruling party simply because it successfully ignited the sense of pride and rootedness in culture among a large section of the people of Bengal.
In a sense, these slogans fanned the ego of these people by creating an environment of Bengali Asmita, which was propagated to be under threat owing to the ‘invasion’ of North Indian culture via the leaders coming to Bengal from other parts of the country for election campaigns. An atmosphere of glorified parochialism and sharp cultural division was created through the discourse of Bengali Asmita from the positions of power which subsequently trickled down to the masses.
Power, by nature, flows vertically, more often than not from the zenith to the nadir. Naturally, if a political discourse is being set and endorsed by the ruling class of people unabatedly, by way of using all its mechanisms of propaganda, it ultimately influences the political consciousness and the decision-making process of the masses. The systematic and well- calculated political cry for protecting the interests of Bengalis alone has been planted so deeply and cunningly in the minds of the people of Bengal that even one of the most reputed singers of Bengal, who has won the prestigious National Award for his singing, has been seen advocating for the rights and interests of the Bengali singers alone!
More interestingly, a group of Bengali singers-turned-intellectuals (!) have extended their support to this popular artist who coughed venom on social media against the effervescent and euphoric youth of Bengal who were/are going gaga over the magical performance and exceptional singing prowess of the legendary singer KK, who and people like whom are being termed by these overenthusiastic so-called intellectuals as ‘outsiders’.
The actual reason behind the untimely demise of this exceptionally talented singer is yet to be unearthed but this episode has brutally exposed one of the darkest sides of the politics of Asmita in Bengal in recent times.
Bengal has historically been the abode of cultural harmony and liberal thought. In fact, the Bengal Renaissance of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century had changed the intellectual landscape of not only this country but almost the entire Asia.
It was due to the collaborative efforts of the British missionaries and the Bengali intelligentsia that this region became the birthplace of a highly modernised education system, the foundational principle of which was to accept heterogeneity and plurality of thought and belief.
Therefore, it is rather too shocking that such land and a major section of its populace, including some leading intellectuals, are proudly upholding narrow provincialism in recent times.
The situation has reached such an absurd extent that the leading Bengali news channel has chosen Banglar Khabor (news of Bengal) as its new buzz- word. Interestingly, one of its rival news channels has come up with a similar tagline Bangalir Khabor (news of Bengalis), which is again designed to target this recently popularised sense of Bengali Asmita among the people of Bengal.
The most alarming part of this entire discourse is that this vulgar and most uncalled-for the race in promoting localism may end up giving rise to separatist politics in this region of the country in the long run.
Instead of fighting this political menace, the present Bengali intelligentsia, at least a large section, has decided to become willing accomplices in promoting the politics of exclusion. Rupankar Bagchi’s verbal conniptions need to be understood vis-à-vis this larger political perspective.
There is no doubt that Mr Bagchi had no such thoughts as protecting Bengali Asmita against north Indian cultural invasion while spitting out chagrin and childlike petulance on the social media platform. He must have questions of financial and artistic security in mind while making such hasty and nasty remarks.
But the point is, he borrows, knowingly or otherwise, expressions from the dominant political discourse of protecting the interest of Bengalis alone, in this case, the interest of the Bengali artists alone, against everything/ everyone that/who is not Bangali. His reluctant notes of apology only add more flesh to his parochial arrogance. What these people refuse to understand is that they are digging their own graves by falling prey to the dominant political discourse, which was framed to serve a specific political purpose, as it is sure to prove counterproductive for them in the long run.
Expectedly, political hullabaloos have started over the sad departure of KK whose last performance took place recently in an auditorium in Kolkata where the total sitting capacity was slightly more than two thousand.
How the organisers allowed more than seven thousand people to enter the auditorium that day needs to be thoroughly investigated and the culprits must be brought to book immediately.
Irresponsible behaviour on the part of the organisers, also the managerial team of the artist, is equally responsible for this massive disaster. But no sensible person on earth would ever call this a case of murder. Therefore, questions like ‘who killed KK’ would be grossly irrelevant here.
Instead of trying to reap political benefits out of this tragedy, political leaders of Bengal must reevaluate their individual political stands on negatively influencing people through violent and parochial political slogans which may ultimately lead the entire community to self-centrism and, subsequently, separatism. Seen from this perspective, Rupankar Bagchi’s question ~ ‘who is KK’ ~ is only the tip of an iceberg. The sooner Bengalis introspect, the better it will be for the future of Bengal.