The who-what-why of the Murshidabad violence

Murshidabad has been quiet for some days, but the BJP is not letting go just yet of the ‘opportunity’ to corner the Mamata Banerjee government for its failure to contain the violence. The demand for President’s Rule is still loud and visits to Murshidabad on Friday and Saturday (18–19 April) by Governor C.V. Ananda Bose and members of the National Commission for Women (NCW) have kept the pot boiling.

There are all kinds of provocative whodunit-style claims and counter-claims on social media, but there is also enough in that media maelstrom to doubt that the violence was in fact a ‘communal’ incident rather than politically instigated. There is more than a handful of stories of Hindus and Muslims jointly resisting the mob in Murshidabad, even though these accounts have been drowned in the din of political rhetoric.

According to one of these accounts, when ‘Manik’s’ house was attacked, his neighbour Sanaul and other Muslim neighbours joined them to repulse the attacks. Archana Sarkar is thankful to her Muslim neighbours for saving her life and helping her escape.

Such video clips, also shared by ABP Live, of Hindus expressing their gratitude to Muslim neighbours, have barely made it to newspapers and disappeared from the news.

The violence, it was alleged, was instigated by Muslims protesting against the passage of the Waqf Act. If Muslims unleashed the violence, did they also torch their own homes and establishments?! Who attacked the house of Khalilur Rahman, the Muslim MP of Trinamool Congress?

Trinamool Congress circulated videos of women saying on camera that BJP supporters had vandalised their homes for their sin of voting for the ‘Muslim party’. There is no independent corroboration of these allegations. Also, media reports give the impression that the violence was widespread when it was confined to four blocks in two subdivisions of Murshidabad.

That Hindu houses were also attacked is undeniable. By whom is a question that still does not have a clear and reliable answer. That the murders of Haragobinda Das and his 40-year-old son Chandan—who were dragged out of their home, tortured and then stabbed to death—were particularly brutal is another fact.

Police claim to have identified their assailants with the help of CCTV footage, but had no theories on why the duo were singled out for such brutality. The father and son were CPI(M) workers.

The only other death reported from Murshidabad is of a Muslim youth, killed allegedly in police firing.

The Trinamool Congress has been circulating videos of victims claiming it was BJP workers, not Muslims, who hounded them out of their homes. Around 300 Hindu families from four blocks in Murshidabad were taken away by the BSF to schools in neighbouring Malda district after they fled their homes. Some of their houses were burnt by mobs on the rampage.

The Governor and members of the NCW met them and visited villages to take stock of the damage to property. It was hard to miss the saffron scarves in the crowd, and the chants of ‘Jai Shri Ram’, when the Governor was visiting the relief camps.

BJP leaders have accused Trinamool Congress and the police of engineering the violence to divert attention from the snowballing protests of schoolteachers whose jobs were recently terminated on the orders of the Supreme Court. Union minister Sukanta Majumdar claimed the attackers were Bangladeshi infiltrators who wanted to incite violence in the state.

Trinamool Congress and the police, on the other hand, said they believe people from adjoining states of Bihar and Jharkhand, barely six kilometres away, were brought in to instigate the violence. Videos of at least two young boys with skull caps were also circulated on social media with unverified claims that they were Hindus from neighbouring states.

Alleging a total breakdown of law and order, followed by the now-familiar BJP demand for imposition of President’s Rule in the state, Majumdar and the official BJP handles on social media circulated nine visuals of rioting, allegedly in the current cycle of violence in the state. When the police pointed out that these visuals were old, some dating back to anti-CAA protests in 2019-20, and that the visuals were from several BJP-ruled states, the posts were hastily deleted.

Most leaders as well as the police seem to agree that ‘outsiders’ played a hand. Some eyewitness accounts, claiming they did not recognise people in the mob, seem to lend credence to these claims, but there are no details of who they were, or whether any came from outside the state, as variously alleged by both BJP and Trinamool leaders. The West Bengal Police have made 274 arrests so far.

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West Bengal goes to polls in March–April next year. This year started with RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat camping in West Bengal for 10 days in February. In March, BJP leader Suvendu Adhikari declared that Muslim MLAs would be thrown out of the assembly ‘when’ (he didn’t say ‘if’) the BJP comes to power.

It drew a prompt response from Trinamool Congress MLA Humayun Kabir from Murshidabad. Newspapers reported Kabir saying if Adhikari dared to step into Murshidabad on 13 April, he would receive a thrashing. The significance of 13 April was lost on this reporter, but violence broke out in Murshidabad on 11–12 April.

There is an uneasy, fragile peace in Murshidabad, but given the incessant communal provocation at the behest of the BJP, it’ll be a miracle if it lasts.