Bengal Changed Color, Not Yet Character
Acronyms and names used in this post: BJP means Bharatiya Janata Party, India’s ruling national party and now the governing party in West Bengal. TMC means Trinamool Congress, the party that governed West Bengal from 2011 until this election. AITC means All India Trinamool Congress, the formal name of TMC. CPI(M) means Communist Party of India (Marxist), the main Left party that ruled Bengal before TMC. ECI means Election Commission of India, the constitutional body that conducts and reports election results. RSS means Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, the volunteer organization historically linked with the BJP.
Bengal has not been reborn; it has changed the bedsheet after a long fever.
That is not nothing. A clean sheet matters when the old one smells of sweat, medicine, and political decay. The official result is enormous. BJP has won 207 seats in the West Bengal Assembly, while AITC has been reduced to 80. Suvendu Adhikari has taken oath as the first BJP Chief Minister of West Bengal. This is not a slight adjustment in the sofa cover. This is the furniture being dragged across the floor at midnight while the neighbors pretend not to hear.
But I am a fifty-one-year-old lower-middle-class man in the not-so-glamorous edges of Calcutta, which means I have developed the political optimism of a goat standing outside a biryani shop. I do not faint with joy when one party loses, because in Bengal the party is often only the flag on top of the bamboo pole. The real thing is below: the club, the local strongman, the police connection, the tender, the school job, the hospital recommendation, the land quarrel, the para committee, the little envelope, the whispered phone call, the “dada dekhe debe” that has governed more lives than any constitution.
This is what we must say without perfume. TMC did not merely lose because voters suddenly became philosophers. It lost because the old arrangement had become too heavy to carry. Too many allegations. Too many scandals. Too much arrogance. Too much neighborhood-level fear. Too many people made to feel that public life was a private estate, and they were allowed to enter only through the servants’ gate.
That anger is real. It should not be mocked by people sitting in air-conditioned rooms quoting democracy like a poetry line from school.
Still, the fall of one ruling network does not automatically create a republic. Sometimes one set of men leaves the room, another set enters, and the chair remains warm. India specializes in this trick. The old landlord goes. The new landlord arrives with a louder microphone, a cleaner kurta, and an even more muscular nephew.
The poor man claps, because what else is he to do? He has a ration card to protect, a daughter’s tuition to pay, a mother’s prescription to buy, and a leaking roof that turns every monsoon into an engineering examination conducted by God. The middle class claps more cautiously. We are the species that has learned to keep one hand on the wallet and one eye on the exit.
The true problem of Bengal is not only party corruption. That is too simple, too satisfying, like blaming the mosquito after leaving the drain open for twenty years. The true problem is that public life has become dependent on private permission. A citizen cannot simply be a citizen. He must be someone’s man, someone’s voter, someone’s beneficiary, someone’s follower, someone’s cousin, someone’s booth worker, someone’s list entry. If he has no one, he becomes air.
This is how a society shrinks. Not with one dramatic dictatorship, but with daily small humiliations. You go to get a document corrected, and a clerk looks at you as if you have interrupted his meditation. You go to the police, and they first calculate who you are before calculating what happened. You look for work, and discover that merit is a decorative word, like those plastic flowers people keep in drawing rooms. You see processions, slogans, flags, and faces, but not enough ordinary competence.
Bengal once had a reputation for argument. We wore it like a shawl, slightly moth-eaten but still grand. “What Bengal thinks today, India thinks tomorrow,” we said, and for some time perhaps there was truth in it. Books, theater, politics, science, football, Marx, Tagore, tea, adda, and unreasonable self-regard all lived together in a smoky room and refused to leave.
Now Bengal often does not think at all. It waits for the next scheme, the next outrage, the next rally, the next religious slogan, the next television shouting match, the next forwarded video from a cousin who has become an expert on civilization after watching three clips and misreading two captions.
Religion has entered politics not as private faith, but as loud identity. Private faith can be beautiful. A grandmother lighting a lamp in the evening has more dignity than ten thousand men shouting into a microphone. But political religion is different. It turns devotion into a headcount. It turns myth into ammunition. It turns the name of a god into a password at the gate. Once that happens, the citizen becomes less important than the crowd.
And crowds are easy to excite when people are tired, poor, badly educated, underemployed, and humiliated. This is not a Bengali flaw. It is not a Bihari flaw. It is not a Hindu, Muslim, rural, or urban flaw. It is a human flaw, especially when cunning leaders discover that hunger and pride are the two cheapest fuels in politics. Add a small bribe, a little fear, a heroic slogan, and a villain conveniently supplied in the correct costume, and the machine begins to move.
That is why I distrust all triumphant certainty today. Those who say Bengal has been saved are selling sweets before checking whether the kitchen is clean. Those who say Bengal has been destroyed are writing the obituary before checking the pulse. I prefer the more boring but useful position: Bengal has shifted power, and now we must inspect what power does when the cameras leave.
There is a small tea stall near my side of the city where politics is analyzed with more sincerity than in many television studios. The cups are thin, the biscuits are tired, the tea is strong enough to start a scooter, and every man is an expert because every man has suffered. One has a son preparing for an exam. One has a brother looking for a government job. One has a medical bill. One has a case stuck somewhere. One has given up and now speaks only in jokes. This is Bengal’s real parliament. Not elegant, not clean, not always fair, sometimes foolish, sometimes cruel, but close to life.
In that parliament, nobody asks for ideology first. They ask: will the police behave? Will the local boys stop threatening shopkeepers? Will school jobs be clean? Will municipal work happen without begging? Will hospitals treat patients as humans? Will the new rulers punish only criminals, or will they first decide who voted for whom? Will minorities be safe? Will Hindus be respected as citizens rather than milked as a crowd? Will the poor receive welfare without being turned into walking campaign posters? Will the young get work, or only more flags?
These are not romantic questions. They are drain-cleaning questions, ration-shop questions, school-fee questions, blood-test questions. They matter more than speeches.
The new government will speak of development, good governance, investment, transparency, and law and order. Every government does. These words are like new plastic buckets: bright on the first day, cracked by winter if handled badly. The proof will be administrative, not poetic. Can a citizen get a service without party mediation? Can a teacher be hired without suspicion? Can a contractor work without feeding the new local mouth? Can a Muslim family feel secure without flattering anyone? Can a Hindu family feel represented without being recruited into permanent rage? Can the police stop behaving like weather, changing direction depending on pressure?
The realistic answer is: not quickly.
This is where grown-up politics becomes irritating. We want a revolution, but the state is made of files, incentives, habits, fear, debts, loyalties, officers, clerks, brokers, contractors, local bosses, and men who know where the bodies of old favors are buried. A government can change in a day. A political culture changes like an old wall drying after the monsoon. Slowly, unevenly, with damp patches returning just when you thought the room was safe.
But a beginning is still a beginning.
BJP now has the rare chance to prove that it did not merely want Bengal as a trophy. It can either govern as a party that has finally entered Writers’ Buildings with historic hunger, or it can behave like every conqueror who denounces the old palace and then quietly asks where the treasury keys are kept. If it uses power to clean institutions, it may change Bengal. If it uses power to capture them, it will only become the new landlord in an old play.
TMC, if it has any instinct left beyond survival, should understand why people turned away. Not because every voter became saffron overnight. Not because every critic became communal. Not because Bengal suddenly forgot its past. People turned because arrogance has a smell, and after fifteen years even the loyal nose begins to protest.
As for the rest of us, we should not become paid drummers in anyone’s procession. The citizen’s job is suspicion with receipts. Praise when something improves. Complain when it does not. Refuse to treat leaders as uncles, saviors, gods, saints, warriors, poets, or household deities. They are public employees with better security arrangements. Nothing more mystical than that.
The old Bengal loved thought. The new Bengal must recover something even more difficult: adult citizenship. Not shouting. Not forwarded fury. Not slogan worship. Not party slavery. Citizenship. The plain, stubborn idea that the state belongs equally to the person who voted for the winner, the loser, and nobody at all.
I do not know if Bengal can still do this. Some mornings, after the power cut, the sweating, the price of fish, the medicine bill, the thin consulting income, the endless looking for stable work, and the feeling that one has lived too many lives in one body, I suspect we are too tired. Then some small thing happens. A student asks a good question. A shopkeeper argues with wit. A woman in a queue refuses to be pushed around. A young man says he wants to leave but also wants to fix things. The old spark appears, not as a bonfire, but as a matchstick cupped against the wind.
That may be enough for one more attempt.
Bengal has changed color. Now we must see whether it can change character.
Until then, lift the fish gill before buying. This is Calcutta. We know better than to trust only the shine.