The killing began with the beat of a single drum piercing through the summer heat. Five hundred members of the Arya Samaj had been marching down Harrison Road that afternoon, passing by the Dinu Charmawalla mosque as crowds began to gather for Friday prayers. “At the urging of the police inspector, and with the co-operation of the procession leaders, all except the drummer fell into silence,” the historian GR Thursby recorded. The fingers of the musician continued to fall on his drum skin, though. The beat would claim the lives of 110 people, and leave almost a thousand injured.
Last week, 99 years since that 2 April 1926 riot, fresh evidence has emerged that communal conflict is deepening in West Bengal. Following the killing of three men in Murshidabad, hundreds of refugees have fled across the Ganga into safer communal enclaves.
Ever since 2008, political scientists Suman Nath and Subhasish Ray have noted, communal violence in West Bengal has been escalating steadily, driven by political competition between the Trinamool Congress and Bharatiya Janata Party. Like in 1926, it isn’t entirely precisely clear how the violence began. But observers have recorded that the killing was preceded by a series of protests against new Waqf legislation (backed by the TMC) and BJP-supported Ram Navami processions across the state.
Last year, an abusive slogan on a neon signboard led to communal violence in Beldanga. Large-scale communal clashes had broken out in the industrial suburb of Rishra in 2023, again centred around Ram Navami processions, with rival gangs using soda bottles, bricks and homemade bombs.
Although communal killings remain low compared with historical levels, there’s no missing the intensification of clashes across the country. Leaders likely consider violence as a tool to mobilise their electoral constituencies, but without escalating to dangerous levels. That, Bengal’s history shows, is a dangerous assumption.
A rising tide of hate
Elected to power on the back of growing Muslim resentment against West Bengal’s Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPI-M)-led government, the Trinamool’s influence in the community was mediated through clerical groups like the Jamiat-e-Ulema Hind. Early in her tenure, Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee sought to return the favour, announcing an honorarium for imams and muezzins. The move was declared unconstitutional by the courts, but the state government responded by routing the funding through the Waqf Board.
The Trinamool government’s efforts to consolidate its ties to Islamic clerics inevitably made religion part of the language of politics. Even as the BJP assailed Mamata for her pro-Muslim tilt, she also began patronising Ram Navami rallies and Hindu religious gatherings. In 2020, the chief minister also put in place allowances for Hindu priests.
From 2008 on, Nath and Ray show that the consequences of this competitive religiosity became steadily more evident. The number of recorded communal riots in the state grew almost ten-fold, from just 10 that year to 56 in 2017.
The Naihati-Hazinagar region saw large-scale violence in 2016 after a long-standing compact over religious practices at the Chasma Shah Baba Mazar broke down. That led to aggressive processions on Ram Navami and Muharram, leading to shops and homes being burned. Two rival gangs of Trinamool cadre engaged in a battle over extortion from a land deal in Dhulagarh, ended up sparking off communal violence that ran over several weeks in 2016-2017. Further rioting followed at Asansol-Raniganj in 2018, again centred around a Ram Navami procession.
Political analysts Ambar Ghosh and Niranjan Sahoo have observed that large-scale mass violence of this kind was enmeshed with the routine operations of criminals patronised by the political parties—a phenomenon they call “everyday violence.” They argue that the process of criminalisation can be traced back to at least 1970, when the Left began challenging the Congress’ post-Independence monopoly of power. The CPI-M eventually triumphed in the brutal power struggle that followed.
The CPI-M and its allies, Ghosh and Sahoo argue, created a new system where it became “the elementary institution of rural life in the state—not family, not kinship, not caste, not religion, not market, but ‘party’. It is the institution that mediates every single sphere of social activity.”
From 2008 on, the CPI-M’s monopoly on violence would be challenged by a resurgent Maoist movement, which the Trinamool adroitly leveraged to its advantage. Trinamool leaders would later work with the central government to defeat their Maoist allies—but their levelling of the communist party system had opened the way for the revival of primal religious conflicts.
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Gangsters and gods
The men who participated in the 1926 riots would have understood the ways in which the communal and criminal were organically entwined. Less than 48 hours after the drummer’s beat began the riot on Harrison Road, historian PK Dutta writes, the revolutionary terrorist Pulin Das was mobilised for the defence of the Kalitola temple. A second group, led by the opium smuggler Nanda Ghosh, acted as a second line of defence. The Muslim League leader Huseyn Suhrawardy, for his part, recruited the gangster Meena Peshawari.
Early in the 19th century, the grievances of small Muslim peasants in Bengal fuelled the genesis of communal identities, historian Dilip Chattopadhyay has shown. The millenarian Islamic movements of Nisar Ali and Mahomed Mohsin Aldin Ahmed proclaimed the coming of a promised utopia, in conformity with the words of the Quran, where there would be no private property and taxes.
Later, scholar Atis Dasgupta writes, Islam played an important role in providing a language for the resentments of poor, mainly-Muslim, peasants against predominantly Hindu zamindars and moneylenders.
East Bengal’s middle class also began forming itself into religious and cultural organisations, both to compete with this peasant upsurge and the pressure of English colonialism. The build-up to Partition saw these sentiments harden into support for the Muslim League.
Kolkata’s criminal groups, historian Sumanta Banerjee has shown, drew legitimacy from this fraught religious milieu. For example, by providing muscle to clerical protests in 1897 against the expropriation of land that was claimed to belong to a mosque. The Sardar and the Dada (the local strongmen who led small criminal groups) played an important role in organising the community, allocating space and adjudicating disputes, sometimes in defiance of colonial authority.
Following the Partition of Bengal in 1905, Banerjee shows, the criminal groups drew increasingly close to political organisations—sometimes supporting revolutionary terrorism against the English but also participating in the defence of communal interests. The foundations for the exceptional violence of West Bengal politics were thus laid well before Independence.
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Faultlines in the neighbourhood
The twin trajectories of East Pakistan and West Bengal should make clear what is at stake. The communal warfare that preceded Independence climaxed in 1946 in savage bloodshed, which claimed at least 4,000 lives. And while West Bengal succeeded in rebuilding civil society, East Pakistan saw violence that pushed a million-and-a-half refugees into India in 1950; more than 6,00,000 in 1951-52, and another 1.6 million from 1953 to 1956.
In 1962 and 1963, further violence against Hindus sent 35,000 refugees streaming into West Bengal and Assam.
Even this genocidal violence, though, proved no solution to the problem of building a nation, or an identity. Leaders of East Pakistan would eventually secede from the republic they helped form and create Bangladesh. For all its many failings, the new country was founded on secular principles, realising the only option was civil war.
The renewal of communal violence in West Bengal couldn’t come at a worse time. Islamism is growing in Bangladesh, and organisations like the Islamic State and al-Qaeda will be hoping to capitalise on communal faultlines in India. For its part, India is witnessing a renewed escalation of communal violence, which is tearing the country’s civic life apart. The communal war being ignited by politicians in West Bengal will have no victor. Leaders igniting communal warfare in Bengal should beware of being consumed by the flames they’re kindling.
Praveen Swami is contributing editor at ThePrint. His X handle is @praveenswami. Views are personal.
(Edited by Zoya Bhatti)
Shri Prasenjit Bose, writing for Indian Express : India’s Muslim community has shown remarkable restraint over the last ten years. 2. A lot on its plate now. Fortunately there has been a very low level of radicalisation in the community. Whether it is the social fabric in such a large, diverse country, or even India’s economy progress, a lot is at stake. Seeing the scenes from Murshidabad and Nagpur, difficult to think of WEF Davos in the same frame.