“Revolt” of Bengal’s lumpen bhadrolok against Muslims, Bahujanised lower castes

By Kuriakose Mathew
From famines to partition violence to political killings to colonial witch-hunt to confessional riots, millions of Bengalis have died unnaturally. The famines of 1770 and 1942 killed around 1.3 crore people. Preventable diseases and poverty too have killed millions of Bengalis. One does not even know how many have died in the partition of Bengal. One also does not know how many have been killed in Mughal, Maratha, and British wars! Natural death has been a luxury in lower Gangetic plains.
Is there any other people in the world that has been subjected to periodic waves of this many unnatural deaths? The spectre of unnatural deaths haunts the brains of the living in Bengal.
However, the tiniest ruling class of the world, the Bengali Brahmins and their Kayasta and Baidya associates, composed perhaps of less than 1,000 extended families of inner Kolkata, has seemingly not learnt any lessons from this torturous history. Maximalising political power and monopolizing resources are their soulless motto.
Uncompromising and unaccommodating, the ruling families of inner Kolkata are utterly exclusive, crassly classist, and cheaply condescending even towards the non-governing sections of the Bhadrolok elites, forget the lower castes and Muslims.
The systematically excluded non-governing bhadrolok elites have been thoroughly lumpenised and all too ready to resort to violence at the slightest provocation. Since the fruits of the famed Kolkata education is reserved for the members these inner Kolkata governing elites, the lumpen Bhadrolok has escaped quality education, trapping them in ideological impoverishment and economic immobility.
Unemployed, unemployable or underemployed, the lumpen bhadrolok are in an inescapable contradictory caste location, their Brahmin supremacism gets daily punctured by the bitterness of (peri)-urban lower middle class life. But they share the caste capital of the governing bhadrolok elites but without getting a proportional share of educational, economic and political resources; this perpetual secondary position as non-governing elites, with no scope of an effective bargain with their governing caste brethren, all they have to blame for are the Muslims and the lower castes.
Lumpen bhadrolok are major supporters of merit (all they want is good jobs with no work) but they know they won’t even get a clerical job in Kolkata without being part of the ruling bhadrolok network. But, rather than challenging the caste network of fellow bhadrolok, they blame the unimplemented Bahujan reservation and imagined Muslim appeasement for all their misfortune.
Every attempt of the lumpen bhadrolok to make the governing elites to share power and resources until now has miserably failed. The lumpen bhadrolok have tried Brahmo Samaj, Indian freedom struggle- all varieties of it ranging from terrorism to Azad Hind Fauj, humanism, Marxism, Naxalism and Maoism to mend the monopolistic ways of their caste brethren. In other words, every form of political mobilization except of caste!

Mamata Banerjee

This is what puts the lumpen bhadrolok in a contradictory caste location; they’re so close to the ruling elites caste-wise, but, as a class, so far from the corridors of economic and political power. With the rise of Mamata, they hoped for political and economic ascendancy.
And Mamata’s rule did encourage the inclusion of lumpen bhadrolk into the ruling class, though with too little, but she also did the unthinkable. She shared power and resources with the lower castes and Muslims, too, to the great horror of both sections of the bhadrolok.
The lumpen bhadrolok wants to do fratricide without hurting Brahmin supremacism and without letting the Bengali Bahujans rise. They want regime change without social and economic change in favour of Bahujans.
After decades of failed political experiments, the lumpen bhadrolok has finally found their rightful political platform, i.e. Hindu Nazism. With BJP, they hope to unseat the governing elites based on a Hindu unity ideology, that would untouchablise Muslims and hegemonies the lower castes. They have mobilized sizable sections of Hinduised ‘chotolok’ invoking Muslim-hatred.
But the hegemony of the ruling bhadrolk elites is such that they will not give up an inch. They consider themselves as the divine priests of universities, media, judiciary, politburos, legislature, puja pandals and so on. In other words, it is a complete socio-politico-economic dictatorship of bhadrolok elites. They are trying their best to keep the lumpen bhadrolok as foot soldiers against lower castes and Muslims.
Nevertheless, the revolt of the lumpen bhadrolok is triple-edged; it is simultaneously against Muslims, Bahujanised lower castes and the dictatorship of their caste brethren. The lumpen bhadrolok hardly care about Ishwar Chandra Bandyopadhyay or Tagore -- the icons of the ruling bhadrolok, their busts will be broken. Many more to follow!
This caste dictatorship too shall fall, but unfortunately not without a civil war. It is inevitable. Let the bhadroloks kill each other, but who will save Muslims and lower castes from their fratricidal intra-caste war?
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