Babasaheb Ambedkar was sent to Constituent Assembly by Bengal legislature in 1946 after Bombay turned its back.
Is Bengal inimical to “outsiders”? Unlike Maharashtra, which has now a Shiv Sena-led coalition, or Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh, Telangana, Odisha, which give primacy to regional, ethnic politics, West Bengal so far has prided itself as a cosmopolitan state where a Sikh has served in the Cabinet and non-Bengal personalities like Babasaheb Ambedkar and V.K. Krishna Menon have represented it in Parliament. Trinamool Congress had sent Gujarat-born Dinesh Trivedi not only to Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha, but also made him the party’s nominee in the Union Cabinet, with a powerful portfolio, Railways. (Trivedi recently left the party.) Mamata Banerjee’s war cry against the BJP’s high-pitched, no-holds-barred campaign in West Bengal cautions the electorate against incursions by “bohiragoto” (external) forces. Harking back to the eighteenth century, when between 1741 and 1751 Bengal was annually raided by Maratha troops from Nagpur, she refers to the folklore about Borgi (a section of Maratha troops who were the fiercest plunderers) and recites a popular limerick which describes the loot and plunder that hit Bengal a few years before the East India Company won Plassey in 1757 and sowed the seeds to British rule in India.
Mamata’s party, Trinamool Congress, projects itself as the “party of Bengal”, which seeks to protect the state from the “bohiragoto” influence of BJP. A decade back when she swept to power after trouncing 34 years of Left Front rule her catchword was “poriborton” (change). All that has changed now—the dwindling fortunes of the Left, which has tied up with Congress and Indian Secular Front, a party led by a Muslim cleric for this poll, have made Mamata train her guns pointedly at BJP by projecting herself as daughter of the soil: “Bangla nijer meyeke chai”(Bengal wants its daughter) is the Trinamool catchline; countered by BJP’s “Bangla nijer meyekei chai, pishike noi” (Bengal wants its daughter, not aunty), the party campaign projects half a dozen faces of women in its posters—BJP spin doctors who effectively projected Rahul Gandhi as “Pappu” and Dr Manmohan Singh as “Maun mohan” have very effectively exploited the emergence of Mamata’s nephew, Abhishek Banerjee, as a power centre and turned Mamata from Didi to “Pishi” (aunt; father’s sister: Bua) in 2021. From three seats in 2016 BJP is now aiming to unseat Trinamool, which had won 211 five years back. The acerbic language used by Mamata to describe BJP leaders, using colloquial Bangla slang (hitherto never used in political discourse) shows that BJP is certainly no longer “bohiragoto” in the home state of its founding beacon, Shyama Prosad Mukherjee.
The chairman of the drafting committee of the Constituent Assembly, Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar, could not get elected in 1946 from his home state Bombay (which engulfed present Maharashtra, Gujarat). His party Scheduled Castes Federation (SCF) had fared poorly in the legislative election and had no seats in Bombay Assembly. SCF’s unit in Bengal persuaded the Muslim League, which was in power in undivided Bengal, to accommodate Babasaheb. He was thus elected to the Constituent Assembly as the member from Khulna-Jessore by the Bengal legislature. Post partition, when Khulna-Jessore went to Pakistan (now in Bangladesh) Babasaheb was elected through a bypoll from Bombay after jurist M.R. Jayakar vacated his seat in 1947. Having emerged as a key player, Ambedkar could not be stopped by his opponents in Maharashtra in the bypoll.
V.K. Krishna Menon, who had represented Bombay North in Lok Sabha in 1957 and 1962, was denied renomination by Congress in 1967—no, not because of the 1962 debacle; but for the pressure of rising regionalism, which was accentuated by the formation of the Shiv Sena. Congress leaders in Maharashtra were opposed to an “outsider” from Kerala being elected from Bombay. Menon contested as Independent and lost. In 1969, Bangla Congress, the party which nurtured Pranab Mukherjee, put up Menon in a byelection from Medinipur and sent him to Lok Sabha. Acting as the interpreter for Menon’s speeches was the first major exposure for Pranab Mukherjee on the big stage. Menon defeated a local Congress stalwart. No one in West Bengal called him “bohiragoto”.
Mirza Ghalib had to trudge to Calcutta in 1828 to plead for the restoration of his pension with the British rulers. His biographers note that on returning to Delhi the poet included in his “hazaron khwaishen” the desire to settle down in Calcutta, as he had been overwhelmed by the city’s openness and its cosmopolitan culture, which provided more freedom to disagree, in contrast to Delhi’s “courtly” culture. Calcutta had attracted in the nineteenth century settlers from China (even now their families exist), from Armenia and had been the refuge for a section of Baghdadi Jews (The hero of 1971, who negotiated the surrender of Dhaka, Major General J.F.R. Jacob, belonged to a Calcuttan Baghdadi Jew family. Even now traditional Calcuttans swear by the confectionary of Jewish bakery Nahoums, which is as reputed as the better known Flurys and flourishes in upscale New Market.)
Between 1972 and 1977, the Congress regime of Sidhhartha Shankar Ray had as cabinet minister Gyan Singh Sohanpal, a Sikh, who won nine Vidhan Sabha elections from Kharagpur—he passed away a few years back, after having conceded his last election in 2016 to Dilip Ghosh, the president of West Bengal BJP. Kolkata has a fair population of Sikhs and social work by the Guru Singh Sabha is much talked about in the metropolis. Businesses in Bengal have traditionally been dominated by Marwaris, from Rajasthan. More important than the treachery of Mir Jafar, Robert Clive’s ability to win over Jagat Seth, the rich Marwari banker of Murshidabad in 1757 helped the British to turn the tables on Siraj ud-Daulah prior to the Battle of Plassey.
Given this milieu, Mamata Banerjee’s war cry against “bohiragoto” is alien to Bengal’s hereitge; history. An oxymoron: while Mamata berates against “outsiders”, she also cries foul on the recent CBI notices to her nephew’s wife, Rujira Narula, a girl from Delhi, who is Bengal’s “bou” (bahu, daughter-in-law/spouse), not meye (daughter) in the strictest sense.