Muslims land knockout punch

KOLKATA: The anti-incumbency that toppled the Left Front in a number of seats was not a usual trend. The ruling CPM combine had felt its pinch in
the preceding elections, but that was never more than a 0.5 to 1 per cent swing. It was the Muslim discontent across the state that gave it momentum and turned it into a wave that the Left could not combat. The Nandigram carnage stoked the simmering discontent and the findings of the Sachar Committee on the status of Muslims gave a boost to the dissent against the Left, though the combine had pressed for tabling the report’s findings in Parliament. It worked in all the seats spread over Malda, Murshidabad, North 24 Parganas, South 24 Parganas, East Midnapore, Howrah, Nadia wiping out the Left. Initially, the CPM did not pay heed to rising discontent. Party mandarins in Alimuddin Street instead tried to discount it as “a fundamentalist conspiracy”. They called Muslim leader Siddiqullah Chowdhury an imperialist agent. But that did not provide them a lifeline. With land reforms — the once binding force of several castes and communities — stagnating since the early Nineties, the CPM poll managers found it increasingly hard to contain the several layers within a homogeneous class set-up. The land stir expedited CPM’s alienation among the rural poor, giving birth to a new Muslim-Dalit combination in the villages. Muslims and Scheduled Castes comprise the majority of farmers, bargadars, agricultural labourers and artisans with land being their mainstay. CPM leader and minister Abdur Rezzak Mollah got a whiff of the winds of change and alerted the party top brass. But Alimuddin Street could not reassure the Muslims about the insecurity over their piece of land. Left leaders preferred to look at it as a general discontent till they got a drubbing in the 2008 panchayat elections. The Nandigram phenomenon soon spread to South 24 Parganas and North 24 Parganas, fomenting the Muslim anger. Unnerved CPM activists stood as mere spectators and allowed Trinamool Congress chief Mamata Banerjee to take up their land cause. CPM minister Abdus Sattar tried in vain to mollify the insecure Muslims. The Sachar Committee findings, however, came as a final blow. The Muslim clergy spread the message around and the educated and young among the Muslims took the lead. The CPM was unnerved. They could not address the minority problem except saying that the Sachar Committee did not take cognisance to lands distributed among the Muslims, as part of land reforms. The Sachar Committee report has come in handy to the young Muslims to showcase their deprivation. “How is it that we are not being considered for jobs under the Sarva Siksha Abhiyan? Whenever we went to the local CPM leader, he said that there were graduates and post-graduates waiting and it is was not possible to engage matriculates. The requisite qualification, however, is Madhyamik,” a CPM supporter of Deganga said. When CM Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee took up the Muslim cause and asked government department to allot funds for the minority from housing to other sectors, it was too late. “We voted for the Left Front because it ensured communal harmony in the state. But the security is not enough. During these years, the government and developers bought our land in Rajarahat and other areas for a pittance, and are making huge money at our cost,” said Mansur Alam of Rajarhat. What hurt Muslim sentiments most was the Bhattacharjee’s bid to assuage their feelings with sops that never reached them before.