The Outsider Gambit

Mamata is now tweaking her Bengali sub-nationalism pitch— her bid to foil the BJP’s Hindu polarisation

- Romita Datta

On January 28, the ruling Trinamool Congress (TMC) organised a gathering of 500-odd Hindi-speaking people in Kolkata where Mamata Banerjee, in one of her inspired moments, challenged BJP stalwarts Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his deputy, Amit Shah, to a Hindi reading contest (she alleges their speeches are written in the Gujarati script and read from a teleprompter). The West Bengal chief minister was speaking in Bengali, but her speech was peppered with Hindi phrases. How did it come to this, for it was a volte-face from June 2019 when she first raised the regional/ linguistic rhetoric after the BJP’s stunning performance in the Lok Sabha election? “If you live in Bengal, you will have to speak Bengali,” she had made it clear then.

It was part of Mamata’s fightback against the BJP’s muscular cultural push in Bengal, with its Ramnavami and Hanuman Jayanti processions. (For the average devout Bengali, Ram and Hanuman are not part of their daily prayer nor any community worship.) Sources say more than the BJP’s unexpected gains in 2019, it’s the post-poll violence, where her partymen were getting beaten and driven out of homes and party offices, as in Naihati, that pushed Mamata into raising the ‘outsider’ bogey. “They are outsiders. I will not let them turn Bengal into a Gujarat....”, she had said then, losing her cool after being taunted with ‘Jai Shree Ram’ slogans when she visited the area.

While Mamata saw in the BJP’s import of Hindi heartland culture an opportunity to stoke the fears and insecurities of Bengalis about losing their unique cultural