Mamata Banerjee, the chief minister of West Bengal, stirred some controversy on Saturday, April 22, when she urged Muslims to “unite” and vote against the BJP in the 2024 Lok Sabha elections. She made the controversial statements at a gathering held on Red Road in Kolkata in honour of Eid-al-Fitr and sponsored by the “Calcutta Khilafat Committee.” She congratulated the Committee members and urged the Muslim vote to come together as one. “Today the Constitution is being changed, history is being manipulated. I am ready to give my life but will not let this country divide,” Mamata Banerjee announced amidst loud cheers from Muslims present in the crowd. To further placate the illegal immigrants residing in West Bengal, she threatened to forbid the execution of the National Register of Citizens (NRC) exercise in the State.
Banerjee urged Muslims to pray to Allah and put an end to the BJP’s alleged “Dadagiri.” Ironically, the West Bengal Chief Minister was speaking from a venue that was crucial to the country’s division and Partition in 1947 while mouthing platitudes about pluralism and societal harmony. We must decipher a few crucial points that are indicated by the speech snippet of Mamata Banerjee. First and foremost, Mamata Banerjee urged Muslim unity to defeat the BJP in the 2024 general elections. Since Mamata Banerjee has made a lot of communal statements recently, which demonstrate that she is stoking anti-Hindu sentiment and caving to the most extreme sections within the Muslim community, this deeply communal stereotype that she is peddling is not surprising.
Right after Mamata Banerjee suggested that Hindus should avoid “Muslim areas” after Islamists attacked Hindus in West Bengal during Ram Navami processions and perpetrated terrible violence against the Hindu community, Banerjee also made other problematic claims. In addition to clearing the Muslim community by stating that they are not allowed to use violence during the month of Ramadan, she also urged Muslims to pray to Allah to “teach rioters a lesson,” with a clear reference to Hindus. Mamata urges Muslims to pray to Allah to halt the BJP and their “dadagiri” in her most recent speech as well. Additionally, Mamata asserts that she would stop the implementation of the NRC. It is crucial to emphasise that there is no national NRC draught; however, when Mamata repeatedly brings up the subject, it is crucial to understand that she may be sending a message to Bengal’s illegal residents—most of whom are Rohingyas from Myanmar and Bangladesh—that they won’t be expelled from the state. The combination of the two narratives demonstrates how deadly her political rhetoric is. The demonization of Hindus while simultaneously caving into the most extreme segments of the Muslim community and illegal immigrants. The fact that Mamata Banerjee made this potentially deadly speech while attending an event put on by the “Calcutta Khilafat Committee” may make it much worse.
From 1919 on, the Khilafat movement mostly consisted of Indian Muslims supporting the Caliphate in Turkey. The Khilafat movement called for the British to reinstate the Ottoman Empire’s Caliph’s authority. Nothing about India, the Indian freedom movement, or our aspiration for self-governance was involved. The Khilafat movement took its name from the “Kaliph” because they were fighting to uphold the authority of the Turkish Caliph of Islam, even though it is frequently promoted as a struggle for India’s freedom, fuelled by the name itself which suggests that the Muslims were “against” the British rule. Khilafat has two meanings: the official one, “caliphate,” and a more general one, “succession.” It is not a fringe group that only adopted the name “Khilafat” to call itself the Calcutta Khilafat Committee. In reality, it is the original regional committee set up in 1919 to carry out the Central Khilafat Committee’s objectives.
On December 30, 1918, at the All India Muslim League’s 11th session held in Delhi, the first signs of the Khilafat Movement in Bengal emerged. Bengali Khilafat leaders such as Maulana Akram Khan, Abul Kasem, and Mujibur Rahman Khan held a public meeting in Kolkata on February 9, 1919, to rally support for maintaining the Ottoman Empire’s integrity and preserving the Khilafat institution after the Paris Peace Conference (1919) confirmed these fears. The inaugural Khilafat Day was commemorated on October 17, 1919, and the majority of Indian-owned businesses in Kolkata were closed. In Bengal, public gatherings and prayers were held in a variety of mosques. The inaugural All-India Khilafat Conference presided over by Bengaliman AK Fazlul Huq, took place in Delhi on November 23–24, 1919. It was agreed that there would be a boycott of British goods and a policy of non-cooperation would be implemented against the British until the Khilafat problem was settled.
According to reports, the Calcutta Khilafat Committee’s office in Kolkata was founded in 1920 and is located next to the Nakhoda mosque. On February 28 and 29, of that same year, the first Bengal Provincial Khilafat Conference was place at the Kolkata Town Hall, with several Central Khilafat Committee members in attendance. At the summit, prominent Bengali Khilafat leaders reaffirmed that boycotts and non-cooperation would persist until their demands over the Khilafat issue were satisfied. The Second Khilafat Day was declared by the conference to be observed on March 19, 1920.
The extraterritorial allegiance-based pan-Islamist movement eventually revealed its real colours. As a result of the Moplah Musalmans’ senseless zeal, nearly 10,000 Hindus were brutally murdered, thousands of Hindu women were raped, and Hindu shrines that were revered by the Hindus were desecrated. The Moplah Muslims engaged in a murderous rampage during the Malabar Massacre in 1921, slaughtering Hindus in the most heinous ways possible. On one occasion, on September 25, 1921, the Moplah Muslims beheaded 38 Hindus and threw their heads down the well, killing them. The district collector of Malabar at the time has records of several Hindus who were killed and thrown into the well pleading for assistance even after two to three days.
Dr Ambedkar said about the Malabar genocide: “The (Khilafat) movement was started by the Mohammedans. It was taken up by Mr Gandhi with tenacity and faith, which might have surprised many Mohammedans themselves. Many people doubted the ethical basis of the Khilafat movement and tried to dissuade Mr Gandhi from taking any part in the Movement the ethical basis of which was so questionable.” (Pakistan or Partition of India, pages 146,147).
Dr Ambedkar further said: “As a rebellion against the British Government, it was quite understandable. But what baffled most was the treatment accorded by the Moplas to the Hindus of Malabar,” he wrote. The Hindus were visited by a dire fate at the hands of the Moplas. Massacres, forcible conversions, desecration of temples, foul outrages upon women, such as ripping open pregnant women, pillage, arson and destruction— in short, all the accompaniments of brutal and unrestrained barbarism, were perpetrated freely by the Moplas upon the Hindus until troops could be hurried to the task of restoring order through a difficult and extensive tract of the country. This was not a Hindu-Moslem riot. This was just Bartholomew. The number of Hindus who were killed, wounded or converted, is not known. But the number must have been enormous.”
Mamata Banerjee frequently draws on perilous analogies and cliches that resulted in the genocide of Hindus and the division of India, which led to the establishment of Pakistan along religious lines. If one remembers, Mamata Banerjee had started the “Khela Hobe” campaign during the Assembly Elections. The violence that followed winning the West Bengal elections has been extensively reported. Unfazed, Mamata Banerjee then said that TMC would observe “Khela Hobe Diwas” on August 16 to unseat the BJP in several states. On August 16, 1946, Pakistan’s founding father Mohammad Ali Jinnah of the Muslim League began the horrifying “Direct Action Day” campaign against Hindus.
Mohammad Ali Jinnah issued a call for a “Direct Action Day” on August 16, 1946, on the streets of Kolkata (then Calcutta), informing his fellow Muslims that they would have “either a divided India or a destroyed India.” Nothing like the terror that ensued had ever been experienced in India. Over three days, 10,000 people were killed and up to 15,000 were injured by tens of thousands of sword-wielding Muslims. The Great Calcutta Killings, which were the outcome of Direct Action Day, are regarded as some of the most heinous acts of violence committed against Hindus in the past hundred years. Additionally, as was previously mentioned, she only lately highlighted how Hindus must avoid so-called “Muslim areas” for their Ram Navami processions. This was also used as justification for the subsequent atrocities against Hindus. Interestingly, there were other such attacks on Hindus before the partition, with one of the main causes being that the procession was passing by a mosque or that Hindus were playing music in front of the mosque.
It would seem clear that political expediency has trumped good sense as far as maintaining the integrity and sovereignty of the country and Hindus are merely used as sacrificial lambs when it comes to consolidating the vote base that the Calcutta Khilafat Committee, a part of the extraterritorial Khilafat movement, was after making dangerously communal statements at an Eid event.
The BJP’s dramatic victories in West Bengal, which was considered to be a centre of “secular-liberal” politics, have astonished several experts. This is a profound misinterpretation of Bengali political history, which has always had a strong undercurrent of Hindu assertion. The Bengali song Vande Mataram, from which Bharat Mata’s imagery is derived, was created by Bankim Chandra Chatterjee.
Both Swami Vivekananda and he were Bengali. The dream for which S.P. Mookerjee gave his life was realised when the Modi government repealed Article 370 in 2019. Jahaan hue balidan Mookerjee, woh Kashmir hamara hai has been the BJP’s emotive catchphrase for decades. In actuality, K.B. Hedgewar, the Sangh’s founder, received his education and developed his political views in Calcutta. In jest, Somnath Chatterjee, a fervent Communist, once challenged Sushma Swaraj to define cultural nationalism. Sushma Swaraj responded on the floor of the Lok Sabha, saying that it occurs when a Bengali Hindu names his son Somnath after a jyotirlinga in Gujarat. By chance, Somnath Chatterjee is the descendant of a well-known Hindu Mahasabha leader.
Sobhandeb Chattopadhyay, the West Bengal Minister of Agriculture and Parliamentary Affairs, compared Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee to “God” last month, saying she was above reproach and could do no wrong. The minister remarked, speaking at a public gathering in the North 24 Parganas area, “A priest in a temple can be a thief, but that doesn’t make God a thief. If it is discovered that the priest is a thief, do we cease to worship God? Why would Mamata Banerjee, whom we revere as a goddess, steal? When a person starts thinking he is God or expects people around him to treat him like God, they are finished. That’s the rule history has chalked out. Take care, Didi.
