Fascists at a Festival and anti-fascist Resistance

By Malini Bhattacharya

Durgapuja is the most celebrated people’s annual festival in West Bengal. Book stalls run by left parties and organizations affiliated to them have long been a part of the festival culture associated with it.People out to visit festival pandals visit them too and often buy books even as they visit food stalls, toy shops and stalls selling small household articles set up by small entrepreneurs and artisans. I am perhaps right in surmising that these bookstalls do better than Geeta Press or TMC’s Jago Bangla stalls simply because they do not sell only party publications, but offer a large variety, reprints and translations of classics, fiction and non-fiction, popular books on science and history and children’s books. Many small publishers send their books to these stalls.

In the last 15 years they have sometimes been under attack from TMC goons who have thus sought to exercise the absolute right to public space supposedly belonging to the ruling party. But leftist activists on the ground have withstood these attacks which are not however against books as such. If the stalls had been selling jhalmuri they would have been attacked just the same.

But this year, the new party in power has found a new pretext for attacking these bookstalls.In a high state of moral indignation, BJP leaders down from the obstreperous Chief Minister, are talking about the immoral and anti-national content of the books sold at the stalls and vowing to wreak their anger on them because their presence would pollute the sanctity of Durgapuja.

So in the pre-puja days, people who are engaged in setting up these stalls in Kolkata and in the towns, in spite of having taken permission from police and civic authorities,have been subjected to threats and assaults in many places from stick-wielding gutkha-chewing musclemen who have sometimes succeeded even in dismantling the stalls. Nothing daunted, many of these ground level activists have however returned to the broken stalls and started work again; sometimes they have arranged their ware on the roadside itself. Sometimes, they have put their books on three-wheelers and gone around the area to sell books. Actually this resistance against the fascist war on books has attracted the public and been a good advertisement for books and book-reading.

The worst phase of the war so far came yesterday evening, the day of Saptami when Puja actually starts. With milling crowds on the streets of Kolkata out with family and children for the festive occasion, huge deployment of police (and even armed forces) were sent in many areas of the city to demolish ‘illegal’ left book stalls when they should have been engaged in managing the crowds flocking at the pandals and ensuring citizen safety.
Some stalls were demolished. At some places there was stiff resistance even in the face of violence orchestrated not only by BJP and ABVP goons, but by the state administration itself. When a well-known bookstall which has been coming up for the last four decades during Puja at a market square near Jadavpur University was attacked by police with bulldozers and conservancy trucks, large numbers of local people including students gathered around the stall and guarded it all night forming a human chain. The goons of the state were ultimately forced to withdraw.
But the sheer irresponsibility of the fascists at the helm of the state had caused tragedy in the meantime. Because of the gap in the system of crowd management precipitated by the eagerness to use the police to demolish bookstalls, a massive stampede took place at the Chorbagan pandal in North Kolkata taking away the lives of 18 people and leaving many injured. This catastrophe unprecedented in this city’s history has blighted the biggest festival of the Bengalis and exposed the sheer absurdity of fascist rule.

We have heard of book burning by the Nazis in Europe. The fascists’hatred of books, of learning, of free thought culminates in the destruction of reason. We have so far heard about it, now we are seeing it in front of our eyes. It is a story of our national shame today. But even while we mourn these unacceptable deaths, let us also proclaim our solidarity with those who were out on the streets on that night protecting books and crying ‘no pasaran!’ In them our hope for the future lies!

(The author is a translator, playwright, women’s activist, retired professor of English and former MP.)