The Festival Of Misery In Bengal

The festival season in West Bengal is when thuggery and extortion rule unchecked, and supported actively by local politicians.

Jagatdhatri Puja has just ended in West Bengal. And with it, people all over the state heaved a collective but cautious sigh of relief. Because the festive season in the state, which kicks off with Vishwakarma Puja in mid-September and concludes with the Saraswati Puja in mid-February, brings with it quite a bit of misery and sufferings for Bengal’s citizenry. That is, of course, discounting the cheer it ushers in.

Almost the entire citizenry of Bengal are held to ransom by the organizers of community Pujas these few months and are subjected to blatant extortion by them. From ordinary folks to traders, businessmen, professionals and industrialists, everyone is targeted by the Puja organizers who enjoy political patronage. Hundreds of crores of rupees are collected by organizers of various Pujas all over the state every year and none, barring some honorable exceptions, bother to submit any accounts. While a major part of the loot collected in the name of organizing a particular Puja is actually spent on the ostentatious Puja ‘pandals’ and ‘bhogs’ for devotees, a substantial portion is kept aside for fun and revelry, often drunken, by the organizers for themselves. A smaller portion goes into the pockets of some of the organizers, local politicians and, quite often, the local cops.

Organizers of the various community Pujas—according to conservative estimates, more than 50,000 ‘sarbajonin’ (community) Durga Pujas are organized all over Bengal every year; add to this the Vishwakarma, Ganesh, Lakshmi, Jagatdhatri, Manasa, Lakshmi and many other Pujas—resort to various forms of threats and even indulge in physical violence to extort money from people. They dictate the amounts that people have to pay.

In a locality, the organizers of a Puja of that locality write out the amounts they want from residents of that locality on the donation slips and the latter have no option but to pay up. Refusal, and even requests for lowering the amount, are met with verbal abuse and even physical intimidation. None dare complain to the police since the latter know that the organizers of these Pujas are local toughs who have close links with politicians.

In most cases, the organizers of the community Pujas are members of the locality club—powerful bodies which exert a lot of influence in localities across Bengal and are patronized by politicians who use these clubs for help during elections. In most middle-class and upper middle class localities in the towns and cities of Bengal, the ‘para’ (as a locality is called in Bangla) clubs are the dens of unemployed youths and toughs from the slums adjoining these localities. Politicians look on the slum dwellers as vote banks and patronize them. And they actively encourage the extortion in the name of organizing Pujas by the members of these clubs.

The ‘bhadralok’ Bengalis just don’t have the stomach to challenge these goons from the neighboring slums. But even in areas like Kolkata’s tony Salt Lake where the organizers of the local community Pujas are residents of that locality, this sort of extortion happens, though the means employed are much more subtle. All households are asked to pay a fixed amount ranging from Rs 1,000 to Rs 5,000 (the rates for this year’s Durga Pujas) and refusal to pay is often met with a social boycott or a smear campaign. Few risk this.

To add to people’s woes, most localities have more than one particular community Puja and thus local residents have to pay multiple ‘donations’. This leads to frequent outbreak of trouble. For instance, in the Gol Park area of south Kolkata, an 80-year-old trader was brutally assaulted in front of his grandchildren a few weeks ago when he refused to pay Rs 10,000 to a local club for their Kali Puja. He had already paid Rs 35,000 to three other local clubs for their Kali Pujas. But members of the club he refused to pay to did not listen to his pleas to reduce the amount and assaulted him in broad daylight. Three of the assailants were arrested, but they got bail after a few days.

Members of the club justified the extortion, saying that there is no way they can hold the puja without ‘donations’ from traders. A local Trinamool Congress leader, who is the patron of the club, told media persons that the trader should have paid up the “reasonable” amount of Rs 10,000!

It is not just the extortions that Bengal’s residents have to put up with. Across the state, Puja organizers stop trucks carrying all sorts of goods and perishables and force them to cough up huge sums of money. This results is a surge in prices of all commodities from the start of the festive season till late November when the last community Puja—the Jagatdhatri Puja—ends. Saraswati Puja, thankfully, has not yet become a community Puja and is observed in individual households and educational institutions. A transporter who has a dozen-odd trucks transporting vegetables to Kolkata’s wholesale Koley Market said-

During the festive season, every truck carrying vegetables that enters Kolkata from the neighboring districts has to cough up at least Rs 5,000 to organizers of different Pujas en route. This is over and above another Rs 5,000 that has to be paid to police on the way and at the vegetable ‘mandis’. This additional cost is obviously not borne by us but passed on to the consumer. As a result, prices of vegetables shoot up during the festive season…

At the root of this menace is widespread unemployment, no economic growth and no creation of jobs in Bengal. “With unemployment rife and means of livelihood so limited or non-existent, the lakhs of unemployed youth and even middle-aged men resort to such acts. There is little to celebrate in Bengal, save for the festivals, and the jobless or the people engaged in petty vocations or trades want to drown all their miseries and sorrows and forget about their gloomy present and future through the Pujas. But they don’t have the resources to organize the Pujas properly and thus target those who do.

The politicians look upon these unemployed, and often unemployable, men as their army of goons whom they commission to threaten and intimidate voters, fight their political battles, and rig the polls. So the politicians don’t stop the extortions and the police, powerless as they are to take any action, find it more sensible to join in the crime,” said Basanta Talukdar, a former professor of sociology at Calcutta University.

There is no way this menace would end anytime even in the distant future. If anything, it is set to increase since all the community Pujas are getting more and more ostentatious and, hence, more money has to be collected (or extorted) to fund them. A common and collective prayer to the pantheon of Gods and Goddesses who are worshipped during this festive season by most of the devotees is for the extortion to end. But those prayers from accursed Bengal will, perhaps, never be answered.