The Performance of Change
What a day to be from West Bengal, huh.
BJP crosses 190 in West Bengal.
Do I want to talk about it? No. Will I still? I suppose we have to.
After all, they came in 2014, and twelve years on, it is this lack of conversation that keeps us entitled to our delusions, and keeps them in power.
If I’m being honest, I think I knew it the minute I landed home this time to vote.
I tried, as I always do when elections arrive, to avoid relatives who sat in a living room somewhere, explaining just how tired they were of poor people being “given money” without “checks and balances”. They spoke of political goons, jobs handed as donations, and a lack of safety (as though the rest of us in other states have somehow been spared all these years). They challenged “buying off” voters in one breath, while defending the opponent’s duplicate promise in another.
The point is, they played their part in the familiar theatre of political delusion, and I played mine by saying the thing that ruined the room.
I don’t think anyone left persuaded. Some sighed, someone else attempted to change the subject, and perhaps, the mamaji I last met in 2021, secretly decided I have become too argumentative. But there is a specific kind of rot in hearing comfortable people speak to someone else’s survival as moral failure, and silence begins to feel like complicity, even if breaking it does nothing but make everyone’s tea go cold.
Except, I realised something stranger this time. Bengal still seems wrapped in the memory of a state that was once intellectually and politically alive, and yet now echoes the same contempt and exhaustion toward liberal politics that you hear among the middle and upper classes in Delhi, who see the BJP as some kind of final messiah.
So I kept hearing references to the revolutions Bengal once fought, as though everyone stepping into a polling booth could claim them as inheritance, even as they cast their votes, specifically overlooking the catastrophic failures India has seen since 2014.
Goes to show that inheritance without imagination is just furniture to sit on, admire, and mistake for movement.
And this is not a defence of the ruling government, because God knows the anger is real. The fatigue is real, the unemployment is real. Young people are without jobs, women are a votebank to pay (attention to), and while Mamata Banerjee may remain a dominant force, dominance is simply not the shiny new toy everyone wants.
But what I cannot make peace with is the very people who have spent ten years hollowing out the country are now being asked to fix one of its greatest identity-driven states. To dress up the BJP as a novelty because the TMC has become criminally familiar with the state is the same as being deemed a different person because one day you arrive wearing a different colour.
And then there’s this insistence that we’re not “voting for Hindutva”.
How are we twelve years in and still managing to separate polarisation from the party that has built its politics on it? You have a play-by-play of how the country has fared, and yet you want to fight the incumbent of a state with the incumbent of the nation.
Demanding radical newness to emerge from old power hardly qualifies as anything beyond novelty. And novelty, as we know, wears off quickly.
And Bengal in all its intellectual snootiness, you’d think, would have known the difference.