The politics of West Bengal is often characterised as ‘progressive and casteless’ while the disparaging use of ‘caste politics’ is reserved for North India’s Hindi belt. What is conveniently overlooked, however, is that there are two Bengals—one of Brahmin, Kayastha, Baidya upper castes, and the other of marginalised Dalit and Adivasi communities. It is the caste-based intergenerational privilege that separates Bengali savarna upper castes from their oppressed Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribe counterparts.
This separation is not geographical but manifests in terms of social capital, economic resources, and political dominance. The ability of Bengali urban mainstream society to ignore the existence of caste-based hierarchy and its impacts, sustained by persistent denials to propagate itself as progressive, is never questioned, giving the so-called ‘Bhadralok’ a free pass. This perception of ‘progressiveness’ is largely constructed upon the caste consciousness of Bengali upper castes.
Dalit aspirations get subsumed and dismissed every day in Bengali society, media, academia, civil society, and particularly in politics, under the façade of a ‘casteless Bengal’ and the carefully curated upper caste narrative of ‘Poschimbonge UP Biharer moto jatpater rajneeti cholena (West Bengal has no caste politics like Uttar Pradesh and Bihar)’. Notably, during a meeting of I.N.D.I.A coalition partners in Mumbai, West Bengal Chief Minister and TMC president Mamata Banerjee vehemently opposed the idea of a caste census, aligning with the BJP’s stance. A statewide caste census in West Bengal may expose the magnificent social progress achieved by upper castes and bust the Communist myth of Bengal’s binary caste structure of rich and poor, similar to how Bihar’s caste census revealed social deprivation to be highest among Dalits and lowest among Kayasthas.
According to the 2011 census, West Bengal ranks among the top three states with a high percentage of Scheduled Caste populations, but the census data also reveals stark demographic disparities between upper caste communities and SC/STs. While the SCs comprised 23.51 per cent in West Bengal, their share in Kolkata’s population was merely 5.4 per cent; similarly, the STs were 5.8 per cent statewide and only 0.2 per cent in the state capital. This shows how inadequately empowered the two groups are, resulting in their abysmally low urban mobility. The political and social patronage of upper castes have been internalised by the Bengali society at large to such an extent that the crude socio-historical reality of the oppressed caste groups continued to be perpetuated time and again.
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Asserting Brahminism
During the 2021 West Bengal assembly election, the BJP made pointed attempts to politicise Hindu backward classes with the promise of OBC reservation. A rattled Mamata Banerjee had to invoke her Brahmin identity against her BJP opponent, Suvendu Adhikari (a TMC turncoat): “I would like to tell him that I belong to a Brahmin family and he should not play the religion card with me. Don’t teach Hindu dharma to me.” Adhikari responded similarly: “I am a Brahmin’s son. I do the chandipath every day.” In glaring opposition to this, CPI(M)’s upper caste leaders have practised Bhadralok politeness to shrug off their castes while playing the role of gatekeepers in politics and within the rank and file of the party for their own community members.
Intellectual Hindutva, casteless gentry
Historically, West Bengal’s upper castes have been radically aware of caste as a socio-religious category, unlike their lower caste counterparts. Author Sumanta Banerjee has written how upper-caste Bhadraloks in 19th-century Bengal organised Hindu melas targeted at the educated upper caste-class Bengalis as a way to revive puritanic Hindu religion. At the political level, Congress’ Surendranath Banerjee, a Brahmin, was organising the Bengali Hindu youth around the concept of all-India nationalism. In 1892, Chandranath Basu, a Kayastha bhadralok, had published an article in Bangla titled, ‘Hindutva, Hindur Prakrita Itihas (Hindutva, the Authentic History of the Hindus)’.
Celebrated Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore too subscribed to the evil idea of caste as the basic organising principle. According to him, “India’s caste system is the outcome of a spirit of toleration.”
Therefore, the perception of Bengal being caste-blind is predominantly manufactured by the upper caste Bhadralok gentry, co-opting marginal assertions and aspirations into the mainstream socio-political spaces of West Bengal.
Also read: Bhadralok and the myth of casteless West Bengal politics
Denial of Dalit representation
When the Communists came to power in 1977, Chief Minister Jyoti Basu did not initially appoint a Scheduled Caste minister in his Cabinet. He did only after their party’s Scheduled Caste leaders put pressure on him to ensure the community’s representation that Kanti Biswas was inducted as the minister for youth services. Biswas, who served as Bengal’s primary education minister from 1982 till 2006, shared in an interview that his appointment had “riled the CPI-M’s upper-caste membership”, which sent hundreds of complaint letters. Monobina Gupta, author of Left Politics in Bengal: Time Travels Among Bhadralok Marxists, referenced one such letter in an article: “A certain Bhattacharya, a brahmin from Bhatpara, wrote, “though Biswas had proven his skill, how could upper caste brahmins take lessons in education from a ‘chandalputra’ [Son of a chandal — a slur used for lower castes]?”.”
All this goes to show how Brahminism is deeply embedded in the collective psyche of Bengal. The representation of SCs in the state Cabinet ministers has always been either negligible or highly disproportionate to their share in the state’s population.
In the 2021 assembly election, TMC started the ‘Tapasili Sanglap’ (Conversations with Dalits) programme. As the 2024 Lok Sabha election approaches, this initiative has resurfaced. However, such seasonal outreach efforts are merely electoral gimmicks. The reality is that none of the political parties in West Bengal has outlined a roadmap for the empowerment of SC/STs. As we move closer to the polling date, the political landscape of West Bengal has intensified. BJP highlights the organic outrage in Sandeshkhali against TMC, while TMC attempts to invisibilise the incident. But in all this drama, the rise of the marginalised has been forgotten, which is a historical template of denial in every assertion of the marginalised sections in West Bengal.
The political landscape of Bengal has largely been shaped by the upper-caste Bengali imagination, which is why it’s also highly Brahminised and nowhere close to experiencing the churn of being led by a Dalit chief minister. In fact, it is not even a talking political point. Therefore, West Bengal needs to de-Brahminise its socio-political worldview, abandon the upper caste lens, address caste blindness, and embrace transformative social justice politics to meet the longstanding aspirations of Dalits for social empowerment.
Subhajit Naskar is an Assistant Professor at the Department of International Relations, Jadavpur University. He tweets @subhajit_n. Views are personal.
(Edited by Prashant)