The Bharatiya Janata Party has had to wait for decades to grab power in West Bengal. The wait finally ended in May and work has now begun on war-footing to fit Bengal into the Sangh’s ideological and political mould. 

After just two months in power, the Sangh brigade has already unleashed a blitzkrieg, offering Bengal a crash course to familiarise the people with the full fury of its communal agenda. The public-private partnership model of fascist terror with the state empowering and collaborating with vandal brigades on the ground is working overtime across the state. Meanwhile, the government is losing no time in unleashing its policy regime and setting the tone of its bulldozer-powered model of encounter raj.

Over the last decade, fascist rule in India has demonstrated three prominent features – mob lynching, bulldozer raj (‘bulldozer justice’, in official parlance) and targeted elimination dressed as ‘encounter deaths’. All three features are already being proudly flaunted by the new regime. The first incident of pelting of eggs at Trinamool Congress leader Abhishek Banerjee set a new trend early on and the dominant media of West Bengal, now completely aligned with the new regime, promptly normalised it as an expression of public anger against the TMC-era corruption. The media even coined a new term – ‘egg therapy’ – for this unmistakable symptom of a mob taking the law into its own hands.

Encounter killings were adopted as a strategy by Amit Shah in Gujarat. One of these cases had even landed him in jail in a judicial era where the powerful still did not enjoy complete impunity. Subsequently Uttar Pradesh chief minister Adityanath incorporated encounter killings as a declared policy of governance along with bulldozing of houses, mosques, shops or other institutions belonging to members of the Muslim community. The BJP chief minister of West Bengal has turned this policy into a film dialogue of sorts “sakale jama, rate kharoch” – deliver to the police in the morning and kill by the nighttime. The........

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