The Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP’s) Suvendu Adhikari, Leader of the Opposition in the West Bengal Legislative Assembly, made a statement at the gates of the House precincts that sounded suspiciously like hate speech. Suspended from the Assembly for 30 days from February 17, he said at the gates to the complex on March 11 that his party would throw out all Muslim MLAs from the Assembly once it came to power in Bengal. We shall come to the proximate cause of the outburst. On March 13, Suman Roychaudhury, a West Bengal Pradesh Congress Committee functionary, lodged a first-information report with the police, arguing that the statement would create unrest and foment communal division. Roychaudhury said Adhikari’s statement “created a sense of insecurity among the minority community and went against the fundamental secular fabric of the country.” The probable reason for Adhikari’s outburst was the defection of the BJP’s Haldia MLA Tapasi Mondal to the Trinamool Congress (TMC) on the day before the outburst. Though Mondal was the twelfth BJP MLA to defect to the ruling party in Bengal since the 2021 elections, reducing the Opposition party’s seats to 65 from the 77 originally won, this one was likely felt more deeply by Adhikari because Mondal was counted as one of his key followers and because Haldia is in Purba Medinipur district, his home turf.
It is clear that Adhikari feels threatened. Soon after the results for the 2024 general elections were announced, Adhikari had gone against his own party’s line, saying it should jettison the slogan of “sab ka saath, sab ka vikas (with everyone, development of everyone)” and say, “jo hamare saath, hum unke saath” (we are with those who are with us). He had also advocated the winding up of his party’s Minority Morcha. No serious action had been taken by the central leadership for these breaches of discipline. It seems likely that Adhikari’s 2024 statements were prompted by his party’s poor showing in the elections in which it lost six seats and almost 2 per cent of the vote in comparison with the 2019 result. It is hardly a secret that Adhikari had been given the main role in running the campaign even though Balurghat MP Sukanta Majumdar (now also a union minister of state) was the president of the party’s state unit. The simple deal was that a good result would put Adhikari in pole position in the state, while a bad one would undermine him. Adhikari has been a serial offender when it comes to communal vituperation; by indulging in it, it appears, he hopes to both boost his party’s support and his position within the party. It is time that the law is enforced against him.
