Symbolically close but socially distant. This has been the Sangh Parivar’s relation with West Bengal for the last 100 years. If the exit polls prove correct, the BJP may finally get a chance of tasting power in the state, which has by and large remained out of bounds for it till 2019.Even after 2019, its surge in the state has not succeeded in unseating the Trinamool Congress (TMC).AdvertisementBengal may have been outside the Sangh Parivar’s circle of influence till a few years ago, but it has enjoyed symbolic heft within the RSS family. The national song, Vande Mataram, was composed by Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay, a Bengali, in 1875 and has been held in immense importance in all Sangh-associated organisations. This importance has grown particularly after the Congress decided to accept only the first two verses since 1937 on the grounds that the other verses had a clear Hindu imagery and would be unacceptable to Muslims.The idea of Bharat Mata, another leitmotif of the Sangh Parivar, also has a Bengali origin. It was first conceived in a Bengali play written by Kiran Chandra Banerjee in 1873, in which, in the context of a famine in Bengal, people get motivated by a goddess to rise in rebellion.Opinion | In West Bengal poll, not just the fate of a state, but that of the Indian republic is at stakeBankim’s Vande Mataram carried forward the idea and there was also a suggestion at the time that the word saptakoti, or seven crores, the population of united Bengal at the time, be substituted with trimshatkoti, meaning 30 crores, the estimated population of India at the time, to adapt the song as one symbolising the Indian freedom struggle. In 1905, Abanindranath Tagore painted the picture of Banga Mata. Later, the idea was popularised across India by Sister Nivedita.AdvertisementApart from this, the Sangh Parivar has also drawn inspiration from Swami Vivekananda — the Vivekanand Vichar Manch is seen as linked to the ABVP — and Aurobindo Ghosh.The Sangh’s founder K B Hedgewar also had a Bengal connection. He not only studied medicine in Kolkata but also joined the Bengali revolutionary society Anushilan Samiti, much before he founded the RSS.BJP’s Bengal limitationsDespite symbolic inspiration, the RSS and its associates remained a marginal force in Bengal for several decades, primarily because the Bengali bhadralok — a loose term used to describe largely middle-class and upper-caste Bengali Hindus, though it cannot be pinned down to caste alone — sought to forge a distinctively Bengali Hinduism over time. This made them see themselves as distinct from the Hindus of north India, leading to a self-image of Bengali exceptionalism.There is a history to it. While Bengal was one of the nerve centres of the early freedom struggle — though many Bengalis preferred to join government jobs, something that earned them the moniker of ‘Babu’ throughout India — its importance in the freedom struggle slid after the rise of Mahatma Gandhi, who turned what are UP, Bihar, Gujarat and Maharashtra today into hubs of mass movement against the British from 1920 onwards.Political Pulse | Why BJP feels it has an advantage in BengalAfter the death of Chittaranjan Das in 1925, the only prominent Congress leader from Bengal at the national level was Subhas Bose, who also quit the Congress after a dispute with Mahatma Gandhi in 1939. From the 1930s, Allahabad, rather than Calcutta, became the nerve centre of the freedom struggle. Joya Chatterji’s book Bengal Divided shows the decline of the Bengal Congress within the Indian National Congress in the last 15 years of colonialism, while Gyanendra Pandey’s The Ascendancy of the Congress in Uttar Pradesh tracks the rising prominence of UP in the freedom struggle’s later phase.Rabi Ranjan Sen, who teaches history at Katwa College in Bardhaman in Bengal, says Bengali Hinduism increasingly sought to distinguish itself from Hinduism in north India, also claiming to be superior to and more “cultured” than the latter. Indeed, the idea that Bengal worshipped Goddesses Durga and Kali, and not Lord Ram, the “quintessentially north Indian” deity, gradually gained ground.By the 1940s, the RSS had considerably expanded in UP, as historian Ravi K Mishra has shown in his paper Colonial Perceptions Of The RSS And Hindu Mahasabha. It had also entered Bengal by this time, but did not make a significant impact there. That the organisation was a promoter of Hindi became a challenge for its spread in Bengal and the southern states, as it came across as north Indian despite its Maharashtrian origin. This was unlikely to attract Bengalis, despite the propensity of Bhadralok Bengalis to turn anti-Muslim in the 1930s and 40s, as Joya Chatterji has shown.After IndependencePost-Independence, the Jana Sangh failed to make a dent in Bengal despite riots in East Pakistan that led to an exodus of Hindus to India and its leader, Syama Prasad Mookerjee, himself being a Bengali politician vocal for the cause of Bengali Hindus in East Pakistan. In 1952, the Jana Sangh won just two seats in Bengal, though its national tally was only three. Like in other states, the Congress was the dominant player in Bengal soon after Independence.It was the Left rather than the Jana Sangh that was able to carve out a support base among Hindu refugees trickling in from East Pakistan in the 1950s. Historian Ranjana Das, who teaches at Ramjas College in Delhi University, says Left groups carved out a support base among refugees through measures such as supporting squatter colonies. Rabi Ranjan Sen agrees, adding that Hindutva groups confined themselves to distributing relief. Once the CPI(M) came to power in 1977, it launched tenancy reforms under Operation Barga, cementing the Left’s hold on the rural peasantry.Don't Miss | Bengal exit polls predict BJP majority, TMC decline: Here are the numbersIt was its support to the Ram temple movement through the Palampur resolution of 1989 that led to the exponential growth of the BJP in north, central and western India in the 1990s. However, Bengal remained untouched by this surge, given its widespread belief that it had a distinctive Hinduism based on the Shakta tradition of worship of the goddess. The space for the party’s presence in Bengal was to emerge after the CPI(M)’s collapse in 2011.BJP ascendantyou may likeThe collapse of the Left in Bengal brought the Mamata Banerjee government to power. Ironically, says Sen, this provided the BJP an opening, as former Left workers started turning towards the BJP after Modi became PM, largely for protection. Activist Prasenjit Bose has estimated that the BJP gained more than a crore votes in the state between 2016 and 2019 due to this shift. The slogan in the 2019 and 2021 elections, Agey Ram, pore Baam (Ram this time, the Left next time), exemplified this shift. It gradually made the party a force in the state, despite its organisation being much weaker than the TMC.Unlike in northern and western India, where the BJP attracted urban and “upper caste” Hindus first, and penetrated the rural population, and the OBC and Dalit communities (COMMA) much later, the party’s rise in Bengal has seen it attracting Dalits and rural areas first. In 2019, it did well in the high SC and ST concentration seats of north Bengal, Jungle Mahal, Nadia, and North 24 Parganas. In fact, the biggest challenge for the BJP has come from Kolkata, the hub of the bhadralok with its sense of a distinctive Hinduism that has not synced with that of the RSS and its associates.If the party succeeds in making inroads in Kolkata and the adjoining areas, it will perhaps be for the first time that the RSS brand of Hindutva will find acceptance in the cultural centre of Bengal. This is one of the things that will be keenly watched on Monday, as the TMC looks to defend its bastion and the BJP looks to breach it.