Kolkata’s community pujas getting politicised as the ‘community’ withdraws indoors

Upper class, educated and affluent Bengalis were largely missing from the city’s community Pujas, branded as ‘Sarbojanin’or ‘Puja for All’, where people irrespective of religion, caste, creed and class could take part. But this section was conspicuous by their absence just as middle and upper class Maharashtrians have been keeping away from Ganapati Mandals in Mumbai. Have both the festivals been taken over by political lumpens, I wondered.Call it the BJP effect, I could sense an invisible wall which has come up between Bengali and non-Bengali speaking communities. Even in the well-known gated communities, I witnessed people calling each other names under the breath. It was disconcerting.Communal violence in neighbouring Bangladesh and politics also cast their shadows. As long as the Left Front was in power, there was no overt patronage by the state government of the community pujas. But now with the state government and the chief minister giving grants and inaugurating ‘pujas’, politics is now a part of the celebrations. BJP took the cue and has tried to organize its ‘own’ puja. The community, not surprisingly, has retreated.



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