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Publication: Reversethegaze.Substack.com
Date: April 3, 2026
URL:   https://reversethegaze.substack.com/p/liberals-and-their-didi-inside-the?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=6hscg7&triedRedirect=true

Why Mamata’s blood‑soaked rule still passes as “secular resistance”

Nothing exposes the moral decay of India’s left-liberal establishment more starkly than its indulgent construction of “Didi” as a plucky regional satrap, a kind of noisy but ultimately benign mascot for “federalism” and “secularism”. The reality she presides over in West Bengal is not competitive politics but a slow‑motion campaign of ethnic cleansing, where targeted Hindu communities are being squeezed out by the combined force of the state, party militia and Islamist street muscle.

The normalisation of a permanent emergency

Elections in West Bengal have been bloody for decades, with the Marxist slogan of a “classless society” always translated, in practice, into the elimination of rivals. The stories are older than social media: the Congress worker whose mother was forced to eat rice soaked in her son’s blood, the cold‑blooded eviction and killing of Bengali Hindu refugees at Marichjhapi. These are not marginal aberrations; they form the operating manual of the state.

When Mamata Banerjee dislodged the Left Front in 2011, many—including some Hindu nationalists—allowed themselves to hope that the culture of political terror would ebb. Instead, as soon as the BJP began to emerge as a serious challenger around 2016, she demonstrated that she had fully assimilated the communist grammar of power while adding her own blend of Islamist street muscle and a cult‑of‑personality rule. In the 2018 panchayat polls, over a third of all seats—about 34 percent—were won uncontested, because opposition candidates were physically prevented from filing nominations. This is not competitive democracy; it is a managed plebiscite punctuated by selective violence.

The message to ‘rebel’ youth is written literally on their bodies. When 18‑year‑old Trilochan Mahato was found hanging from a tree in Purulia in 2018, the message scrawled on his T‑shirt in Bengali read, in substance, “This is what you get for doing BJP politics.” The casual savagery of that scene should have become a defining image of “Mamata’s Bengal”. It barely survived a couple of news cycles.

May 2, 2021: a pogrom in a “vibrant democracy”

The post‑poll violence that followed the TMC’s landslide victory, announced on 2 May 2021, marked a new low even by Bengal’s degraded standards. Human‑rights petitions before the Supreme Court recorded mobs of TMC supporters, often led by local Muslim strongmen, attacking homes of Hindus identified as BJP voters, looting, burning and forcing families into flight. Women were particular targets. Affidavits before the Court detailed gang‑rapes, including of a minor, and instances where sexual violence was carried out deliberately in front of close kin to maximise humiliation and social death.

One emblematic case is that of a grandmother reportedly gang‑raped in front of her grandson; another involves a young girl assaulted while her father was restrained and beaten.

Other reports from the ground describe BJP women workers forced to lick their palms after TMC men urinated on them, and young girls related to BJP supporters’ families made to strip and dance to the TMC campaign song ‘Khela Hobe’; in other places BJP workers were tonsured and paraded while making public apologies before being allowed to ‘return’ to the TMC. Hundreds of Hindu families fled their homes after the 2021 results, with fact‑finding reports and court submissions speaking of large‑scale displacement and systematic extortion — including demands that families submit their women to sexual exploitation - if they wished to return; yet this sustained degradation barely registered in ‘mainstream’ media.

These are not random “law and order” failures. They are the intimate, targeted punishments of a regime that wishes to send an unmistakable message to an entire community: political disobedience will carry a sexual and material price.

The murder of BJP worker Avijit Ghosh, preceded by the killing of the stray puppies he looked after, captures the same performative cruelty at a micro scale.

Yet none of this appeared to disturb the “constitutional morality” of a judiciary that took its time even to list urgent pleas for protection, and eventually told petitioners to approach the Calcutta High Court—where judges and lawyers themselves were facing open intimidation from ruling‑party leaders and cadres. The contrast with the institutional overdrive triggered after the 2002 Gujarat riots—cases moved out of state, a Supreme Court‑monitored SIT interrogating even the sitting Chief Minister—could not be sharper.

How liberals stopped seeing Hindus

Why does this not register as an emergency within India’s liberal conscience? Why is the same ecosystem that can turn a single slogan in North India into a multi‑year morality play so unmoved by systematic terror against the poorest Hindus of South 24 Parganas or Murshidabad?

Social psychology has some vocabulary for this. Researchers speak of “parochial empathy” or “intergroup empathy bias”—the tendency to feel more empathy for those we perceive as part of our in‑group, and markedly less for those we code as out‑group. That bias is near‑universal. Most of us read about wars and conflicts in distant continents with a dull ache at best; the same scenes in our own city would paralyse us. The mind learns to protect itself by distancing what it cannot afford to feel fully.

But when an educated Bengali liberal sees a grainy video of an elderly sari‑clad grandmother, sitting beside her innocent grand‑daughter, begging simply that the child be saved, we are no longer talking about a distant out‑group. The language, the setting, the social markers—all point to “people like us”. If there is still no visceral response, if the instinct is instead to question the video, seek partisan context, or slot the woman’s trauma under “BJP propaganda”, then something deeper has shifted. For that spectator, the Hindu victim is no longer an in‑group member. She has been reclassified as “political other”, and therefore as collateral.

The Sandeshkhali revelations fit the same pattern. When scores of village women speak—faces covered, voices flat—about years of routine sexual exploitation at the local TMC office under a party strongman, the reflex of the liberal commentariat is not horror but hermeneutics: is this a BJP plot, is it being “instrumentalised”, can we relativise it with generic talk of patriarchy. Again, the only workable explanation is that these women have ceased to exist, in the liberal imagination, as “our women”. They belong to the wrong party, wrong community, wrong religio‑civilisational camp. Their suffering therefore cannot be allowed the moral priority that would destabilise cherished narratives of “progressive” rule versus “communal fascism”.

The architecture of denial & distortion
It would be generous to attribute all this to unconscious bias. But Indian liberalism today is led, not by naïve idealists, but by hardened professionals: editors who know exactly what they downplay, politician‑lawyers who can calibrate outrage to party interest or personal ideology, academics who can flip taxonomies overnight when it suits a line, NGO entrepreneurs who know which atrocity will unlock funding. They manufacture the epistemic environment in which the average English‑speaking Indian can continue to think of Mamata Banerjee as a flawed but secular bulwark against “Hindu majoritarianism”, rather than as the political author of communal pogroms.

These are not just “misled Hindus” or “wayward cousins”. They have chosen, repeatedly and with full information, to stand on the side of Adharma—of a project that treats Hindu life as expendable and Hindu self‑assertion as an existential threat. The rank‑and‑file left‑liberal—the cub reporter, the social‑media volunteer, the campus activist, the well‑meaning NGO intern—might still be acting under illusions. But the core ring‑leaders are fully complicit. To persist in reading them as potential co‑travellers in some broader “Indian” project is not magnanimity; it is strategic blindness.

Sangh strategists who assume that all Indians are either swayamsevaks or future swayamsevaks need a hard rethink: trying to assimilate or ignore hardened ideological enemies who are virulently and self‑consciously opposed to you will only end up subverting your own movement.

These liberal elites who still pull the strings of intellectual discourse have branded Hindutva as ‘anti‑Muslim’ and ‘anti-minority’, when in reality it is one of the few organised forces confronting both Islamist & Christian fundamentalism — a threat to tolerant, patriotic Muslims & Christians no less than to Hindus. When Indian liberals genuflect before hard‑line maulanas and Islamist rabble‑rousers, they effectively leave India’s Muslim society at the mercy of the very forces that have already devastated ordinary life in Pakistan and Bangladesh. Hindutva thinkers must do far more to hammer this home and tear down the lazy caricatures that liberals have planted in the public mind.

From hot outrage to cold resolve

Over the last two decades, Hindu responses to this ecosystem have evolved. The earlier defensiveness and hesitation have been replaced by sharper counters, documentation, and a willingness to call out double standards. That is a gain. But too often, the goal remains limited to “winning the argument” or extracting a grudging admission of bias from some television panelist.

That is nowhere near adequate to the scale of the challenge. The ideological vanguard of Indian liberalism is not simply another party in the fray; it is the main domestic instrument through which civilisational Bharat is to be fractured, delegitimised and, eventually, disarmed. What is at stake is not the next election or this or that state government, but the survival of Bharat as a coherent civilisational polity.

Rage at televised injustice is understandable, even necessary. But if it remains in that raw, performative form, it is easily neutralised—by fatigue, by algorithmic throttling or by being co‑opted as just another round of political one-upmanship. What is needed is something more meaningful: a disciplined, long‑term resolve to dismantle the moral and narrative power of this class by methodically & ruthlessly removing its ring‑leaders from the commanding heights of public discourse. In our own shastras, the spectrum of sam, daam, dand, bhed teaches us that confronting Adharma calls for a full repertoire of strategies—persuasion where still possible, incentives and disincentives where needed, lawful punishment where warranted, and strategic division of hostile coalitions when necessary.

The first step, however, is conceptual. We must stop comforting ourselves with the idea that the liberal establishment “deep down” shares our civilisational commitments. Its behaviour in Bengal, its refusal to acknowledge even the most basic claims of Hindu victims, has already answered that question. The next phase will be decided by whether Hindu society can respond not just with hurt or anger, but with a clear, cold determination to ensure that such collaborators with Adharma no longer enjoy either moral prestige or institutional impunity in this land.