Rethinking West Bengal's caste-free status?

Yogendra Yadav calls the Left Front out for double-speak and hypocritical commitment to rights-talk in this Indian Express op-ed today. Pointing out the inconsistency in the CPM's actions, and it's positioning as "a party that swears by human rights and lofty democratic ideals lies vast hypocrisy", Yadav also notes that Nandigram isn't the first time something like this has taken place in West Bengal:

"The story of Alipurduar goes back to January 10 1987, twenty years before Nandigram. On that day, UTJAS had organised a rally of what they estimated to be about 50,000 people in Alipurduar, the headquarters of Cooch Behar district. As the rally started, they noticed something unusual: The police was nowhere in sight. Soon the rallyists found themselves surrounded by and under attack from the armed cadre of the CPM. The rally was dispersed as unarmed protesters were beaten and chased. The police surfaced, only to arrest the victims, once the party cadre had finished their job.

Note the parallels between Nandigram and Alipurduar: The Party faces a political challenge, decides to nip it in the bud and executes an onslaught in sync with the police and administration. The only difference this time was that there was unexpected resistance. And that an anti-SEZ movement makes more news today than a dalit movement did twenty years ago. There were no Gopal Gandhi or Tanika and Sumit Sarkar then to point out that the emperor had no clothes."

Nothing new here for those who've lived in West Bengal, but what is even more interesting is what follows after:

"This gap between the CPM’s preaching and practice did not surprise me. I have been looking at Christophe Jaffrelot’s research on the social profile of MLAs in India. His analysis shows that the proportion of upper caste MLAs is on the decline all over the country since the 1960s. There is only one exception: In West Bengal the proportion of upper castes has increased in the state assembly after 1977, after the Left Front came to power. A coincidence? Not if you calculate the caste composition of successive Left Front ministries: About two thirds of the ministers come from the top three jatis (Brahman, Boddis, Kayasthas). Perhaps you did not notice that West Bengal was the last major state to come out with an OBC list to implement Mandal. You might say, the CPM believes in class, not caste. Fair enough, but then why is the CPM in Delhi so aggressive about championing Mandal? Why does it present itself as more Mandalite than thou?

Or read the data supplied by the West Bengal government to the Sachar Committee. With 25.2 per cent of Muslim population, the state government has provided just 2.1 per cent of the government jobs to Muslims. West Bengal has the worst record of all Indian states in this respect. Gujarat has just 9.1 per cent Muslims and has 5.4 per cent Muslims among government employees. The irony, of course, is that the CPM was the first party to come out with a statement demanding implementation of the Sachar Report!"

Yadav's conjecture is a serious one, in essence arguing that in spite of the pride it takes in its apparent castelessness and commitment to secular tolerance, the West Bengal government is far worse off in respect of increasing opportunities for Muslims and lower castes than other states, even ones which have a proven track record of ill-treatment of minorities. This also turns much of the received political wisdom about caste and religion in West Bengal on its head, for it challenges the commonly held notion that institutional discrimination against lower castes and Muslims in Bengal is hardly prevalent.

Postscript: More on caste in Bengal:

Anjan Ghosh, "Cast(e) out in West Bengal" (Seminar)
Sandip Bayopadhyay, "Bengal's Caste Prejudices" (The Statesman)
VB Rawat, "Dalits Ask for Justice in West Bengal" (Countercurrents Newsletter)
Sukanta Bhattacharyya, "Caste, Class and Politics in West Bengal: Case Study of a Village in Burdwan", Economic and Political Weekly, January 18, 2003 (noting that, based on the study of data in one village in this district, "the numerical strength of the lower castes and lower classes has been established at the level of panchayat and other organisations. But at the leadership level, concentration of power is found in the hands of the middle peasantry", and further, "At the level of the elected village body one would expect a communist party to have a high percentage of agricultural labourers and poor peasants [Lieten 1992]. My findings show an absence of this group in the party level, which does not signify any radical restructuring of the rural power structure.")