“Our eyes are waiting for God. Will someone save me and my daughter?” The woman asked, her voice betraying the turbulence within. The group of men who had come and left a few hours ago had left saying that no one will come to save you when we come next time. “Ebar asal khela hobe.”

I was hearing out a woman after being asked by a friend to hear the narratives of ground level workers from Bengal to understand the violence taking place after the recent elections. “You can understand their pain and give support,” she had suggested.

The woman talking was a political worker from Bengal. She had campaigned in the elections wanting a change from the violence she was witness to every day. Her candidate had lost and now she faced a massive violence by a crowd chanting slogans outside her home. They had promised to return saying we will not go away without the ‘gonimoter maal’, a slang term referring to young girls as a booty to be is looted in Bengal, in this case her daughter.

“Can’t she leave and take shelter elsewhere?” a group member asked.

“No, we can’t,” she replied. “This is my ‘bhite’, my ancestral home. Where will we go and for how long will we stay there. We would rather die here. My parents ran away from East Bengal. How many times will I run and how far will I go? They are everywhere. I have asked a few local boys for rescue. If they come we will survive but when a crowd comes they will be helpless.”

“What about taking help from police?” someone asked.

It was an insensitive, naive question as someone pointed out. “No one today asks for help from police in Bengal.” She said, “The goons left saying, ‘Aaj bade noi kal asbo’.” Meaning we will come back.

She ended by saying, “Leave me on my own. I have learnt my lesson. Never again will I stand up for a political party whose leaders cannot stand for me. That ‘woman’ has said she will see all those who did not vote for her. She keeps her word.”

She is not alone. Today, in Bengal thousands are thinking like her being victims of the violence following the election results. There is a terror that has enveloped Bengal today permeating the ecosystem. Just like it was in Kashmir thirty years ago when the shouting people asked the terrified Kashmiri Hindus to run away leaving behind their women. It was the same in Nazi Germany eighty years ago when Jews were hunted out. If a survey is done in today’s Bengal about the level of fear in people about ‘gonimoter maal’, the figure would shock everyone.

Solzhenitsyn once famously said, “The man who is warm cannot feel the pain of a man who is cold.” The pain of the woman who talked to us, the pain of the men and women killed in last few days, will it be felt by rest of Indians? The message to people like her has reached home. ‘Stay silent, stay within your limits.’

While a culture of terror has enveloped the State, most Indians but few are silent. Just like they have been silent in Kashmir. Indians look at killings in other parts of the country with indifference, a sense of banality what Hannah Arendt described it as the ‘banality of evil’. They don’t see the motive as to create silence and fear. We react to news of political killings by acting paralyzed every time.

Violence has many shades. The motive in political violence is hidden by the perpetrator so that the victim, the witness may fall in line and obey in silence. In political violence, one group tries to teach the other a lesson where the perpetrator believes he cannot impart in any other way. It is a violence that is becoming common and banal. It asks not to change the status quo, the power balance between the communities, no matter whose government it is. Power and government can lie at different ends. ‘Khela hobe’ is the new war cry for killings of others, element of joy combined. As any genocide researcher can tell you, killing has been combined with a fun activity to keep it going when the numbers are large.

A woman faces the most violence when she tells her abusive husband that she is walking out on the marriage as she cannot take it anymore. He beats her up to tell her that Slaves in history were beaten to death when their masters felt that they were asking for more than they deserved. Equality was guaranteed as long as status quo was left undisturbed and not asked to be changed by the Slaves. Awareness is dangerous because it tells one to speak up about the inequalities and ask for rights.

In India today there is a tectonic shift in power taking place between the two communities. One who has remained a slave for thousand years and the other which doesn’t consider itself to be one. While governance may be in the hands of one, power lies in the hands of the other, guilt and secularism providing the balance keeping it in place. When this balance of power is disturbed, like in Bengal, it has to be brought under control through a way you cannot foresee.

The violence in the last few days is not meaningless. It is an organized pogrom just like Nazis did and tells a warning not to raise your voice but you should remain silent. It is a silence that must be maintained if you want to survive in secular India, a message almost unchallenged for centuries. ‘Arbeit macht frei’ (work makes you free) was the slogan for the Jews to make it appealing and even harmless.

Political violence is often part of a chain that tells the victim to stay put in his place and not cross his limits. In the aftermath of violence of 2002, almost no one brought up the massacre of victims burnt alive in the train. Perhaps the screams of the victims were drowned by the crowd surrounding the train. In the violence of Kashmir the voice of the victims was not allowed to come out so the world could sleep.

Why did we miss this sinister, omnious cry? Why did we not see it coming? Does the answer lie in our understanding of history?

A leader is known by how he stands for his people and heals them in their hour of distress. Indian leaders without exception have failed in that. Gandhi told his people who came to ask him for saving them that they should prepare for their women to get raped and asked the men to be ready to get killed before he turned to his spinning wheel for wisdom. Have we ever wondered what impact such messages have done to our society down the generations? That leader after leader fails to stand up and protect us? Whether it is silence of asceticism that characterizes our leaders, silence remains the golden rule. How will the future generation or history assess us for this, I wonder?

Meanwhile the despair of the woman whom the men threatened to come back for ‘gonimoter maal’ will not go down. This will be true for everyone in Bengal who has tried to speak up and bring a change. This despair will increase in the coming months and soon become an integral part of our life. It is the new reality of Bengal post 2021 and is poised to be the new reality of India. The statement ‘What Bengal thinks today, India thinks tomorrow’ may finally be coming true. Only the word ‘think’ may have to be replaced with the word ‘grieves for’.

The views expressed are personal