Metamorphosis of the Political Language in West Bengal | Arup Kumar Sen

Rajni Kothari, the eminent political thinker in India, drew our attention to the failure of the institutions of democracy about two decades back. He argued: “We have entered a phase of human history when long-cherished ideals of liberty, equality and fraternity appear increasingly difficult to realise…It is even less clearly recognised that the very structures that had been conceived for promoting the democratic process and providing liberation from traditional constraints – political parties, representative institutions, and the judiciary – are becoming vulnerable to the influence of anti-democratic forces. Democratic structures are proving incapable of dealing with these forces…” (Rajni Kothari, Rethinking Democracy, Orient Longman, 2005)

To come out of this impasse, Rajni Kothari suggested: “We need a theory of democracy that seeks to redirect the attention of intellectuals and social and political activists to the institution of the state; a theory that attempts to civilise the state and to make governance more humane than has been so far.” (ibid.)

The junior doctors’ movement in West Bengal testifies that the concept of ‘fraternity’ has got a new ethical meaning in the perspective of their demand for ‘justice’, raised in the context of the brutal rape and murder of a junior doctor on night duty. The movement represents “attempts to civilise the state and to make governance more humane.”

The movement has forced the chief minister of West Bengal to visit the protest site and invite the protesting doctors for dialogues to address the crisis of governance. We don’t know whether ‘justice’ embedded in the demands of the young doctors will be delivered in the future or not. However, it is quite certain that the language of politics in West Bengal has undergone a metamorphosis in the wake of the social movement initiated by them. The new urban ‘fraternity’ born as an outcome of the movement bears testimony to the fact that ‘ethics of care’ is not a spent force in our social and political life.