“Liberals and Their ‘Didi’ – Inside the Moral Collapse of India’s Secular Elite” Reverse The Gaze, March 16, 2026
“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…”
Read the full article on reversethegaze.substack.com
