When Trinamool Congress MP Tapas Pal threatened to unleash his party cadres against the CPM, going so far as to crudely say he would let loose his “boys” to rape women supporters of Bengal’s Marxists, he epitomized the prevailing culture in TMC. He felt emboldened to threaten mass rape because he had long got the cue from his party chief Mamata Banerjee whose notions of sexual violence are almost as deviant as the crime itself.

What has shocked and outraged Bengal, once the video containing his vituperative speech surfaced, is that Pal, whose acting career began with a popular Bengali film in which he played the role of a gentle and sensitive young man given to Rabindra Sangeet, too had stooped to the level of TMC hoodlums and toughs like MLAs Anubrata Mondal and Arabul Islam.

Regardless of Pal’s less-than-convincing apology, Lok Sabha’s Privilege Committee must swiftly initiate proceedings against him, while Mamata should immediately expel this errant party member who is associated with a history of abusive behaviour. A few years ago, Pal, who had then not joined the TMC, was alleged to have thrown his aged parents out of his house.

But the venom that he spewed against his political opponents in Choumaha in Nadia district during election campaigning and his scant disregard for women, regardless of their political affiliations, is a new low, reflecting Bengal’s inexorable slide into social degeneration. In March this year, a young Bengali actor, Dev, had to face civil society’s ire for likening his election campaign to being raped.

That Bengal, which once prided in its high culture, exceptional educational attainments and social refinement, has come to such a sorry pass is not surprising. The steady slide to the depths of darkness began soon after the Left Front regime captured power. The Marxists patronized criminal gangs who ran amok during elections, the CPI(M)’s local committees being centres of all kinds of nefarious activities.

Those who chose to practice a different brand of politics were hounded, with CPM cadres issuing open threats to life and property. Over time, the threats turned to action – those who did not vote for the CPI(M) would be subjected to the most inhuman of atrocities, including chopping off of limbs.

So deep was the penetration of the Marxists that local committee members would settle disputes ranging from marital to property-related. In time, as the Marxists’ power waned, the criminal gangs and other dregs of society moved to the TMC’s side which now patronises them. Mamata’s party has collected all the scum.

But perhaps the greatest blow the Leftists dealt Bengal was to the education system and its institutions which were thoroughly politicised. The result was debilitating in that politics and campus violence ruined the system, as generation after generation of students could not take examinations.

Coupled with high levels of unemployment, ruinous student politics, faulty educational policies and the Leftists’ tacit encouragement to indolence and job-shirking contributed in no small measure to Bengal’s social disarray.

By the time the Marxists were swept out of power in 2011, the social rot had become so deep as to have become the dominant form. Tapas Pal and many others in the Trinamool Congress, including the party chief, represent that social sickness. They use the same, if not worse, abusive language not only against their political rivals cadres but also among themselves.

Normal private conversations are laced with invectives. Deviant behaviour is the norm. Take for instance West Bengal transport minister Madan Mitra, once a cab driver, who was embroiled in an alleged illicit relationship with a Kolkata advocate who was later found dead in her Rajarhat flat which, reports suggested, was acquired with Mitra’s help.

A few years ago, a senior TMC leader who would later become a minister in the UPA regime, was caught in the act with a woman inside the party headquarters in Kolkata. On a tour to a Midnapore village in 2009, the same leader was forced to flee when villagers charged him for sexually exploiting a woman whose house he had stayed the night over.

What is, however, surprising is the silence of the more refined elements within the TMC. That silence is in part a reflection of a crisis of masculinity in Bengal in general and in TMC in particular. Men of letters and of some social and cultural elegance prefer not to speak up against their crude and crass colleagues for they cower in fear of Mamata Banerjee who employs fear and coercion to maintain personal power within TMC.

Unfortunately in Bengal, where rapes have been on the rise since the TMC captured power in 2011, the woman’s body has become a site where men communicate with each other. Tapas Pal’s venomous speech is just one example of such perverse and sick communication.