All these would have been bagatelles, had not the protest gatherings been so flagrant in their anti-national posturing and so provocative in their communal speeches. In this age of electronic surveillance and data-gathering, it is just not possible to hide or camouflage these disturbing and dangerous developments.



Of course, West Bengal under the Trinamool Congress (TMC) chief Mamata Banerjee and her rabble-rousing cronies, has been on the slippery road to disaster for a number of years. The assiduous courting of the minority vote-bank, coupled with a dangerous tolerance of cross-border infiltration, not just by the TMC, but also by its predecessor, the CPM-Left Front regime, for more than four decades, has created drastic demographic changes in at least four districts of West Bengal, all of which are on the Bangladesh border. Worse, the TMC has steadfastly refused to clamp down on aggressive communal grandstanding by certain segments of the Muslim population.