Forget the political class, it is the intellectual elite that has failed Bengal and its people. Its leading lights have become so selfish that they speak when it serves their image

Did this happen to Bengal, really?” This was the question among the tribe that has prided itself in standing apart and shaping the thoughts and culture of a State by sheer endowment of history than an interactive understanding of contemporary reality, namely the intellectual. Soon after the Lok Sabha verdict had announced the inevitable, that the syncretic liberalism that the State had been a product of was now slowly endorsing a majoritarian conservatism, Bengal’s intellectuals began groping for explanations. And thrown into a sea of confusion from their ivory tower constructs, they clutched at the next best thing. Survival. Even if it meant changing perspectives overnight. If something had fallen, may be there was something indeed wrong with it, never mind that they had wilfully ignored the signs as long as it was self-serving and non-threatening, and, therefore, pragmatically moved on to the next best thing. Nothing can better explain how a shifting bloc of Bengal’s cultural elite has thrived on every regime change, picking up patronage to ensure its legitimacy and in the name of being the people’s conscience, has conveniently moved on to the next sponsor. Question is do the keepers ever listen to their own conscience? For if they had, they would have realised that they have failed Bengal.

Nothing can better explain how a group of intellectuals, fattened by 34 years of Left Front rule and almost embedded as a profoundly political secret society, took up the cudgels when resistance came in the form of the Trinamool Congress (TMC) and Mamata Banerjee at Nandigram and Singur. And now that the trade winds have shifted, they are negotiating a new pole position in the name of giving out a conscience call. Nobody is endorsing the Trinamool’s excesses or arrogance that cost it the Lok Sabha tally but why couldn’t the intelligentsia nurtured by it effect a course correction from within, rebel or mobilise a movement if needed, force an agenda on the people and lead them if required rather than being glib deserters preening with their “I told you so” diagnosis? If only they had looked into history, they would have realised that their predecessors never stood in the sidelines but plunged deep into the thick of things, that they were not just agitationists and commentators but revolutionaries, that they never depended on patronage of the establishment but forged their own legacies. Most important, they remained true to the spiritual core of their civilisational identity than don a garb of foisted ideology.

Would the Indigo Revolt of 1859 have made such a mark if it didn’t have the support of the Bengali intelligentsia, who built a tide of opinion through pamphlets, protests and dialogue? Bankim Chandra Chatterjee and R C Dutt supported the anti-zamindari Pabna Agrarian Leagues. Had Raja Rammohan Roy and Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar not led from the front, the Bengal Renaissance would not have become a reality in colonial India or been the bedrock of social reforms that had an impact across our DNA. Had not the enlightened elite started their printing presses and encouraged sub-altern literature and home-grown opinions, there would not be a discourse on either democracy or nationalism as we know it today. And though Bengal revolutionaries are not credited enough in post-colonial history, the fact is they were born of the urban middle class. Even the Leftist, socialist movement and sensibility was birthed by it. And the two icons that Bengal’s elite claims lineage to — Rabindranath Tagore and Swami Vivekananda — abandoned their city comforts and made the countryside and the dispossessed their karmabhoomi. They even became our first global Indians, letting in a cross-flow of cultures to be adapted and learnt from but one that never sequestered the Indic philosophy.

Bengal’s intellectual movement bloomed as long as it was a connective matrix of people without prejudice and was about a shared, humanist pursuit of a single goal. But the moment the bhadralok got gentrified, there was a categorisation of culture as what Bengal thought and others didn’t and the consequent imperviousness to what people really wanted. In the Left regime, the bhadralok became a part of an enormous cultural czardom with entitled and guaranteed roles in academia, the theatre, the arts and films. The Naxalist era did see activist movements on the ground but those were just pyrrhic sparks, not enough to dent the deeply-set culture codes that were quickly appropriated as an extension of the establishment. In the process, State power bred its own brand of “intellectuals”, the kind who kowtowed than questioned, the kind who ended up as repressive and intolerant of otherness. That primarily explains why in both the Left and Trinamool regimes they have been posited as trophies and medallions of courtiership rather than emerging as a vibrant self-check mechanism, one that could have either saved or annihilated both regimes that follow a similar template of coercion and propagation. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn defined intellectual in The Gulag Archipelago as “a person whose interests in and preoccupation with the spiritual side of life are insistent and constant and not forced by external circumstances, even flying in the face of them. An intellectual is a person whose thought is non-imitative.” Contemporary intellectuals today are just the polar opposite. In fact, they have become so cultishly selfish that they speak when it serves their image and will not stake the largesse they have accumulated through years of them being endorsed by their patron regimes to a worthwhile cause of rescuing Bengal’s standing. Yes, they are a civil society alright. The question is, therefore, are they being civil about their duties?

It is sad that Bengal is now cited only in terms of has-beens, the first to abolish feudal systems, the first to initiate land reforms, the first to devolve power to the panchayats and farmers and so on. But look at indices of development and it is a wasteland. This even prompted welfare economist Amartya Sen to argue that the State has paid for ignoring industrialisation. In fact, the politics of Bengal has been predicated so much on parties toppling each other for the throne by fouler means than fair that there has been no revision of ideologies or ideas to revive what could sustain it in the first place — growth and development. Without these two, there cannot be mental enlightenment either.

For all the intellectuals, who still get the media arclights whenever they deign to drop a pearl of wisdom, there are no answers on bettering growth figures, winning back industrial investment and pulling it out of a negative trap of the trade unionist era, or improving its human development indices like education, which are dismal compared to even smaller States. Nobody is absolving the political class one bit for ignoring governance and administration or being despotic about priorities. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), too, has already fallen into the same trap of desperate power-grabs. But there’s no absolving the cultural elite espousing its opinion from the comfort of Kolkata without even so much as attempting a connect with rural society, its aspiration to mainstream itself with the rest of India, its right to live a normal life with basic parameters rather than being pledged as a faceless votebank or even its deep desire to break out of the vicious trap of denial and non-recognition.

Such is the deep disconnect that even films, where Satyajit Ray and Mrinal Sen once captured the rural angst, are now all about urban concerns, relationships and gender identities. In the process, the popular cultural discourse, even in literature, has become severely restricted to the perception of an elite Kolkata, so used to the pandering by both the Left and Trinamool, that they believe they are the agenda and not the other way around. The resultant benefits have made them ideological kulaks rather than free-thinkers and change-makers. So when a group of activists now criticises Mamata and seeks redress with the Bengal Governor as part of their constitutional right and duty, one would like to ask them where was this purification campaign before the election or even the last five years when Bengal made national headlines for extortion scams, political violence or child deaths? Why were they so tepid despite being coopted in several state-level committees and did not use them to sound the alarm bells? What stopped them from mass resignations or signing off retirement benefits? Why have they, as the protector of Bengal’s soul, been loyal to parties (and they will in the future too) than the idea of Bengal? Why do the greatest thinking minds in the academia and global institutions not spare a journal to be test-piloted on the ground? Or remit some practical wisdom than regret the state of affairs? One may argue that they are entitled to their intellectual freedom and privileges that come from it. But then one expects that intellect to also rise above what others do. This intellectual corruption, bankruptcy and hypocrisy, one that privileges personal capitalism over preached socialism, has failed the ordinary people of Bengal. And so if the common Bengal labourer is wondering why his mills are shut, doles are pathetically low and he has to travel to plants in Gujarat as a migrant, everybody better be prepared to answer the question.

(The writer is Associate Editor, The Pioneer)