In early 1972, a small group of school friends took a decision that changed the course of our lives: we opted to leave Kolkata and finish our education in Delhi. To family elders, it was a strange and unwise decision. Kolkata, we were told, was the cultural capital of India. It was one thing to go for higher studies to England — at that time the US didn’t feature that prominently on the mental radar of an older generation — but surely Delhi was no alternative. North India, in the minds of the Bengali bhadralok, was an intellectual desert.

Travelling to the small towns of West Bengal this election season, there was a sharply different experience. The hard reality of decline now confronts the state. At Independence, West Bengal was one of India’s most important industrial hubs, just a notch below the Mumbai region. Now it has slipped to a middling position in the national league. There has been a similar slippage in the field of education. Entire middle-class localities are witnessing the unending exodus of educated youth. They are buying one-way tickets out of the state. Some of the gated housing colonies in Kolkata now resemble grand retirement homes, with elderly couples maintaining Skype contact with their children and grandchildren who will never return to their beloved city.

Of course, there is considerable activity and boisterousness in the state-subsidised clubs that have mushroomed all over the state. Every conceivable puja in the calendar is celebrated with great fanfare and the state has more public holidays than ever before. An economy centred on carrom boards and festivities has taken the place of purposeful productivity.

And yes, income is also generated through organised extortion — what is called the ‘tola’ system — controlled by politicians. No economic activity, even the simple renovation of homes, is free of extortion by the ‘syndicates’. They fulfil two functions: they fund the politics of the ruling party and they maintain the cadres who, when they are not idling away their time, serve as foot-soldiers during elections. The tola system didn’t originate with Mamata Banerjee assuming charge in 2011. Earlier, the Left imposed its own taxes on local businesses, an exercise tightly controlled by the local party units. Under the Trinamool, the single-window system has been replaced with turf wars involving different factions of the same party. Local dadas now dominate the localities and citizens live in anxiety and fear of humiliation.

What is happening in West Bengal is the systematic debasement and criminalisation of public life. The local police have been rendered ineffective and there are serious allegations of criminal complicity against their top brass. Even something as basic as college admissions are governed by a variant of the tola system. One of the reasons why elections in the state have become so extraordinarily violent is this criminalisation. Normal politics has been replaced by crude attempts to impose single-party dominance. The repercussions for stepping out of line even involve murder.

The first two phases of the elections clearly demonstrated this. Wherever the central para-military forces were deployed, there was peaceful voting and a big turnout. However, in areas under the supervision of the state police, polling was marred by violence and even booth capturing. The state witnessed the unique spectacle of polling staff in many areas refusing to undertake their duties unless they had the protection of central forces.

The cumulative effect of this debasement of public life is the collapse of morale. Last year’s school examinations saw the leak of questions for seven different papers, turning the whole exercise into a farce. Alas, this assault on the education system wasn’t accompanied by either outrage or protests. A people that had hitherto attached an exceptional premium on education and knowledge grumbled in private and meekly digested the disgrace.

However, there is some light at the end of the tunnel. Earlier, even during the turbulent 1970s, the bhadralok classes were loathe to accept anything disparaging being said of the state. They even glorified the romantic nihilism. Today, a mood of resignation is also accompanied by a growing sense of shame. There even seems to be an impatience with Mamata Banerjee’s disingenuous attempts to camouflage the social and political decline with contrived Bengali pride based on emotional separatism. Today, there are small indications that Bengal is no longer content to step aside from the national momentum. This trend is still an undercurrent but may become more visible if the Election Commission can ensure an atmosphere for voters to express their preferences without fear.