This morning when you brew your cup of Darjeeling tea, remember it’s made by slaves. Many of them — estimates range from 300 to 1,000 since 2002 — starved to death in Darjeeling, Jalpaiguri, Cooch Behar and North Dinajpur in poll-bound Bengal. Meanwhile PM Modi and CM Didi celebrate achhe din.

Mamata Banerjee’s nephew, a well-nourished fellow called Abhishek, visited some impoverished tea estates in Alipurduar, north Bengal, recently. He did not allude to poverty or starvation. Instead, he spoke about ‘janata’ (people), ‘khamata’ (power) and ‘mamata’ (compassion, or his aunt’s name) to a bunch of hungry people.

Over 100 tea estates in Bengal are bust. Assets have been stripped by owners. Recently, seven estates owned by Duncan Industries were nationalized to ‘save’ 15,000-odd employees and get their votes. Around 52% of tea workers are women. Almost all are anaemic.

In Bengal’s collective memory, the last instance of starvation deaths was during the Winston Churchill-devised Great Famine of 1943. Then, the flatulent British PM decided to divert all grain grown in Bengal, Bihar and Orissa to Allied soldiers fighting the Japanese. Five million people died as a consequence.

This is well recorded. Satyajit Ray directed Ashani Sanket (Distant Thunder), starring Soumitra Chatterjee in 1973. In 1980, Mrinal Sen directed Akaler Shandhane (In Search of Famine) about a film crew led by Dhritiman Chatterjee, excavating the detritus of this horror. Amartya Sen researched the calamity in a much-cited book in 1982 called Poverty and Famines.

Today, to look for famine, welcome to north Bengal. The science of starvation is simple: deprived of nutrients, the body becomes too weak to scrounge for food; the immune system degenerates rapidly. If there’s very little water, sugar or salt, things get worse. Then anything, even common cold, becomes lethal. You die.

Makaibari is a prized tea estate in Darjeeling: in a 2014 auction, one kilogram of its famous brew sold for $1,850, around Rs 1.3 lakh. In comparison, the costliest Assam tea sells for roughly Rs 230 per kg. Yet, there is no starvation death in Assam’s gardens; but north Bengal, including Darjeeling, is on the road to perdition. What explains this brutal contradiction?

Short answer: history and politics. In the early 1800s, the British ran up a huge trade deficit with China when the Qing dynasty banned opium import from colonial India to pay for silk, porcelain, herbs — and tea. A frantic rush to find substitutes for Chinese tea, to which the memsahib was addicted, led to the discovery of tea growing wild in the Naga hills of northeast India. By mid-1830s samples landed up in the Botanical Society of Calcutta, which vouched for its quality. Thus was born the tea industry in Assam and Bengal.

Its human cost was terrible: after a few years of fruitless experimenting with local Assamese, Bengali and Chinese workers (many Chinese were skilled carpenters or shoemakers, not tea guys), the Scots who ran the gardens decided it was cheaper to import workers from the Santhal parganas: modern-day Bengal, Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh, Orissa and Telangana.

In his classic 1977 book, economic historian Amalendu Guha reckoned around 80% of these workers died on slave boats en route to tea estates. The rest found a terrible livelihood. Their descendants are the so-called ‘tea tribes’ of Assam and the starving workers in Bengal.

Today, in Assam, which produces 52% of India’s tea, the ‘bagani’ or tea garden population is 20% of the total. This number guarantees them voice and political clout. They can’t be ignored or starved. But tea workers are just 1.2% of Bengal’s 90 million-plus population. They’re concentrated in sparsely populated northern hill districts, which elect few people to the legislature: they have little political heft.

So, Assam tea workers can bargain for, and get, a minimum wage of roughly Rs 140 per day, compared to north Bengal’s Rs 90-95. A recent report on 273 tea gardens in Bengal demonstrated how, in 2012-13, 41 estates didn’t put one paisa into employees’ provident fund accounts. This is a criminal offence, but who cares?

One-fifth, or 20%, of every tea plantation has to be uprooted and replanted every year to maintain the quality of leaves. The Duncan gardens had been ignored for so long that tea bushes were chewed up by termites. Those leaves are worthless.

Bengal’s tea distress is a metaphor for the rotten politics practised here. Thus, Anubrata (Keshto) Mandal, a Trinamool Congress heavyweight from Birbhum can tell media he’ll make voters for the opposition ‘vanish’ on polling day. Till sometime ago, CM Mamata Banerjee flaunted a fake doctorate from a non-existent US university. Her education mantri, Partha Chatterjee is accused of plagiarizing his doctoral ‘thesis’ in 2014. More than a dozen TMC honchos are on camera pocketing cash-for-favours. At least one former minister is in jail for colluding in a Ponzi scheme. But he has Didi’s blessings and a ticket to contest the 2016 polls. With netas like this, north Bengal’s hungry folk need no enemies.