The wasteland

RUDRANGSHU MUKHERJEE

CHANGE cannot be divorced from human agency. Only a very crude determinism attempts such a separation. The results of the elections to the West Bengal assembly in May 2011 were products of human thought and action. The Left Front had been voted out and Mamata Banerjee voted in because millions of people not only wanted it that way but also because they went to the polling booths to demonstrate their choice. The results were not the products of absentmindedness on the part of the voters; neither were they an accidental outcome of collective choice. The verdict was too overwhelming and comprehensive to be either. Quite apart from the victory of Mamata Banerjee, this historic election also represented a triumph of human will and agency. The point is important since for a better part of the past 34 years, a concerted attempt had been made by the Communist Party of India (Marxist) to dominate human agency and to make human beings subservient to the diktats of the party and its cadre. From the above generalizations two related questions follow. One, what made the people of West Bengal wait for over three decades to assert their will and to overthrow the CPI(M)? And two, why did they choose Mamata Banerjee and her party, the Trinamool Congress, as their preferred instrument to show the Left the door? The second question is easier to answer than the first, so I will begin with that. In spite of the overall dominance of the Left in West Bengal since 1977, voting figures show that a substantial body of electors in every election cast their ballots against the Left. This number hovered somewhere around 40 per cent of the total number of votes cast in each election. This suggests that over the years there existed in West Bengal a body of voters who were not happy with the way the Left ruled the state or were ideologically not inclined to support a political formation that was associated with some form of communism. The expectations of these voters could not get adequate representation because of the failures of the political party that since independence was the only force opposed to the rise of communist power and influence in West Bengal, that is, the Indian National Congress. The Congress in West Bengal from the 1980s had no important leader who could appeal and reach out to the people. The Congress national leadership was not too concerned about the plight of the West Bengal unit of the party. The one important figure within the Congress who came from the state was Pranab Mukherjee who, till the other day, could not win a Lok Sabha seat from West Bengal and when he finally did, it was because he had the support of the Left. The Congress in West Bengal had little or no credibility, and the perception was that many of the local leaders had made their own deals with the Left. Under these circumstances, one figure and one voice stood out.

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he figure was that of a woman and the voice was shrill. Through many vicissitudes of fortune Mamata Banerjee refused to compromise with the Left. She was relentless in her opposition to Left rule in West Bengal even when this meant that she was in a hopeless minority, or even when many people suspected her motives and criticized her behaviour. Even her enemies and her critics were forced to recognize her as the sole spokesman of anti-Left opinion in West Bengal. The bhadralok, for reasons of class and gender, took their time to accept this, but they had no other option. This is one of the reasons for her growing popularity. But the significance of this factor should not lead to an underestimation of her skills as a politician, her uncanny ability to stay with the people and to feel their mood, her nerves as a negotiator and so on. She was not born with charisma but she acquired it through her hard work or, it could be said, she had charisma thrust upon her. It is an old philosophical premise that no identity can be affirmed without its Other. Following from this, it could be said that Mamata Banerjee’s identity as the sole spokesman would not have been possible without the powerful existence of the Left. When she won the elections in May 2011, a veteran and committed supporter of the CPI(M) told me, ‘The greatest achievement of the Left Front in West Bengal is the making of Mamata Banerjee.’ There was irony and bitterness in the statement but it is difficult to imagine Mamata Banerjee and her present status without the existence of her arch adversary, the CPI(M).

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he upsurge of popular discontent against the Left, of which this election results are a manifestation, must be seen for the purpose of analysis at two distinct but related levels. One is at the level of trends, something traceable over a period of time; and the other is, events – incidents that aggravated the trend of decline. The dominance of the Left, especially that of the CPI(M), was articulated through two instruments – control and terror. The CPI(M) tried to control every sphere of life in West Bengal by using the power of the state, by making every single institution (bureaucracy, educational establishments, hospitals, panchayats, municipal bodies, unions, the local clubs and so on) subservient to the party. Where the attempts failed or were resisted, the CPI(M) used terror through its cadre. This created discontent which was muted or even suppressed. This use of terror, not unexpected from a Stalinist party, was the hallmark of the Left’s tenure in West Bengal and this will be the remembrance mark of the Left despite its many much-flaunted achievements. At the level of events, the most crucial episode was the violence in Nandigram in 2007 where the CPI(M), in an act of revenge and retaliation, unleashed a reign of terror. The party wanted to regain lost turf and it used armed cadre and the state police to achieve its ends. Many of the victims of this violence were poor peasants and farmers who had at one time supported the Left and had then felt threatened by the government’s policy of land acquisition. The violence produced shock and dismay, especially among the intelligentsia, most of whom had since 1977 been advocates of Left rule. The intelligentsia and members of civil society came out in protest against the government’s and the CPI(M)’s shameless use of force and terror. This was a turning point. The people of West Bengal began to realize that it was possible and necessary to stand up against the Left’s arrogance and misrule. It was the beginning of the end.

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t was almost natural that this rising anger of the people would look for a political face and find it in Mamata Banerjee who had been fighting the CPI(M)’s arrogance and use of force for over a decade. There was a coming together of this popular anger and Mamata’s image as the sole spokesman of anti-Left opinion and politics in West Bengal. Mamata’s charisma is grounded in this merger. Mamata Banerjee’s particular purpose comprehended the substantial content of the people’s anger and desire for change. They flocked to her banner. She became the instrument of their agency. Any change has embedded in it an element of uncertainty. Mamata Banerjee’s came to power with the slogan of paribartan, change. Her endeavour to refashion the present history of West Bengal could not escape its historical context. As the chief minister, she was expected to exercise choice without fear or prejudice. The question was: Would she be able to do that? The cynics said, the more things change, the more they remain the same. The optimists responded with the words of the poet, ‘There is only the fight to recover what has been lost... there is only the trying.’ West Bengal waited in 2011, caught in the cusp of history.

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he answer was not slow in coming. Within months of Mamata Banerjee’s accession to the chief ministership, questions about the promised change were being raised. The familiar issues of crisis in and decline of West Bengal were returning to the public discourse. The themes of crisis and decline have haunted the consciousness of educated Bengalis. These concerns first manifested themselves in the middle of the 19th century, the high noon of Bengal’s cultural efflorescence, when contemporary journals and periodicals devoted considerable space to these themes. It can be said that from the end of the last century and the beginning of the present one, another theme has come to preoccupy the intelligentsia of (West) Bengal – this is the theme of change, first the lack of it and then the nature of the change itself. From the late 1990s, when West Bengal had an octogenarian chief minister heading a communist government that had enjoyed unbroken power since 1977, people began wondering if political change would ever be possible. An entire generation had grown up in West Bengal without knowing of any other political dispensation than the one the Left Front represented. The departure of Jyoti Basu from Writers’ Building did not end the rule of the Left but brought forth the possibility of a change in attitudes and policies. To many it seemed, and there were good reasons for this optimism, that in Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee, Bengal had at last found its Prince Charming. Disarmingly frank about his party’s past mistakes, Bhattacharjee held out the promise of an industrial renaissance. He spoke a different language – referring often to Tagore, Joyce and Proust – and he became quite the darling of even those who are not known for being supporters of communists – businessmen and industrialists. ‘Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee is like a breath of fresh air’, was a compliment that was frequently heard in Calcutta, Delhi and elsewhere.

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y 2008, the promise of an industrial renaissance had evaporated with the Tatas taking away their small car project from the state. That exit was the direct outcome of an agitation that was opposed to acquiring agricultural land for industry in West Bengal. The agitation was thus opposed to the idea of economic change and growth. The danger such opposition represented was overwhelmed by the slogan of change that captured the imagination of the people of Bengal, who voted the Left Front out of power. This was the first concrete political change in 34 years. The sheer thrill of bringing about this change obscured a paradox: the lady who had prevented economic change by opposing the Singur project was the same lady who was propelling West Bengal to the promised land called change. What were the elements that constituted that promise? First was the end of more than three decades of Left rule. Those who held out the promise felt Left rule had been oppressive, and many of those who voted for the change believed that a new government under a different kind of political leadership would not be a bad thing. West Bengal deserved an alternative at long last. Second was the expectation that the change would be for the good – there would be clean and better governance, law and order would improve and so would health services and education. Third was the very personality of the new chief minister, Mamata Banerjee – down to earth and with a no-nonsense attitude, known for her simple lifestyle and honesty, courageous and passionate about Bengal. It was not surprising that Mamata Banerjee brought with her hope and expectations. Of course, the inauguration of the new era was not free of scepticism. Would the chief minister, known for her mercurial temperament, make the transition from being a street-smart political campaigner to being an astute and responsible chief minister? Would she be able to forsake her natural propensity for populism and take hard and unpopular policy decisions? What would she do to attract investments, given her hostility to taking over agricultural land for manufacturing units?

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othing has happened since Mamata Banerjee came to power to quite dispel the questions that the sceptics had raised. Support for her may not have noticeably declined but the number of sceptics has increased. Yesterday’s admirers are today’s critics and many industrialists and businessmen are wringing their hands and shaking their heads. The question being asked is: Has change taken place, and if it has, is the change good for West Bengal? Does Bengal continue to be under the shadow of crisis and decline that had concerned the intelligentsia from the middle of the 19th century? Is the promised change no more than a variation of those seemingly enduring themes? Why do these serious doubts persist? The more important answers to these questions are not difficult to locate. It is obvious that potential investors are getting increasingly disillusioned with the present government. At the root of this disenchantment is the chief minister’s intransigence regarding acquiring land for industry. She believes that the state should not acquire land; the industrialists should acquire it on their own by negotiating with individual holders. This disregards the nature of landholding and agrarian relations in West Bengal. Landholding is fragmented and, apart from the original owner, there are innumerable other stakeholders in land. The process of acquiring a large consolidated holding would entail a prolonged process of negotiation which no entrepreneur can afford to get into, especially if (s)he has better opportunities elsewhere. The chief minister seems unable or unwilling to grasp this point. The question that faces the people of West Bengal is: Will West Bengal remain an agricultural and, therefore, a backward economy? Will there be no change in this regard?

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n health, despite the chief minister’s flying visits to a few hospitals and shows of temper there, no improvements are visible. The increasing number of deaths of babies, in fact, suggests that things have not changed. In education, steps have been taken to depoliticize the system. But there seem to be no schemes afoot to raise standards. One Presidency University, even if it is allowed to become an institution of international excellence, will not change the system. The chief minister’s thinking on education remains vague at best. There is no perceptible improvement in law and order and there is apprehension that the incidence of crime and violence is on the rise because the police are often taken to task for trying to stop violence and are prone to act in a manner designed to please the chief minister. The public finances of the state are in parlous state; for all practical purposes it is bankrupt. The chief minister’s persistent lament that the central government deprives West Bengal carries little or no credibility. The reiteration of the word ‘chief minister’ in the previous paragraph is deliberate because every single aspect of governance and administration has come to be focused in the persona of the chief minister. Nothing happens without the consent of Mamata Banerjee and the best proposals can be set aside if she disapproves of them. Ministers, bureaucrats and police officers have lost their initiative and independence. A one-woman demolition squad of the CPI(M) has now become a one-woman government. This is exactly the opposite of the promise of a transparent and efficient democratic government. The dangers embedded in this situation were evident in the slew of irresponsible statements that have emanated from the chief minister. The worst of these was her announcement that the Park Street rape case was entirely fabricated to defame her government. And the most comic of these was her response when asked in New Delhi about a spate killings in Burdwan, ‘Ask the state government.’ She forgot, she is the state government.

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orse was to follow. In April 2012, an academic was roughed up by supporters of the Trinamool Congress and subsequently arrested by the police. His fault was that he had circulated by e-mail a cartoon making fun of the chief minister. Suddenly, there were questions among the intelligentsia of West Bengal about freedom of expression and individual liberty. Such questions, even in the darkest days of communist rule in the state, had not occurred to anyone. Not that the communist regime was free of oppression and intimidation. The cadre of the CPI(M) bullied people and tried at times to infringe on the basic rights of individuals and institutions and they successfully controlled the latter through shrewd manipulation. But all this did not lead to any major transgression of fundamental rights. If it had, Mamata Banerjee would never have come to power. She came to power through democratic means and by waging a relentless campaign against the Left, a campaign that would not have been possible or successful had the Left effectively stifled democratic rights and expression. When she sat on a hunger strike in Esplanade and then later blocked a major highway for days on end, the state administration did not send in the police to break up the protests and neither did the CPI(M) let loose its goons on the demonstrators.

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ne cannot readily recall the Left Front government or communist leaders being overtly interested in what was circulating in private mails and in what was being written (or said) in newspapers and on television. There was one notorious case of a young man being detained because he had posted something abusive about Jyoti Basu on his website. This was roundly condemned and never repeated. The Left had its own organs of expression through which it articulated its views and often ridiculed what was written in what it dubbed ‘the bourgeois press’. All this was considered par for the democratic course. Under Mamata Banerjee, the Bengali word, paribartan, acquired very ominous overtones. Her regime came to be seen as irresponsible, intolerant of criticism displaying a pronounced propensity for authoritarianism. The three adjectives used in the previous statement need to be explained separately. A woman is raped and the chief minister describes the incident as being staged (sajano is the Bengali word she used) by a section of the media. This was irresponsible because there was no need for the chief minister to have made any comment on this. Her extreme intolerance to criticism is shown, first by her decision to banish from government libraries those newspapers that were critical of her, and second, by her condoning of the arrest of a professor who had forwarded by email a set of cartoons that poked fun at her. Her authoritarianism is manifest in her refusal to listen to anyone. She acts as if she knows everything.

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he incidents cited above are by no means isolated. On the contrary, they are part of a long series. Similar instances could easily be multiplied. There is no need for that. What is more important is that the true character of her regime is revealed by the fact that her party cadre repeatedly attack and beat up people who they think are opposed to the Trinamool Congress. The police take no action against those who perpetrate such acts of violence. In one case, the police refused to take action against a group of people who attacked journalists in spite of an FIR; in another the police stood by while a demonstration on a major thoroughfare was attacked. In both cases, TV footage exists to identify the attackers. But in other cases, the police act with alacrity on an FIR even when they know that the charge is flimsy. This suggests two conclusions. One, the political cadre, like the Blackshirts and the Stormtroopers, are taking law into their own hands to settle political scores with opponents and dissidents. Two, the police force has become an extension of the party in power. It is not acting to uphold law and order and not behaving in a manner to protect citizens from violence. It is acting to promote the interests of the ruling party. There is a remarkable similarity between this and the way things were under the aegis of the CPI(M). It is difficult, if not impossible, to believe that all this happens without the knowledge of the chief minister. In fact, there are grounds to suspect that most of these things happen at her behest. Her utterances condoning some of the worst manifestations of arbitrariness and breach of the rule of law are proof of this. Any student of history with a modicum of familiarity with pre-Second World War European history will recognize in the developments discussed above the emergence of a form of rule that completely destroyed democracy in the 1930s in Italy, Germany and Russia. In these countries, everything was made subservient to the interests of the party and to the whims and insecurities of one individual.

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here is no denying that some elements of authoritarianism and its attendant intimidation were present during Left rule in West Bengal. But in spite of attempts to suppress dissent and to subvert individual rights, the spirit of democracy could not be quelled. The Left was dislodged even though it took an inordinately long time for that to happen. But in a bizarre irony the very agent who made the defeat of the Left possible is now threatening democracy and freedom. This turn towards authoritarianism is marked by a sharp decline in the political vocabulary in the state. This decline begins with the chief minister. She publicly reprimanded her security staff with the telling words, ‘You lot should be whipped,’ and followed it by the threat to photographers that they should be slapped. Violence has become such an important marker that even an expression of frustration is laced with it – ‘[s]hould I go and beat up the prime minister?’ the chief minister had asked in a public meeting. These are some examples of the prevalent vocabulary. Such statements are evidence of a sharp decline in the political vocabulary of West Bengal, a kind of lumpenization of political culture. The process of this degeneration can be traced back to the years when communists ruled the state and when they were dominant in public life. There are still people around who will remember the kind of language the communists used to attack Congress leaders like Prafulla Sen and Atulya Ghosh. The Naxalites, often exalted as heroes of a generation, were particularly crude in the abuse of those they considered ‘class enemies’. But to be fair to the communists, abuse and the vocabulary of the lumpen were not the only kinds of discourse available when they dominated public culture in West Bengal. In this context, one needs to remember the poetry, the theatre and a certain intellectual ambience that the communist party fostered and, for a long time, encouraged. Even in straightforward political discourse the descent into abuse is a relatively recent phenomenon among communists – one has only to recall the erudite oratory of Hiren Mukerjee in Parliament and in the course of election campaigns, the urbane sophistication of Somnath Lahiri when he spoke in the Constituent Assembly and later to the public at large or even of Jyoti Basu when he was at his best in election meetings.

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he difference today is that a lumpenized rhetoric is the only one that is available. And like water it flows downwards from the top. There are too many political figures of the ruling dispensation prone to using words and epithets that are abusive and have seldom been heard before. Even the more educated members of the ruling party are not entirely free of this particular tendency. On rare occasions Left leaders, as if in retaliation, have also used abusive language. But on one notable occasion, the leader concerned earned a reprimand from the party. Not surprisingly, the abusive language is complemented by the threat of physical violence and, on quite a few occasions, violence has actually taken place. There is the growing fear in West Bengal that violence lurks just below the surface. Goons enjoying political patronage often take law into their own hands to settle personal and political scores. In parts of Calcutta, shooting in the streets is not an uncommon occurrence. Thus while Tagore’s songs play at traffic lights a lumpen raj prevails on the streets. What could be more charming and more revealing about the antinomies of Bengali culture?

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would suggest that the debasing of political vocabulary is a symptom of an alarming malaise. One feature of the contemporary political culture is the restriction of the space for the three Ds – difference, debate and dissent – that lie at the very core of the fourth D – democracy. The political culture, especially, has come to be dominated by intolerance, the obverse of the three Ds. It is an intolerance that is directed not only at political opponents of the ruling party but at anyone who voices an opinion that is different from and critical of the views of the chief minister. Any criticism is seen as an expression of the views of either Maoists or the CPI(M), even when they are voiced by a young college student just out of school. One immediate result of this is the complete supineness of the bureaucracy and the police who are over-eager to please the chief minister. This led, notoriously, to the arrest as mentioned earlier of an academic who had circulated a cartoon. In that particular case, the police acted with surprising alacrity. But the same police force is rendered inactive when Trinamool Congress supporters manhandle television cameramen and reporters or, most shamefully, when a police officer is shot dead and the killer flees in spite of the presence of a posse of policemen. The narrowing of the democratic space and the imposition of an individual’s will on the institutions of governance are manifestations of a growing authoritarianism. ‘I am the State’, appears to be the principle according to which the present chief minister operates: to this end promises can be made and ‘facts’ about achievements doled out. Woe betide those who dare to differ. There have been occasions in the past to bemoan the political fortunes of West Bengal. The people of the state voted overwhelmingly for change but not a change for the worse. The hopes of a change for the better now lie in shambles. The emergence of a lumpen political culture manifest in words and deeds, directed by the unashamed exaltation of an individual leader carries within it the seeds of a political formation that is the exact antithesis of not only democracy but also of any kind of civilized existence.

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he people of West Bengal cannot claim that they are not implicated in their own plight. For 34 years they allowed themselves to be ruled by one political formation. They replaced it by another that is no more than a mirror image of its predecessor. The state now has a chief minister who refuses to govern; whose politics never stretch beyond populism; whose lack of respect for democratic norms and rights are becoming prominent every passing day. Does this worry the people of Bengal? Apparently not. For them, all said and done, there is the past when a master politician from western India patted Bengal on the back and declared Bengal’s today is tomorrow’s India. In the 21st century, Bengal has neither a today nor a tomorrow.