What does Marxism mean to me? This is an attempt to answer this question. However before reaching a conclusion to this question I would like to start by taking a trip down the memory lane and find out how I became interested in Marxism and trace my lived experience of Marxism in West Bengal during the first forty years of my life. Like most people who call themselves Marxists I was attracted to the ideology not after a thorough reading of Marx’s writings. Hence let me begin by asking why and how did I find myself lured towards Marxism? How and through what channels did the ideology find its way inside my identity? What indeed did I understand as ‘Marxism’ when I first encountered it? How did the lived experience and the historical changes around me transform my relationship with Marxism? This then is my story which is also inextricably linked to the story of the time I have lived through.
I
I was born in a private Nursing Home in a place called Dumdum in North Calcutta in the year 1971, the year made famous by Mrinal Sen in his film Kolkata Ekattor (Calcutta ’71). The previous few years had seen the most violent eruption of communist movement in the history of West Bengal – the Naxalite Movement, or the Nokshal Andolon. By 1971 however the movement was gradually beginning to subside and the state government under Sidharta Sankar Ray was gaining control over it. The process of gaining control was anything but democratic and hundreds of students and followers of the movement were tortured and killed in the name of law and order. There were violent incidents of retaliation as well from the side of the Naxalites and it became quite common to find someone in the neighbourhood to be missing or dead. To make matters more complicated, the ‘revolutionary’ and the ‘criminal’ became intertwined and who was getting killed for political reasons and who was getting killed for personal reasons was sometimes difficult to determine.
I have no memory of such violence. My parents however do and they still feel paranoid about those days. My mother still recalls that every evening she used to remain tense as to whether her husband would return home safely or not. My parents also remember dead bodies being carried away in a cart in front of them.
I spent my early childhood in a rented house in Dumdum where my parents used to live in a joint-family with my grand-father and grand-mother, two aunts and two uncles. There were others in the family, like my jyatha (my father’s elder brother) and some of my father’s cousins who also lived nearby. An adopted street dog completed the home. It was a large house in comparison to today’s flat bari (apartments in multi-storied buildings) standards with a largish backyard. I remember very little of that house during the period when we used to stay there as we shifted to a rented house in South Calcutta when I was about four years old. Joint-families were breaking down into nuclear ones and our family was no exception. This however did not mean that that the ties were completely lost and we very often went to visit our grand-parents house. Two visuals of this period stand out in my mind. The first was that of my grandmother who was an intensely religious person and used to have her own prayer room (thakur ghor) and we used to enjoy the rituals where various sugar candies (batasha and nokul dana) were dished out at us. The food that was served after the pujas at home was also quite delicious. The second memory is that of my grand father who was a criminal lawyer and used to have his office (usually called ‘chamber’’ in the outer part of the house. This room used to be populated in the evening by all sorts of people, some were I guess his clients and some were people who used to just drop by. I knew that this was the space for grown up people (boroder jaayga) and I was not supposed to go there.
My grandparents were originally from Tangail in what is now Bangladesh. After partition, in 1948, they came over to Dumdum in North Calcutta like many other refugees. However they were not utter destitute living in shanties but were able to rent a decent sized house and my grandfather was able to start his own legal ‘practice’ at the Barrackpore Court, where he was a respected lawyer till his death. He also became involved with the Communist Party, the details of which is however not clear. Life was tough and uncertain and growing up in such an environment was not easy for my father. My grandparents belonged to an age prior to the introduction of family planning in India and they had five sons and five daughters. Not all of them managed to get decent education. The priority was clearly that the sons should be educated and should earn money while the daughters should grow up and get married. My grandfather was honest, he was respected, and he was a supporter of the Communist Party but was also a patriarch and a Hindu.
My grandfather from my mother’s side was also from East Bengal (now Bangladesh) but he had come to Calcutta before partition as a student. From what I could gather from my mother and my grand mother he was into the nationalist movement of the time and later on became a follower of well-known communist leader, Bhupesh Gupta. In all probability he was inspired by the Swadeshi Movement and developed a whole-sale tea-business in Sylhet district of Bangladesh. My grandmother came from an upper-middle class family in Kolkata and my mother grew up in a posh locality called Ballygunge while my grandfather used to stay mostly in East Pakistan. In 1961, because of a riot, he had to leave his business and came over to Calcutta and eventually took a dramatic turn and became a farmer in north Bengal and settled down in Jalpaiguri, a district town in northern part of West Bengal. He died when I was only a few years old and I do not have any direct memory of him. From the photographs that I have seen of him he looks like a patriarch with a big moustache.
At what point in time and why my grandfathers came in touch with Marxism that was gaining currency in the city of Calcutta is impossible to determine precisely but one can more or less locate the period 1950-55 as roughly the period when Marxism as an ideology entered our familial space. The impact of dislocation from the rural roots and the formation of an urban identity also played a role in creating the ambience for the entry of Marxism. This process was however also very much a masculine process and it would be a mistake not to see the gender dimension of the story. Marxism/Communism/Communist Party was something that existed in the world of male associations, and developed a harmonious relationship with a Hindu-upper-caste Bengali familial space. In other words, when it came to usual familiar rituals and daily existence the Hindu-Upper Caste-Bengali pattern of lifestyle was retained. There was no overhauling of the daily practices because of the entry of Marxist ideas. It was something that the men indulged in as a matter of political choice rather than something that became a practice for the entire family. At this stage certainly Marxism did not alter the male-female relations, nor did it make an impact on religious beliefs or on marriage choices. The entry of Marxism was also in a complex way negotiated within Bengali bhadralok culture, and the books of Marxism found their way into the bookshelves along with that of Rabindranath Tagore, Saratchandra, Nazrul Islam and other greats of Bengali literature. The ideas represented by these authors did not always match but they stood for a sense of living beyond the ordinary and banal, and knowing such books was part of being cultured in the Bengali bhadralok sense. Thus Marxism made an entry into our familial space rather timidly and certainly not as a force that would sweep everything away in a revolutionary manner.
A few years after we shifted to South Calcutta I had my first experience of boarding an aircraft. We were not going abroad, but to Tripura, a small North-Eastern state, to visit my mother’s cousin’s family. Since it was necessary to cross Bangladesh, the only way to go there was by air. I have vague memories of being in Tripura, one of them being completely puzzled by the concept of maach chaash (literally ‘fish farming’) – how is it possible, I thought, to cultivate fish? Clearly, being an urban person who had no connection with rural society, I was ignorant of the rural world. This was quite extraordinary as even my father’s childhood was spent in a village. However what is important for our narrative is a particular evening that I somehow remember quite vividly. There was power cut and hence it was quite dark. The radio was on and at regular interval election results were being broadcast. All the adults were glued to the radio and were feeling ecstatic every time the results were being read out. I understood that something important was happening although it was not clear to me exactly what it was. I could hear the words – “CPM…CPM”. Every time a CPM candidate was declared to be a winner there was wild jubilation. It was much later that I understood that a Communist Party was coming to power in West Bengal. Congress, the party of the landed elite, was being voted out of power. It was 1977.
II
One of the many contradictions within which my parents became supporters of a Communist Party was related to education of their children. Middle-class (moddhyobitto) Bengali families, Marxist or otherwise, suffered from the anxiety of ‘chele meyeder manush kora’, i.e. to raise one’s children. This inevitably meant sending their children to a good school, usually a private school. Some of the best schools in Calcutta were run by Christian Missionaries and my elder brother was admitted to one of them. Sending one’s children to a Christian school and supporting a communist party was somehow not felt to be a contradiction. Unlike my brother I was a black sheep who continuously failed in entry level exams of the prestigious schools of the city. Hence I ended up in a school that was not that famous and where most of the students were Marwaris and hence culturally very different from me. I showed very little interest in schooling and spent most of my time in my maternal grandmother’s place. It was my grandmother who first introduced me to the stories of the Puranas, Ramayana and Mahabharata. This is where I first got interested in stories and narratives. It was here that I also first got to see some ‘red’ books, which probably my uncle had collected and read at some point as a young man. Sometimes there were discussions of contemporary politics at home. It is at this stage perhaps that unconsciously the first few words and ideas of Marxism began to enter me. Marxism was less clearly understood by me at this point as a political philosophy and more as the ideology of the political party that my family supported. It was, I understood the most progressive political party of the country and to be progressive meant supporting CPI (M). However I must also make it clear that since I had no rural root I had no idea of land reforms, panchayati raj or other rural programmes that CPI(M) had launched after coming to power. By the time I was about eight or nine I came to understand that the hammer and sickle icon meant a party for the poor people, complicated concepts like ‘dialectical materialism’, ‘class consciousness’ etc were still quite far away. I had also come to know of the Naxalites but was not clear as to what the differences between the Leninists and Maoists were.
By 1980 Cold War had crept into my consciousness. Not through a sound reading of international relations but through the discourse surrounding the Olympic Games which was scheduled to be held in USSR. I had taken the side of the Soviet Union (in Bengali we preferred to say ‘Raa-she-aa’). This was also a time when India was, although formally a non-aligned country, much closer to USSR than to USA. An important landmark in the development of a pro-Soviet mind-set was the collaboration between USSR and India in space research which for the first time launched an Indian into space in 1984. This was a proud moment for me and many others like me. I was never interested in the scientific aspects of space research, indeed I was bad in science subjects, but this incident was important in creating a certain modernist mythology which stood as a ray of hope in the midst of a poor and superstitious India one did not feel proud of.
A certain amount of third-world consciousness also operated whenever football World Cup took place. We (me and my family and friends) were delighted to see Argentina win in 1978 and were devastated to see Brazil lose in 1982. Similarly the rise of West Indies in cricket was celebrated at home every time they demolished England or Australia but perhaps not when they demolished India. Nonetheless Vivian Richards or Malcolm Marshall was iconic figures in my childhood not just because they were great sportsmen but also because they were black. It felt good when they beat the white cricketers of rich countries like England and Australia.
Meanwhile the domestic space had undergone a significant change as we moved away from the joint-family of Dumdum to the nuclear family of Dhakuria. As I have said earlier, the joint family set up was to a large extent dominated by a set of religious rituals which governed daily life. In Dhakuria my mother still continued to pray to ‘God’ but the rituals became less and less significant, symbolized by the absence of any thakur-ghor. We continued to have the public religious occasions or the barwari pujas – Durga Puja in September-October, Kali Puja in November, Saraswati Puja in January (the dates fixed according to the Bengali calendar) but these barwari pujas were becoming more and social occasions and public festivals rather than religious events. Saraswati Puja was less about praying to the goddess of learning and more about making the first overture towards girls and getting the thrill of organizing a neighbourhood puja, Durga Puja was more about new clothes and going round the city to see the artistry of the various pandals than about praying to goddess Durga, and Kali Puja became an occasion of firecrackers than about worshipping the deity of darkness. Nonetheless it is important to note this process of secularization also had its limits. Eid, the Muslim festival, was never really our festival. We did not nurture any special hatred for the Muslims but there was hardly any opportunity to mix with Bengalis belonging to the Muslim community. Hindus and Muslims did not quite belong to the same space even though the prevalent political ideology was pro-secularism.
In 1981 my parents were relieved when I finally managed to pass the entrance exam of a well-known school in South Calcutta, Patha Bhavan. The school was created by a group of educationists affiliated to the Communist Party of India (CPI) and was heavily influenced by the educational philosophy of Rabindranath Tagore. Between 1981 and 1990, the period I spent in that school, I was regularly indoctrinated in the thought of Tagore through his writings and his songs. The school, like Tagore’s own Santiniketan, encouraged the creative arts which I enjoyed immensely. It also encouraged delving into literature, both Bengali and English, which slowly but surely transformed me into a bibliophile.
The love for books fitted in with my introverted, unsocial and non-athletic personality. I enjoyed reading books by the masters of Bengali literature apart from Tagore and also the literature meant for teenagers (kishore-sahitya) by authors such as Satyajit Ray, Bimal Kar, Premendra Mitra, Sunil Ganguly, Sirsendu Mukhopadhaya, Sastipada Rajguru and others. There were also the slightly more adult detective fiction of Saradindu Bandyopadhaya. There were also the Bengali translations of Jules Verne by Adrish Bardhan. Slowly I also began to read books in English starting with Enid Blyton and slowly moving on Sherlock Holmes and thriller writers such as Alistair McLean.
My love for books slowly took me towards becoming a member of the children’s library at the Ramakrishna Mission Institute of Culture in Golpark area of South Calcutta. Here, in the library of a religious institution, I discovered some of the most wonderful books on modern art, scientific discoveries, and illustrated histories of modern Europe that had a deep impact on me. The books were vividly illustrated in beautiful colour plates and they opened a world of modernist mythology – from the Renaissance to the various revolutions that shaped the nineteenth and twentieth century world.
Reading books was only one part of the story. I also developed a fascination for buying books and writing my name on them. The principal stumbling block in this pursuit was of course money. I used to roam around the second-hand book-stalls near Golpark which used to have a wide range of second hand books – from Encyclopedias to pornographic magazines. They also had an innovative system of renting books – one could get to read a book for a certain number of days by keeping a deposit with the bookseller and getting a refund (with a percentage cut from it) of the deposit on returning the book or magazine.
While I did buy some important books from these stalls such as Carl Sagan’s Cosmos and magazines such as National Geographic, Time and Newsweek, nothing could match the delight of holding a brand new book in one’s hand. The exchange rate vis-à-vis British Pound and US Dollar at that point in time was not as harsh as it is today but still buying a book published by Penguin, for example, was not easy. I did buy a few, especially translations of Albert Camus which were not that expensive as most of the novels by Camus were quite thin. However there was a much more attractive alternative. The book stall that I visited the most during this time, on the otherside of the second-hand stalls of Golpark, a small book stall owned by a certain Tiwari-ji, used to have (quite ironically!) to the right side of the shelf a series of beautifully produced hard bound books coming from Russia which were available at throw away prices. The works of masters such as Tolstoy, Gorky, Dostoyevsky, Gogol and others were available in richly illustrated hardbound editions that even I could buy. It was impossible not to get attracted to these books and of course the writing was mesmerizing to say the least. The love of these Russian books also took me, like many others, towards books by Marx and Engels, Lenin, Stalin and others. The big fat volumes of Capital were still a little too intimidating to buy (and read) but the book that acted as the bridge between me and Marxism was a novel named “How the Steel was Tempered” by a relatively unknown writer named Nikolai Ostrovsky. The book was immensely popular at that point in time in Calcutta and also had a Bengali version named “Ispat” or Steel. Its protagonist, Pavel Korchagin, left a deep impression not only on me but on many young hearts of my age.
It was roughly during this time, between 1983 and 1985, that I committed perhaps the only revolutionary act of my life, something that was a direct product of the Rationalist/Modernist/Marxist ideology that I had imbibed through the range of influences that I have talked above. Every young Brahmin has to undergo a ritual of incorporating the sacred thread – poitey in Bengali. My turn had come around this time. Although I received immense pressure from my greater family, I refused to take it, making it explicit that I do not believe in caste or religion. My mother, especially, was shocked, not so much because she was afraid of what the Gods would think but because she thought that the politics of the greater family would be too difficult to handle. The matter was resolved in truly Hindu style – it was decided that there is another option (there is always another option in Hinduism) – I can take the sacred thread when I would get married. The immediate crisis was therefore averted.
There was a funnier internal revolution, which happened quietly without disturbing the external world. I was, since my childhood, acutely afraid of ghosts. I am not aware of the deeper psychoanalytical aspects of fear but there is no doubt that this had something to do with the frequent nightmares I used to have as a child. Our house in Dhakuria was an old house and somewhat unusual in structure. We used to live on the first floor but there was a winding staircase which up to the roof where there were two other rooms. I used to be acutely afraid of walking up these stairs at night, especially if the lights were not switched on. I can’t recall exactly when, but sometime between 1981 and 1983 I slowly managed to rationalize my fears, managed to convince myself that there cannot be anything called a ghost or spirit. The acid test was to climb up those stairs at night and reach the roof without feeling any fear. This required several efforts, but finally I managed to convince myself that ghosts do not exist and I was able to walk up the stairs. I kept practicing this and finally a day came when that fear disappeared from within me. It is difficult to explain how jubilant and proud I felt within myself after achieving this.
Thus a new self was fashioned between 1981 and 1985. This self was a rational atheist self that believed in the power of reason; that despised God as superstition and dismissed identities based on caste. The mythologies of the Puranas and the epics that I imbibed through stories told by my grandmother were replaced by a new set of mythologies with their new set of superheroes – detectives like Sherlock Holmes, Byomkesh Bakshi and Felu-da; adventurers like Tintin and Shankar of the novel Chander Pahar (Mountain of the Moon) by Bibhutibhusan Bandyopadhaya; Pavel Korchagin of How The Steel Was Tempered; and the legends of the various revolutions of the History books. It is within this larger constellation of rationalist-atheist-modernist mythology that Marxism fitted in within my identity.
III
One of the reasons why the ideology of Marxism came to me via books and not through working class struggle was that we did not belong to that section of the society who had to get involved in politics for the sake of day-to-day survival. We were ordinary middle class but my father worked in a Public Sector Company of the Central Government where he had a permanent job and hence it was not necessary for him to indulge in party politics on an everyday basis. My mother was a school teacher in a private school and both me and my elder brother were in private schools. Thus our daily life did not require us to join any trade union or retain good contacts with powerful people of the political parties. The party was however not too far away. Because of my interest in visual arts as a child I used to be fascinated by the amazing dexterity with which the party workers of CPI-M used to write their election campaign slogans on the walls. The walls of the neighbourhood were first taken over for party slogans and graffiti before the elections. Firstly, one group of junior artists would come a white-wash the portion of the wall and write “All wall CPI-M” with a future date attached to it, thereby implying that the wall belonged to the party till then. Then the senior artists came and in beautiful calligraphy wrote slogans such as “markin smrajyobad nipat jaak” (Down with US imperialism) and “bamfront sorkar ke bipul bhotey joyi korun” (Vote Left Front to victory) and invariably there was a hammer and sickle next to the slogan painted in bold.
The focus of the party activities in our neighbourhood was a slum called Gobardanga Basti. When the dadas belonging to the Congress Party used to go to the slums they used to behave like zamindars and refer to the people of the slums in the derogatory “tui” mode – “ai son kalke bhot ditey jaabi” (hey you, go to vote tomorrow). Left Front on the other hand launched a serious slum improvement programme. Not that the slum was radically transformed but electricity and drinking water was ensured. What was most important was that the slum dwellers found a new sense of dignity vis-à-vis the middle-class babus of the neighbourhood, a phenomenon that was observed by G.K Lieten in rural West Bengal as well. It was no more possible for middle-class babus to talk to them in an undignified manner. This new found sense of dignity was expressed by the slum dwellers in a rather innovative manner. As I have said earlier, there were three different pujas in the neighbourhood – the Saraswati Puja (mainly organized by teenagers), the Durga Puja (organized by the middle-class dominated Club of the neighbourhood) and two Kali Pujas – one by the middle-class youth and the other by the slum dwellers. The slum dwellers never participated in the Durga Puja as it was considered to be a puja of the babus. Kali was on the other hand closer to the subaltern sensibility of the slum dwellers and also a symbol of power. What was most striking however was the difference in the music that was played in the two pujas. The middle-class youths were heavily into Bollywood music at that point in time and music of the latest blockbuster from Bollywood used to be played out loudly in their pandals. On the other hand the slum dwellers made it a point to play only Shyamasangeet, a form of Bengali devotional music exclusively for goddess Kali. Needless to say there was a cultural statement in this politics of the music – the slum dwellers tried to show that they were more cultured than the middle-class babus of the neighbourhood although they were poorer.
My parents never became radical communists but they taught us to treat labourers with respect. This got reflected in the way we addressed domestic servants and other members of the working class who visited our household. For example, we would call our housemaid who was older than us by the same suffix as we would call any other female older than us – Sanaka-di. Similarly an electrician used come every now and then for various kind of repair work and he used to call my father with the suffix “da” instead of the more traditional “babu” and we used to address him as “Sidhyeswar-da” just as we would call any elderly person in our class. They were not made to feel that they belonged to lower class and caste in the language in which they were talked to. I was in fact quite fond of Sidhyeswar-da who was a regular party member. It was he who introduced CPI-M’s party newspaper Ganashakti to my father who became a subscriber. It was initially a four-page weekly and later on became a daily. It was party policy that every member, and Sidhyswar-da was one of them, had to sell a certain number of papers every month. Hence he approached my father. Ganashakti also followed an innovative strategy of pasting the newspaper in a display board in a prominent place where people would be able to read it.
In my mental register another name slowly came to be ingrained as I was growing up – party office. This was technically speaking the office of the local committee of CPI-M. I was not directly associated with it but the party office was an important landmark by 1984-85. So for example while giving directions to someone it was quite common to say – “walk straight, you will see the party office and then…” More than any individual, CPI-M was represented by the party office or LC.
It is somewhat embarrassing for me to admit it, but the truth needs to be told, at this stage I had no knowledge of what is land reform and what is panchayati raj – the two pillars of Left Front’s success in West Bengal after coming to power. Our own experience as city dwellers was of prolonged power-cuts. The word “government” somehow did not become a respectable one and we stoically coped with power cuts (popularly known as “loadshedding”) every evening, especially during the summer months. Left Front continued to be supported in our family more because the party was part of our identity rather than because of its performance in urban areas. There was endemic violence in our neighbourhood also between the criminal elements of the two slums on two sides of our neighbourhood which was brought under control after much effort by the police. The experience of riding in a public bus was also not pleasurable to say the least. The buses tended to be extremely overcrowded and getting a toe hold on the stairs of the bus used to require lot of skill. But for teenagers like me getting into a “running bus” i.e. while the bus was on the move was a source of masculine pride.
Although it is true that the Left Front had secured a strong position during this time and I was coming under various types of Marxist influences it would be a mistake not to note an important social transformation that was taking place in middle-class society during the eighties. Among my schoolmates there was already a trend that became more and more pronounced as years went by – not to be interested in politics or political ideology at all and concentrate solely on studies and career building. To be interested in such matters was often ridiculed as “aantlami” a derogatory term for intellectual activity. Times had changed from the late sixties and early seventies. Perhaps because of the experience of the brutal repression of the Naxalite movement in which many bright students lost their lives, parents in middle-class Bengal were more and more becoming conservative and rigidly pushing their children like race horses into a clearly defined career path – pass Madhyamik (class ten level) with highest possible scores, join “Science” stream in Higher Secondary and then appear for “Joint”and “IIT” i.e. entrance level tests for medical and engineering streams. That defined success. Most bright students’ typical day was spent coping with this pressure, and hence there was very little time for other things. To be interested in politics was an exception rather than the rule.
Before proceeding further, it may be useful to put the time I am talking about in terms of the standard, well-accepted historical narrative of West Bengal. The period 1967-77 was a period of political turmoil, including the violent Naxalite movement and the Bangladesh liberation war which led to massive influx of refugees from across the border. Rural poverty was very high. West Bengal was however still a leader in industrial production in India. The Zamindari system was abolished but agriculture and agrarian relations were yet to be modernized. Calcutta was the most important city, indeed the only major city of the state which had to cope with an enormous population pressure because of the influx of the refugees from across the border such as my own family. In course of the eighties rural West Bengal saw a three-fold transformation and was the golden period of Left Front in rural West Bengal. The first was the land reform, the second was panchayati raj and the third was the green revolution which was not necessarily the credit of the Left Front. There is a debate among scholars as to whether land reform and panchayati raj led to greater productivity but there is no doubt that because of these three transformations put together rural poverty was quite dramatically reduced though not eliminated. However on the other hand West Bengal began to witness a steady decline in industrial production. The city was clearly less of a priority for the Left Front which explains why we had to cope with power cuts and crowded buses. Politically this was the time when Congress began to decline and CPI-M gradually strengthened its party machinery in both urban and rural areas. Between 1977 and 1985 Left Front was able to establish itself firmly as the hegemon in West Bengal. The Naxalites had become politically insignificant and divided into innumerable factions. The division between the democratic left and the revolutionary left was cast in stone and they saw each other as enemies rather than as comrades.
IV
In 1982, just before the Asian Games in Delhi, we got our first television set at home. During those days it was unusual for every middle-class household to have a television set although it was becoming more and more popular and accessible financially. Colour sets were way beyond average middle-class reach but Black& White sets were good enough for us. Although these were pre-satellite television days, and information was strictly controlled by Delhi it nonetheless opened up a new horizon in terms of news, information and entertainment. We saw some outstanding films, television serials and sports events. In 1985 we got the information that a certain Mikhail Gorbachev has become the General Secretary of the Communist Party of Soviet Union. From various sources, including the television, I could gather that here was a man who was trying to do something different, trying to rectify the ills of Soviet Union and was certainly as glamorous as Ronald Reagan, the US President. Terms such as glastnost and perestroika became familiar to us. The festival of India in Moscow and Gorbachev’s visit to India was widely covered in the television and we admired the suave charm of the man. Soviet leaders were usually grim but here was a man who was smiling. At the 1988 Olympics ( by then we had a colour TV) Soviet Union won 132 medals (55 Gold, 31 Silver and 46 Bronze), East Germany won 102 medals (37 Gold, 35 Silver, 30 Bronze) and USA came third with only 94 medals (36 Gold, 31 Silver, 27 Bronze). This was again a thumping victory. It may seem strange today but at that point in time the news of the problems of the American economy was more in the air than something going terribly wrong in Soviet Union. USA was having a trillion dollar national debt and a monthly $15 billion deficit. On 19 October 1987, “Black Monday” it was called, US Stock Market crashed. Dow Jones went down by 508 points in one day. Half a trillion US Dollar worth of wealth was lost. This was the biggest crisis of the US economy since 1929. By the end of the year more than 48,000 Americans were found to be suffering from a new incurable disease called AIDS. On 4 January, 1988 Time Magazine declared its Man of the Year – Mikhail Gorbachev. The same issue described 1987 as “the roughest year” for USA.
Amidst all these (what then looked like) positive aspects and within overall sense of assurance of a modernist Marxist ideology, there were a few minor cracks in my belief system. From 1986-87, I had developed a habit of buying second-hand copies of Time and Newsweek from the second-hand bookshops in the Golpark area, something that I have briefly mentioned before. It may be mentioned here again that there was no internet at that point of time and there was no scope of watching international television channels. In this information starved period the news magazines were the only source of serious journalistic reports. One of the attractions was of course the brilliant photographs but the detailed news reports on the Eastern Block that were coming during this time were raising a few doubts. I was not able to dismiss them as bourgeois propaganda.
Then came the first big shock. I was eighteen years old. I was shocked by what happened at the Tiananmen Square in China. My youngest uncle, who was in his late twenties, was the only member of my family who was an active member of CPI-M for some time. In fact the copy of Communist Manifesto that I inherited was presented by him to my mother on her birthday in 1975. Chotka, as I used to call him (meaning the youngest uncle) was quite close to me. We shared a common anti-religious attitude and a love for literature. I remember that after the Tiananmen Massacre I had a huge quarrel with him. He agreed that the event was tragic but continued to argue that for the sake of the revolution this had to be done, there was no other way. I was not convinced but remained in a state of confusion.
A few months later came the second big shock – the Berlin Wall fell in 1989. It was difficult to make sense of what was going on. But the images of youths breaking the wall and moving from East to West Germany were difficult to absorb. There was also a feeling that more was in store. But what was about to happen was beyond anybody’s wildest imagination.
It will be wrong, however, to project the years 1988, 89, and 90 only as years of internal political crisis. By middle of 1988 my Madhyamik examination was over and I was now relieved that I could only study the social science subjects. These years were also the years of approaching adulthood – bunking school, going on vacation with friends and without my parents, tasting alcohol, and watching movies only meant for adults. In practical terms life in fact became better as we shifted to an upper middle class locality of South Calcutta called Golf Green as my father got a quarter there. The horrible days of power cuts were also a thing of the past. The locality was planned and unusually for Calcutta, had considerable amount of greenery. My academic situation also looked bright for the first time in life as I did surprisingly well in the Higher Secondary Examination in 1990 and even managed to pass the entrance examination of Presidency College, which was at that point in time one of the best undergraduate colleges in India. My parents at last had something to feel proud of me. Thus ironically while my ideological world was in turmoil the practical side of life was indeed looking good.
Walking in through the gates of Presidency College as a student was not just a matter of entering into one of the finest colleges in India but entering into a mythological space that went back to the Bengal Renaissance. It was not simply a matter of improving one’s career prospects but also finding one’s space in the imaginary space of Modern India. Theoretically at least, only merit was important, any body who could pay INR 17/- per month could study, and the space was open to men and women irrespective of caste or religion. Like all imaginary spaces, the reality was somewhat different, although that did not reduce the significance of the institution as a modernizing space. The Geology department, for example, was open only to male students and the hostel for male students was open only to Hindus. Similarly while the College was open to students from all backgrounds our school education system was such that the overwhelming majority of the students were from Calcutta rather than the districts, from private rather than government schools, overwhelmingly upper caste Hindu and hardly ever belonging to the poorer sections of the society. I can recall only a few Muslim students and cannot recall a single student from Scheduled Tribe background. Having said this, it must be admitted that Presidency College represented one of the finest examples in the country of liberal humanities tradition – where debate was encouraged and thoughts were not censored and both male and female students enjoyed a space of gender equality.
Looking back, I think I was fortunate to get some outstanding teachers precisely at a point of time when I had reached a point of intellectual and political confusion. Doing my undergraduate course in History was of course about trying to get the coveted “first class” in order to improve my career prospects, but it was a lot more than that. The “History” that we read in school was rather boring and was almost all about rote learning rather than indulgence in debates. Thanks to my teachers, History now became more about interpretations by various Historians rather than a bland chronology of facts. While Marxism outside the class room was facing its greatest challenge ever, inside the class room it was almost impossible to deny the Marxist Historians their supremacy. The works of D. D. Kosambi and Romila Thapar in Ancient Indian History, that of Irfan Habib in Medieval Indian History, that of Sumit Sarkar in case of Modern Indian History, Eric Hobsbawm, Georges Lefebvre and Albert Soboul in case of European History to name just a few, had a powerful impact on me and filled me with great pride. At the same time though, we were introduced to some of the challenges that Marxist interpretations were beginning to face. Irfan Habib was being challenged by Historians like Muzaffar Alam, the Marxist-Nationalist interpretation of colonialism and Indian freedom struggle was being challenged by the followers of Lewis Namier in Cambridge, popularly known as the Cambridge School, interpretations of the French Revolution were being challenged by Historians like Simon Schama and a new radical school of Indian Historiography had emerged spearheaded by Ranajit Guha known as the Subalterns. Allan Bullock had written a book that sought to show Hitler and Stalin as two sides of the same coin – an interpretation that infuriated our teacher of European History, Subhash Ranjan Chakrabarty. Francis Fukuyama’s End of History, in which he predicted that the battle between ideologies has come to an end with the fall of the Soviet Union, was in circulation. Older anti-Marxist books such as The Open Society and its Enemies also had made a revival. The works of Annales School of writing History was also much discussed, especially Ferdinand Braudel and March Bloch. Hence although Marxist Historians continued to dominate there were also some major challenges to their perspectives. One may here note that while I came to know of certain alternative perspectives to the Marxist way of looking at the past, I was not as yet aware of the ideas associated with Foucault or post-modernism or post-structuralism. That came a little later, during my MA days.
Outside the class-room, there was College Street. College Street has a special place in Bengali middle-class society for its book shops, especially the second hand book shops. It was here that I found many of the Soviet publications of Marx, Engels and Lenin which were now beginning to disappear. On 1/10/91, I managed to buy a Soviet edition of Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. It was a beautifully produced hard bound book in three volumes. However soon it became clear to me that I do not have the intellectual capacity to actually understand the text. The first volume of Capital alone, more than 700 hundred pages of dense text, was intimidating to say the least. So I preferred to rely on explanations offered by two highly readable books, Robert L. Heilbroner’s The Worldly Philosophers: The Lives, Times and Ideas of Great Economic Thinkers and T.Z. Lavine’s From Socrates to Sartre – The Philosophic Quest. A series called the Fontana Modern Masters had also started to appear in the bookstores and that contained a masterly short introduction on Marx by David McLellan. I found these three books extremely useful in getting a reasonably good understanding of the basic ideas of Marx. The way Heilbroner for example explained the logic of Capital in about 40 odd pages was quite astonishing. The title of the chapter on Marx also left a deep impression on me, “The Inexorable System of Karl Marx”. In the outside world however Soviet Union was inexorably falling apart. On December 25, 1991 the red flag was lowered for the last time and the next day Soviet Union was formally dissolved. It was ironic that precisely at the point of time when the Soviet Union was crumbling and Marx was going out of fashion that I managed to acquire my first understanding of the basic principles of Marxism. In fact, as I was buying the three volumes of Capital, one of the persons at the store said, “niye jaan ekhon, er por aar paben na” (take them now, soon they would be unavailable) hinting at the stoppage of production and supply of such books from Soviet Union.
Apart from the class room and the College Street the third important space was the Canteen and the Student Union room. By 1991 this space had begun to see an important transformation. But to understand this transformation one must first understand that by 1990, i.e. after 13 years in power, CPI-M had established an iron-grip on the student unions of the state through its student wing Student Federation of India or SFI. It was not uncommon to follow intimidating tactics and win without any contest. There were very few student unions which were not in the control of SFI. What was however most frustrating was the fact that student unions, even when they were not controlled by SFI were invariably controlled from outside by some political parties or the other and the student unions became agents of the political interests of these political parties rather than the reflection of the ideas, dreams and interests of the students themselves. It is in this context that a loose, ideologically somewhat confused but united in its opposition to party control, political outfit named Independent Consolidation (IC) came to power in 1991 in the Presidency College Student Union.
IC kept its door open to ideas coming from all sides, Marxist or otherwise. It attracted students who were anti-SFI or against outside domination of the union but who belonged to various political beliefs. It is fair to say that what IC was able to introduce was not any certain ideological agenda but actually a certain amount of healthy confusion. Organizationally IC was a loose formation and not a strict cadre based organisation with a definite hierarchy. In terms of the central theme of the chapter – how Marxism entered me – it can said that IC stood for a brief moment when in the midst of a serious intellectual turmoil there was an attempt to do something different, to introduce the scope for thinking outside the strict messages sent by party leaders from above. However while I shared the anti-SFI sentiment within IC, it was also somewhat frustrating for me to see that IC or the student union for that matter never really took any constructive step towards improving the College. Organizing the annual fest was more important than working towards improving the library.
In 1992 I sat for my Part I examination and missed the coveted “first class” by less than one percent. It was a sad moment. However a bigger tragedy was on the cards. Since middle of 1980s India was witnessing a revival of Hindu right wing forces around the issue of the Ram Temple at Ayodya. The “Sangh Parivar” combined fierce nationalism with anti-Islamic statements and was led by L.K. Advani. On December 6, 1992, roughly one year after the fall of the Soviet Union, a violent mob of “Kar Sevaks” brought down the Babri Masjid, an event that shocked the nation.
The event was followed by riots all over India, claiming around 2000 lives. Calcutta was not spared and our college remained closed for a few days. When we could return to College after a few days a procession was organised by the Student Union in which many of the teachers also participated. We went round the nearby neighbourhoods asking for peace. I am not sure whether the poor people living around the college were convinced by what the students and teachers of an elite institution were saying. It was perhaps less for them and more for us that we took the procession. Our own belief system was under attack and it is our anxiety that took us to the street to make the symbolic march. A few students were also beginning to talk in Hindu right perspective and intense debates in the Canteen were common. Academic questions such as the religious policy of Akbar no more remained a strictly academic issue. Although the Hindu Right was politically weak in West Bengal and almost insignificant in terms of numbers within the college, yet they had an impact in the sense that it became important to refute their claims. In some cases such as their claim regarding destruction of Hindu temples by Muslim rulers was difficult to deny. These ideas never acquired in the world around me a hegemonic position but nonetheless it did throw a challenge to secular-rationalist self that I had developed as a teenager.
Meanwhile terms such as ‘liberalisation’, ‘globalisation’, ‘market economy’ and ‘MNC’ were gaining currency. The Nehruvian world was beginning to be considered outdated. Congress Government under Narsimha Rao and Manmohan Singh were beginning to integrate the Indian economy with the world economy and Multi National Companies began to find their way into India. Students in our college started to think about CAT exam and getting into management institutions which were passports to unbelievable salaries in MNCs. The buzz was in the air – there is no alternative to capitalism and the question was whether India can join the club or not. All this was happening while USA under George Bush (Senior) had unleashed, in the name of democracy, an imperialist war in the Gulf.
For me, like many others, the world had thus changed forever, a change that was difficult to come to terms with. There was no jolt to me in my family life which continued its middle-class existence. But at a political and intellectual level the events of 1988-1992 destroyed something deep inside. The belief system that was created within me between 1979 and 1985 now lay in shambles. The security of a rationalist-Marxist world-view was beginning to fall apart but for me there was no alternative path to pursue either. It was time for chaos and confusion. As I completed my graduation in 1993 I remained sympathetic to Marxism but did not have any particular political party that I could support. I had to accept the brutalities of Soviet Union especially under Stalin and post-Tiananmen China was not a source of inspiration either. In all probability the reason why many in my generation felt attracted toward the songs of Suman Chattopadhyay (later Kabir Suman) during this time was precisely the fact that he reflected this mood – against the conservatism of CPI-M but not a Naxalite either, fiercely anti-establishment and somewhere maintaining the utopian dream of a better world. This was very different from the songs of an earlier generation such as the ones associated with IPTA for example, that were directly related to mobilization by the Communist Party.
V
Let me pause the narrative here and ask how did class, caste and linguistic identity inform my attraction towards Marxism? Looking back I think there was something middle-class and something Bengali about my road to Marxism. It was middle-class in the sense that it was not the experience of working class struggles that took me to Marxism. Indeed at this stage of life I was far removed from any kind of even moderate activism. It was primarily through family influences and through books that I became interested in Marxism. Yet it would be simplistic to see my social position as that of the bhadralok elite. An important element of the Marxist identity that some of my family members acquired was in fact in opposition to the traditional bhadralok elite of Calcutta, who were usually supporters of the Congress Party. There was also the distinction between the ‘Ghoti’ (the original inhabitants of the city) and the ‘Bangal’ (those who had come from East Bengal) and becoming Marxist was a way of asserting one’s ‘progressive’ identity vis-à-vis the traditional inhabitants of the city.
It was also peculiarly a Bengali middle-class process because of the peculiar situation of the partition of Bengal my family was not able to enjoy the benefits of being upper-caste and my father had to build his life from scratch rather than starting from a position of caste advantage. Caste also did not play any role in the process of growing up except during the occasion when I was under pressure to adopt the sacred thread. What mattered for social standing, in the absence of serious wealth, was academic performance and culture rather than the caste status. Thus knowing Tagore or Marx was an important cultural capital which was a source of pride in the absence of the pride that perhaps can come from being wealthy. By the time I was a teen-ager caste had ceased to be a source of pride and privilege in the world around me. What mattered was not so much caste or ancestral wealth but which school or college I was in and how I was performing in the school exams and whether I knew about Satyajit Ray and Fyodor Dostoyevsky or not. This was thus a peculiarly Bengali middle-class context rather than an upper-caste bhadralok context or a rich bourgeois context.
In another crucial sense my road to Marxism was peculiarly Bengali but not necessarily middle-class. Most Bengalis are brought up reading Bengali writers/thinkers and their English/European/American counterparts. Hindi or other Indian languages and their intellectuals are hardly ever given any respect. Hence names like Ram Manohar Lohia or Jay Prakash Narain never figured in the intellectual space that I belonged to even though they were important socialist intellectuals. We never read authors who wrote in Hindi and hardly knew anything about them. The only exception was Hindi movies but even when such movies were enjoyable they never enjoyed cultural status. Thus I (and other students of Presidency College) aspired to read Althusser or Perry Anderson but not Lohia or JP. Those names were simply not sexy and not in circulation in the intellectual space of my school and college days. Among other important Marxist/socialist thinkers EMS Namboodiripad’s name was known to me but once again he didn’t have the glamour of someone like Antonio Gramsci. This reluctance to read a thinker born in India outside Bengal was definitely a colonial legacy; one that ever so subtly drew the boundaries of my intellectual landscape.
VI
Let me return to the narrative once more. How exactly the fall of the Soviet Union had an impact on the Left in India is probably research topic yet to be taken up. What is quite clear is that by 1996, West Bengal under Jyoti Basu and Kerala under EMS Namboodiripad were following two different trajectories. A few years before he passed away EMS led what is definitely the finest achievement of the democratic left in India – the people’s plan movement. Jyoti Basu on the other hand, although pioneering Panchayati Raj in India in 1978, this time failed to move ahead with the same dedication and revolutionary spirit that EMS showed. The left in Bengal was not sure which way to go and turned conservative. The Bengali intellectuals of the Left Front failed to give any direction to the party in its hour of intellectual crisis.
In 1996 I was not aware of the people’s plan of Kerala, but we got a taste of CPIM’s conservativeness in different ways. This conservative attitude and suspicion for change was reflected in CPI-M’s approach to decentralisation which was done in a halfhearted manner, in case of computerization which was considered bad, but also in certain bizarre ways. For example, one of the defining incidents in our college days (exact date I cannot remember) was an incident which took place in Asutosh College when a bhadralok Marxist principal told a female student to come to college wearing Sari and not Salwar-Kameez. This incident was not a stand-alone case. There were many cases of “dadas” and “didis” of the party directing the younger comrades as to how they should lead their love life, whether they should smoke a cigarette or not and what kind of clothes they should wear.
Along with this mood of conservatism there was also a strong sentiment of deprivation by Central Government, almost as if rest of India was conspiring against Bengal. Of course, this sentiment was not new, even Bidhan Chandra Roy had expressed this in the 1960s. However in Bengal of the 1990s this became a very strong sentiment. Left Front began to argue that it was the Centre which was preventing Bengal from industrializing. The sentiment of India conspiring against Bengal crystallized around the Bengal most popular icon between mid-1990s to middle of the first decade of the twenty first century – Sourav Ganguly. Every time Ganguly was dropped or his captaincy was taken away, the sentiment of conspiracy against Bengal was dramatically displayed. While there was a grain of truth in this it was also reflective of a growing sense of Bengal falling behind rest of India.
Between 1993 and 1996, as a student of the Modern History Department of Calcutta University, a bastion of Left power in Bengal, I got a taste of this conservative mood. We had some very fine teachers, indeed some were outstanding scholars, but there was a stiff resistance even among the finest historians to the new ideas that were beginning to have a big impact on the intellectual world of Bengal and names such as Michel Foucault or Jacques Derrida or Edward Said or terms such as post-modernism and post-colonialism were looked upon with a certain degree of suspicion and contempt. There were a few scholars who were enthusiastic and encouraged us to explore, but they were in the minority. Those who controlled the department were united in their contempt for such ideas. This does not however mean that they were all champions of historical materialism and producing ground breaking works on Marxism. In terms of their politics they varied, but in terms of attitude toward new ideas they were united in their conservatism. As a result, while we learnt a lot of economic history of Mughal and colonial India but were kept in the dark regarding challenges to conventional history writing that was coming from scholars such as Hayden White or the new trajectories that Subaltern Studies was taking after the interventions of Edward Said and Gayatri Spivak. They new thoughts were not critically examined, they were simply considered blasphemous.
Apart from content of the syllabus the pedagogy practice also remained conservative – class room lectures followed by examinations at the end of the course, not different from the way it was thirty years before. While leftist Jawaharlal Nehru University was encouraging students to do book reviews and make presentations of their tutorials, Calcutta University preferred to stick to age-old ways. The conservatism was also reflected in the journal brought out by the Department – Calcutta Historical Journal. It was a good journal, but only a certain kind of essays which followed a conservative methodological line was published.
Along with the mood of conservatism I was a witness to the effect of a kind of populism that was peculiar to the Bengal Left. This populism was not seen in the Soviet Union or in JNU and hence cannot be attributed to the Left in general. Our class consisted of more than one hundred students. For the overwhelming majority of them the MA from Calcutta University was required to improve their prospects in the marriage market rather than pursuit of knowledge. Thus every other day I saw somebody or the other turning red – not the red of the red flag but the red of the sindur, the Hindu sign of married women. The very large number of students in the MA class also had a negative impact on the teaching-learning process as teachers had to give notes rather than discuss books or articles. Therefore much of the quality discussion took place either for elected papers (mine was Economic History) where the number of students was small or during informal discussions with the teachers.
The urge to control, as I have mentioned earlier, was prevalent in the Department as well. Power was in the hands of a small number of upper caste men, who were not necessarily Marxist. Hence it would be a mistake to see them as moles of the Party operating on its behalf. Rather they were able to form a close alliance with the Party, remain in its good books, and run the show. Sensible students preferred to remain in their good books as otherwise their chance of getting a job in a decent college or in the University itself would have been affected. To remain in the good books it did not matter whether one was Marxist or not, but it was important not be quoting Foucault or trying to be curious about post-colonialism. In other words, it was important to be conservative and submissive.
I managed to get my MA degree in 1996. It was the year in which Namboodiripad in Kerala launched the people’s plan. It was also the year in which Left Front in West Bengal initiated Operation Sunshine. Because of the industrial decline of West Bengal, and the state Government’s failure to build Public Sector Units of its own, the informal sector of the economy had grown at the expense of the formal sector and one of the ways in which the unemployed found a source of livelihood was by retailing goods in the streets and the pavements of Calcutta. When CPI-M was out of power it was a friend of these hawkers, but in 1996 the Left Government demolished the stalls created by the hawkers to sell their goods. It is true that illegal occupation of the pavements had become a serious problem in places like Gariahat which I used to pass through quite often. There was a certain amount of logic in trying to reduce their concentration. However this rationalization could have been done through participatory discussions and by carefully examining the cases of those who were truly in need of livelihood solutions. But the Government chose to demolish the stalls arrogantly. Left Front Government was keen to show private investors a glossy urbanscape following the initiation of the new industrial policy in 1994. The move however backfired. Thirty-two hawker unions came together outside the banner of CITU (the trade union close to CPIM) and formed the Hawker Sangram Committee and successfully resisted the onslaught against the hawkers.
VII
By the middle of the nineties, when Operation Sunshine took place, in a complex way Bengal was in a state of crisis. Perhaps ‘crisis’ is a melodramatic term and indeed it perhaps does not quite explain the situation. It may be better to think in terms of a slow but nagging disease that does not send you to the ICU but nonetheless does not make you feel healthy either. A sense of decline, a sense of things not quite the way it should be became common. Marx was not overthrown as in Soviet Union and Eastern Europe but Marxism was reduced to a set of well-orchestrated rituals such as holding massive rallies at the Brigade parade ground which showed the organizational capacity of CPI-M rather than popular faith in Marx. In fact this ritualisation of the romantic word “michil” was well-captured in a joke that had become quite popular. It is difficult to explain this joke in English, much of the flavour is indeed lost in translation, but nonetheless it is as follows. Jyoti Basu received a letter from Gorbachev saying that he would like to visit Bengal where he has heard that Marxism is still very popular. Basu became slightly worried and called his able lieutenant Subhash Chakrabarty, who was famous for organizing massive rallies. Subhash touched Jyoti Babu’s feet and said there will be no problem when Gorbachev comes. So when Gorbachev came he saw a sea of humanity at the Brigade Parade Ground. He was of course impressed but then he was also curious and therefore he decided to go down from the dais and talk to the people. So he went down and asked via an interpreter “what has brought you here?” He was astounded when he heard the people reply “Marxbaad” (Marxism). He saluted Jyoti Basu and left. After he left, Basu called Subhash and asked, “Subhash what happened? All the people said that they came here for Marxism! How did you manufacture that?” Subhash explained with a smile that actually they were all promised Rice and Fish, i.e. “Maach-bhaat” which Gorbachev heard as “Marxbaad”. Basu shook Subhash’s hand and blessed him.
The second element of ritualisation was something that Bengal became famous for – bandh. “Hartaal” was once upon a time a revolutionary weapon and it took great courage to implement one especially against the British Raj. Now it became a perfect excuse for a long week-end. So a bandh would be called invariably either on a Monday or a Friday so that it would become a grand success as all office goers would volunteer to take leave from office and then it would be proudly claimed “Bandh” has been fully successful and the people of the state have fully supported it.
Along with this Bengal suffered from a serious crisis of icons. Uttam Kumar passed away in the 80s and Bengali cinema, once a source of pride, declined in technical quality and content. Satyajit Ray passed away in 1992. Noted playwright and actor Utpal Dutt passed away in 1993. Another legendary theatre personality Sambhu Mitra passed away in 1997. Mrinal Sen was alive but his films had taken an inward, introspective turn exploring themes like loneliness and loss of meaning in life. This was a far cry from his earlier avant-garde revolutionary films. In fact the last few films of Ray, although poor in technical quality, harped on a sense of decline in values and rottenness in society.
Two extremely popular novels published during the 90s captured this slow disease like situation in two different ways. Sunil Gangopadhyay’s Prothom Alo (First Light) took his readers back to the days of the Bengal Renaissance precisely at a point in time when that sense of Bengal’s superiority was under threat. The second was the radical novel of Nabarun Bhattacharyya, Herbert, which was a cult novel of sorts for me and my friends. Herbert is a novel that is difficult to summarise as the charm of the novel was as much in the prose as it was in the plot. The protagonist, Herbert, was a social loser and an outsider, who becomes a fortuneteller and starts a business of invoking the ghosts. He is then attacked by rationalists, of the sorts that would be associated with the left movement, and he is forced to commit suicide. But as the bed with his body is pushed into the pyre there is a huge explosion as once upon a time some bombs made by revolutionaries were kept hidden inside that bed. The bizarre ultimately triumphed over the rational. Bhattacharyya followed up Herbert with a set of bizarre creatures called Fyataru, who attacks different cherished aspects of Bengali life, including the Book Fare. Bhattacharya’s anarchist characters were symptomatic of a time which was trying to break free from a sense of moribund staleness, when Brigade Parade Ground had become a joke, hartal had become ritualized and a certain kind Bengali Marxism had become hegemonised. An important element of Nabarun-da’s personality was his khisti (use of fowl language) that sought to shock the sensibilities of the Bengali bhadralok parlance. Yet he was also symptomatic of his time in the sense that his work was not able to project any road ahead or conjure new dreams.
In this situation of a society trying to find its way, Bengal’s pride was saved firstly by the Nobel Prize for Amartya Sen and even more importantly by the rise of Sourav Ganguly as a star cricketer. While Sen’s ideas had very little impact on Government of West Bengal, his Nobel Prize once again gave Bengal the opportunity to bask in the glory of Bengal’s intellectual greatness vis-à-vis rest of India. But it was the “dadagiri” of Sourav Ganguly in the cricket field that captured the imagination of Bengalis cutting across all sections of the society. It is difficult to prove this point but in this celebration “dadagiri” one can perhaps find a society desperately trying to find its source of pride, precisely at a point in time when land reform, panchayati raj and the red flag were all beginning to look like old newspaper as Bangalore was emerging as the IT hub and Bombay was already the commercial capital of India.
VIII
During the early years of the nineties while books on Marxism published in the Soviet Union were slowly disappearing from the bookstalls, there was revolution in our domestic space in the form of satellite television. In one sense it was welcomed by all as we were tired of state controlled television, especially news. I remember the first time I went to the local cable operator while we were staying at Golf Green in southern Calcutta to find out about this new technological innovation. The malik was probably some kind of a local mastaan who had added the cable business to his portfolio of semi-legal business operations and he had large sized television in his office room. He showed me the various channels that one could see – BBC, CNN, various STAR channels, so on and so forth. All this was available in exchange of a paltry sum of money. Thus a grey coloured cable line entered our flat and plugged into the television set.
Soon there was an avalanche of American soaps, news and sports on the screen. CNN started to telecast the Gulf War live and transformed war into an exciting package of information. Television soaps like Santa Barbara and The Bold and the Beautiful as well as non-fiction programmes such as Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous began to display the fantastic consumerism of the super rich in America, subtly pushing the ideological position that this is what life is all about – get rich, make money, have fun. The two soaps mentioned above revolved around the sexual lives of rich men and women who were constantly falling in love with each other, so much so that it became difficult after a point to keep track of who’s going around with whom. Star Movies began to dish out Hollywood films everyday, round the clock. Baywatch, a serial on coastguards in an American coastal city, became a huge hit, not because of the storyline but because of glamorous female actors in swimsuits. We were also suddenly flooded with sports programmes on Golf and motor racing, neither of which was very popular sports earlier in this part of the world. Non-fiction programmes such Donahue and Oprah Winfrey Show brought in problems of American household straight inside the living rooms of Calcutta. MTV started to blast American pop music into our ear drums.
This was accompanied by the return of Coca Cola and the coming of Pepsi. In my childhood, Coca Cola was banned in India by the Government and this allowed Indian companies to produce soft drinks. The most popular was a brand called Thums Up which produced by a company called Parle. As the globalization wave started Coca Cola was allowed to re-enter and the multinational giant immediately bought Parle, including its brands of soft drinks. Thums Up was retained as a brand but it became a Coca Cola product. Coca Cola and Pepsi immediately launched into a marketing war through television ads and through sponsorship of cricket, especially one-day cricket. Street side shops were flooded with the logos of the respective brands. Bollywood actors were brought in to promote the brands. Soon one could hardly get any soft drink except brands owned by these two giants. Pepsi offered to the new generation in urban India a new ideological mantra – Ye Dil Mange More (This heart wants more). Marxist Calcutta was no exception. The ruling left did not show any special interest in opposing the entry of the multinational giants. A quiet victim was a brand of ice-cream soda called Bijoligrill, which I particularly liked.
A crucial ingredient of this cultural/ideological invasion of American capitalism was a certain amount of indigenization of the brands. MTV, Coca Cola and Pepsi successfully acquired a national look, changed their medium of communication to ‘Hinglish’ – mixture of Hindi and English that is popular among north Indian youth – and made Indian film stars and sport stars their brand ambassadors. Thus Coca Cola’s most famous slogan showed Indian actor Amir Khan saying “Thanda Matlaab -Coca Cola” (If it is chilled then its Coca Cola). MTV also slowly moved from pure English music videos to a mixture of Hindi and English videos with the DJs talking in a mixture of Hindi and English. Star TV in the meantime opened a Hindi channel and its most famous show was “Kaun Banega Karorpati?” hosted by Amitabh Bachchan. This was a quiz show based on “’Who wants to be millionaire?” which originated in the UK but later on had a hugely successful US version. The programme pumped in the ideological position that you should be rich and here’s your chance of becoming one to middle-class India. This show also transformed the meaning of a quiz show to us; previously the national television used to have highly popular quiz show among college students which was primarily about knowledge, KBK transformed into a ‘show’ which was primarily about becoming rich.
Two other important social phenomena were happening around me from 1990 onwards. The first was the search for the US based groom for marriage, popularly known as the NRI groom. In the marriage market, Bengali grooms settled in the US and earning in Dollars became the most sought after jamais. Getting one’s daughter married to a groom in the US and thereby occasionally visiting the US became a status symbol in middle-class society.Indeed the NRI became a superior Indian to the Indian living in India. A Bengali serial name Tero Parbon, which launched the career of popular actor Sabyasachi Chakrabarty, depicted episodes of a young man who has returned from abroad and was solving various sorts of societal problems. The second, and this was sometimes related to the first, was the shift from Britain to US as the choice for destination for higher studies. It will be a simplification to say that every person who went to the US to pursue higher education believed in the American Dream but it is safe to say that a substantial number of them did. Meanwhile, for the middle class society around me, an opportunity opened up to live the American Dream in India itself. Thanks to the entry of the MNCs and the software boom, we could hear of our college mates, coming out of the Indian Institutes of Management and getting fabulous salaries, buying cars and flats even before they were thirty – something that was unimaginable a decade earlier. If somebody could be savvy in the stock market as well, then their annual income could reach astonishing proportions. This of course was possible only in case of a few, but the lure of big salaries resulted in the mushrooming of Management Institutes all over the country. Those who could not get into the IIMs went to study in these institutions in the hope of landing jobs with fat pay cheque. At the lowest end of this boom, the urban youth could get into call-centres, master the American accent, get a fake American identity, and earn salaries that were decent enough to cover their lifestyle costs. Calcutta was somewhat late in catching up with this software boom but in course of time a Sector V emerged in the eastern part of the city to cater to the soft ware industry. One of my cousin sisters works there, and one day she told me that the makeshift shanties that provide cheap lunch, known in Bengali as jhupri, has been Americanised as ‘jhoops’.
In 1994, a Bengali woman named Sushmita Sen became the first Miss Universe, beauty contest that is organised by an American company and was telecast live through satellite channels in India along with rest of the world. In the same year, another Indian woman, Aishwariya Rai, won the Miss World contest and this created the platform for a beauty industry in India. A Bengali women’s magazine named Sananda, from the anti-left Anandabazar Group, started a similar beauty pageant named Sananda Tilottama in 1995. The participation in such beauty pageants did raise a certain amount of controversy when it happened. There was a conservative argument against it which described it as immoral and there was also a feminist argument which described this as an attempt at commodification of women but such arguments were not able to make much of an impression. This is because the participation in such pageants became intertwined with a narrative of liberation – of women shedding inhibitions, of women doing what they want to do, of women making it big in life. Marxism of the nineties was unable to provide any alternative to such capitalist dreams of liberation.
IX
Towards the middle of the nineties, when I was finishing my MA, there was a sense in the air that BJP would be growing in West Bengal like elsewhere in India and would soon replace Congress as the principal opposition party. It was believed, and I remember the future Vice-Chancellor of Calcutta University, Suranjan Das, expressing this in a seminar that since BJP is also a cadre based party it is more likely to become the most important party in West Bengal after CPI-M in the near future. Congress was in fact going from bad to worse. It was split into several camps and became leader centric – Suybboto (Subrata Mukherjee), Pio (Priyoranjan Das Munshi), Somen, Panja-da (Ajit Panja), Barkat Gani (Gani Khan Chowdhury in Maldah) and Adhir (Adhir Chowdhury in Murshidabad). The Party lacked any definite agenda, did not know what it stood for and why it was opposing CPI-M. The rock bottom was reached when a highly energetic female leader named Mamata Bannerjee, split the party and created Trinamool Congress in 1998. Ms Bannerjee of course had earlier distinguished herself as the recipient of a fake PhD degree. For a while it seemed that while Congress was going down the drain, BJP would be able to rise. This however did not happen. Partly this was the organizational failure of BJP as they failed to capitalize on the dormant communalism of Bengal but it was also the credit of CPI-M that they ensured that BJP did not manage to grow as a cadre based party in the villages. During the 90s this was probably the biggest achievement of Jyoti Basu’s CPI-M in Bengal. There was very little left in terms of Marxism-Leninism as Jyoti Babu initiated the new industrial policy and the Operation Sunshine but CPI-M did ensure that BJP did not succeed in West Bengal.
However apart from the opposition of CPI-M and the organizational weakness of BJP there was another factor. Bengalis, including our family, had a low regard for the North Indians and BJP’s hindutva was a very north Indian kind of Hinduism. It lacked the sophistication of Vivekananda or even Shyama Prasad Mukherjee. The Bajrangdal and the Viswa Hindu Parishad and the Saddhvi Rithambaras were uncultured brutes in Bengali terms. This also prevented BJP from making inroads into Bengal. They did pick up the important issue of infiltration across the border but were not able to gain much in terms of electoral victory.
The failure of BJP to become a potent political force does not however mean that we were surrounded by secularism. Indeed a certain kind of Bengali Hinduism was on the rise during the nineties. The Kalighat, Dakshineswar and Tarakeshwar temples remained ever popular. So did the Rama Krishna Mission and ISKON (International Society for Krishna Consciousness). Along with this there was the rise of certain peculiarly Bengali Hindu saints. For example, Bijaygarh in South Calcutta, a former refugee colony, was a left-bastion. But it was also famous for the ashram of a certain Ram Thakur. Indeed if you stepped down at the Jadavpur bus stand and wanted to go somewhere in the Jadavpur locality the best way to describe where you want to go was to describe it with reference to the Ram Thakur’s Ashram. I lived for several years quite close to this ashram and therefore was able to see it from close quarters. Like the Rama Kirshna Mission it was impeccably clean (unlike Tarakesahwar for example), revolved around the ideas of an austere saintly figure named Ram Thakur (see entry in Wikipedia for more details about his life). Almost every evening there used to be kirtan in the ashram which was of reasonably good quality. The ashram was however different from Rama Krishna Mission in the sense that it had a particularly local feel; it was intimately related to the life and times of the people of Jadavpur-Bijoygarh area.
The second important Thakur in Bengal was Anukul Thakur who had at least one major writer, Sirsendu Mukhopadhyay, as his follower. Anukul Thakur’s head quarters is in Deoghar in Bihar but had a significant number of followers in Bengal. There is an entry on him in Wikipedia which gives details of his ideas and hence I am not going into that. The most important of these religious saints was however Baba Loknath who deserves a proper academic study. Baba Lokenath is supposed to have lived for 160 years and supposedly had visited Mecca several times. In course of the nineties, along with globalisation, we found massive spread of Baba Loknath’s name all around us. There were Lokenath Stores (small shops selling stationary goods) selling school exercise books named after Baba Lokenath. There were cycle rickshaws that were dedicated to Baba Lokenath, small businesses named after him, not to mention the ubiquitous image of the grim and austere saint just about every where. Lokenath’s slogan – wherever you want me I shall be there – became immensely popular.
Along with the spread of Baba Lokenath there was also an explosion of small street corner temples usually dedicated to Goddess Shani. Typically there would be a certain progression to this. It is not unusual to find in Calcutta big trees at the corner of a street. So firstly a small idol would be placed in one such tree. This would then be followed by a small prayer session every Saturday. As a next step a small temple structure would be created and a much larger ritual would be observed sometimes occupying a part of the street. One worshipper (purutmoshai) would start coming regularly to conduct the pujas every Saturday, giving bhog and prasad to the devotees.
While these were developments peculiar to the Bengali society a landmark was created by the Birlas in Ballygunje area of South Calcutta. This was a massive temple made of marble was initiated in 1970 but was finished and opened to the public in 1996. The temple was much more than a temple dedicated to Radha and Krishna or a brilliant piece of architecture. It became a symbol of Marwari might in the city. By this time capital was almost completely in the hand of non-Bengalis, popularly known as Marwaris. The Birla temple stood as the symbol of this economic fact.
X
In 1996 while Bengali pride took a small beating with the inauguration of the Birla temple at Ballygunje, it took a big blow when Jyoti Basu could not become the Prime Minister of India. He had emerged as the consensus candidate for the Prime Minister of the United Front Government, but due to reasons that remains a mystery, CPI-M took that strange decision of not joining the government and hence Basu could not become the Prime Minister. Why the Politburo failed to see the obvious advantage of having a Prime Minister from its own Party at a point in time when globally the Left was on the back foot is incomprehensible to say the least. There were of course some official explanation but hardly anyone bought the argument. The unofficial explanation going round in Bengal was that the non-Bengali, especially Malayalam lobby within the Party, did not want a person from Bengal to become the Prime Minister and therefore give the upper hand to the Bengal lobby within the Party. The truth of course is waiting for its historian but the perception was certainly strong in Bengal. For once even the anti-Left newspapers were expressing their shock and disbelief regarding this incident. Basu later described the incident as a “historic blunder”.
In spite of this loss for Bengal, Basu ruled Bengal all through the nineties with an aura that may be inconceivable today. For supporters of CPI-M, like many in my family, he was the great patriarch who could do no wrong. He ensured that the party remained invincible in Bengal spite of the BJP wave and the collapse of the Soviet Union. His personal popularity remained intact in rural Bengal and he began winning middle-class sentiments through the new industrial policy. The aura of Jyoti Basu is perhaps best explained by the way he was able to get away with outrageous comments. When some UNICEF officials were burnt alive in broad day-light at a place called Bantala near Calcutta, Basu dismissed the issue by saying “Such things happen, don’t they?” At another time, with someone else making this comment, it would have had dramatic repercussions. Not with Basu. He was neither a very friendly looking person nor a media savvy person. He was hardly ever seen to be smiling in front of the camera. It was common to see on the TV screen Basu coming out of his chamber at Writers Buildings, walking away briskly and the media persons chasing after him – a far cry from the days of political leaders coming to the studio of media houses to give interviews. As a speaker also he was not brilliant but in public rallies he managed to speak the common man’s language in a casual conversational style. However an important element of his style also was his impeccable white Dhoti and Panjabi, which made him appear quite different from the average common man. In a period of uncertainty for the Left Front following the fall of Soviet Union his style exuded a certain arrogant self-confidence that was very much held in awe during this time even by his opposition. Another crucial element of his style was the projection of a pragmatic and practical person rather than the image of a Marxist intellectual. Whether this was true or not, he always gave the impression that he knew exactly what he wanted and how to achieve what he wanted. The successive electoral victories throughout the decade further increased his aura. Even some negative rumours and allegations about his son, a businessman, were not capable of tarnishing his image. There were jokes against him, such as the one which said that his period has seen the emergence of Nandan (a film complex for showing art films) and Chandan (his son) – but that could hardly have an impact on his massive popularity. The opposition continued to make allegations of electoral mal-practices (“rigging”) which were never proved beyond doubt.
Basu’s pragmatic, managerial style in fact became the style of CPI-M in Bengal. While CPI-M in Delhi or in JNU campus would talk about capitalism and other complex theoretical terms, CPI-M in Bengal preferred to show off its managerial competence in keeping the Front together and maintaining its mass base. Leaders such as Anil Biswas and Subhash Chakrabarti prided themselves in their practicality rather than in their knowledge of Marxist theory. The typical CPI-M man in Bengal was therefore a Bengali and an efficient manager of local situations rather than a self-sacrificing idealist or a brilliant and studious theoretician. Typically he or she (usually he) was simple in his/her attire, free of any charge of financial corruption and of course hundred per cent dedicated to the Party. In their mental world there were two kinds of people – those who were supporters of the Party and those who were not – the “us” and the “them”.
The most important task of the CPI-M that Jyoti Basu created in the nineties was to preserve the power of the Party and to ensure that the Left did not lose in Bengal. The anxiety to preserve Left power following the fall of Soviet Union is understandable. This however had its price. Basu and his party men, in their anxiety to preserve the political supremacy of the Left Front, ignored the increasing number of self-seekers who wanted to come close to the Party to gain something rather than to push the agenda of rural transformation which was initiated in the seventies and eighties. “Party kora” (party work) acquired a whole new meaning – it meant staying close to the Party to get personal benefits – jobs, contracts, promotions, land at posh Salt Lake area etc. As long as somebody was useful for preserving the electoral hegemony of the Party, all blemishes were ignored. On the other hand, anybody who was not “us” was treated with suspicion – even if he was a brilliant scholar or writer. Thus Sukanta Chaudhuri, probably the finest scholar of English Literature in Calcutta during this time had to leave for Jadavpur University while I was in Presidency College and slowly many brilliant scholars left Calcutta University over the years. However more important than some scholars leaving for other academic institutions was the psychological transformation of the CPI-M member/sympathizer into a careful self-seeker rather than an idealistic revolutionary. This change was all around us and was brilliantly captured by Suman Mukhopadhyay later in his film version of Herbert (the novel by Nabarun Bhattacharya I have discussed earlier). A character in the film is shown at one point to introduce “Ten Days that Shook the World” to young Herbert. Later he got a Government job as a teacher and was ready to leave the ancestral house. Herbert points out to him that he was leaving behind the book. He takes a look at the book with disdain and tells him that it is no more of any use to him and Herbert may keep it. What I would like to add is that this was not exactly a shift from Marxism to Capitalism but rather from idealism to opportunism. Jyoti Basu and Anil Biswas won the electoral arithmetic but failed to arrest this qualitative transformation.
XI
When Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee succeeded Jyoti Basu as the Chief Minister in 2000, one of the slogans of his that became quite famous was “Do it now”. This was an attempt on his part to change the work culture of Bengal, especially of the employees working in the Government. He was trying to argue that the new Bengal that he was envisioning would require a radically different work culture if the image of Bengal in the outside world would have to be changed.
A couple of years earlier, I had a chance to work inside the Writers’ Buildings, the seat of power in Bengal, for about a year. I was trying to do a PhD in History and therefore had to visit the West Bengal State Archives. The Archives for the twentieth century was located inside the Writers’ Buildings. My first experience was that of standing in a queue in front of the gate through which the common masses entered Writers’. There were other gates of course, which were meant for senior officials and Ministers and may be for high profile visitors. We had to fill up a pass, get it signed by a police officer sitting at the gate, enter through the metal detector and then find our way inside. As I was filling up the pass I asked a young police officer sitting in front of me, “Do you know where the State Archive is located?” He was a nice gentleman, quite a sober looking one. He replied, “You know, lot of people ask me this question… when you find it, could you please let me know?” I went in and found myself inside a maze. It took me close to an hour to find out where exactly the Archive was. It was a surprisingly small little door through which I had to enter, and then found myself in front of another door, through which I went in and found three women sitting in a cramped room packed with oversized tables and shelves full of dusty files. I had to show my identity papers to them and then they pointed out another door ahead of that room, through which I went in and found myself in another small cramped room where none of the windows could be opened and the air conditioner did not work properly. There was an old dusty bound book that gave the details of the types of files that were preserved in the Archives. There was a distinct lack of enthusiasm in the body language of the three ladies about the entry of a rookie researcher. I had to visit some other official also through a small narrow corridor, where frail old men stooped over really old type-writers. It is possible that the type-writers were at least thirty years old and computers were conspicuous by their absence. The walls were damp and I could feel that rats are having a good time inside the Archives.
Located not far away from the Archives was the main library of the Writers’. When I visited it seemed that it is rarely visited by any of the civil servants for whom the library was created perhaps during the British period. The catalogue was yet to be computerized and was lagging behind by many years. Hardly the kind of place one could feel proud of, especially after spending a year at the India Office Library in capitalist London.
The unofficial working hours of the Archive was 11:00 AM to 4:00 PM which a lunch period thrown in the middle. Getting one’s work done depended on the relationship one could build with the people working in the Archive. Even after trying to be as polite and nice as possible it was not unusual for an entire day to be wasted because the particular person who is supposed to look after a particular section of the shelves from where files are to brought was on leave. No one else was allowed to do the job for him. If I tried to volunteer that was also not permitted. On the other hand if some famous scholar was coming to the Archive then he had the privilege of giving a call to the Archive and got his files deposited on the table before he reached so that he didn’t need to waste his time.
It was particularly painful to go to the toilets. They produced a foul smell that one could only absorb by closing one’s nose while urinating.
Sometimes while trying to cope with my research related frustrations I wandered around the Writers’. I could see in front of me a series of stair cases made of steel that has been added after the main building was built. One could take one of these staircases and keep walking through the corridors and see the rooms inside. The rooms for the ordinary employees were invariably overcrowded and some of the tables spilled out into the corridors. There were hundreds of people constantly walking in and walking out, tea sellers doing brisk business. In fact the Writers was a mini shopping complex as well as there were many stalls selling honey, garments and various other commodities which I do not remember very well. In the Canteen, food was cheap but the clerks preferred to open their multi-tier tiffin boxes and enjoy a good Bengali meal. Along with this of course were several posters and wall-writings, all claiming that various forms of struggle would continue.
Having spent a year inside the Writers’ the question that came to my mind was not the usual one, “why is it that Bengalis don’t work?” but rather “how is it that some people actually manage to work in these kinds of conditions?” I am not sure whether any Marxist theoretician has bothered to think about interior design of the offices of a socialist/communist state. At least I have not read any. Marxism is usually bothered about certain grand themes – crisis of capitalism, dialectical nature of historical progress, falsity of consciousness etc. How to create nice, airy offices of a socialist state that also has clean toilets is perhaps not the kind of problem that a Marxist intellectual aspires to solve. I cannot come to a conclusion as I have never been to the Kremlin or had the opportunity to walk in the corridors of power at Beijing or Havana. But I can say for sure that this has never been a problem for a Bengali intellectual, Marxist or otherwise. It may also be argued that my account is anecdotal and not really subscribing to the canons of “social science” and lacking in objectivity. All I can say is that between 1998 when I first visited Writers’ and 2009 when I left West Bengal for Delhi, I have visited all districts of West Bengal and have seen at least one hundred buildings where government employees work – Gram Panchayats, Block Offices, Zilla Parishads, District Magistrates Offices, and the questions has remained the same – “how can people work in these offices without falling into depression?” Barring the chambers of the Ministers, Sabhadhipatis and the High Officials, rest of the offices are usually unfit for human habitation. They are perfectly built for depression induced laziness.
XII
In the winter of 2000 I had my first experience of living in a village in West Bengal for four months. A PhD project running out of funding can have strange and dramatic impact on a person’s life perhaps. Whatever might have been the reasons, it was certainly not a smooth career move, nor was it a well-thought out decision to build a career in development. It was indeed a rather amateurish and unplanned plunge into the unknown. For our purpose however it is more important to tell the story of the village. A small cautionary note before we start – no claim is being made here that this village is representative of the forty thousand villages of West Bengal.
It was a small village located in the Rampurhat 1 Block of the Birbhum district, not very far away from the Jharkhand border. In order to reach the village one had to get down at the Rampurhat station, about an hour by train from Santiniketan. Rampurhat is a small town where all sorts of retail business are carried out. From there one had to take either a motorbike or a car, in my case usually a motorbike driven by an extraordinary driver of the NGO I had started to work for, take a short ride through a beautiful national high way and then take a long and bumpy ride through undulated broken roads for about an hour to reach the village. On the way there was a minor forest which can be a little dangerous during the night. I used to reach Rampurhat every Monday morning and then stay there till end of the week and come back to Kolkata during the week end and hence didn’t need to cross the forest at night.
Let us call this village Mohua. The village was predominantly inhabited by people belonging to the Santhal tribe, a relatively better off tribe among the scheduled tribes of West Bengal. However on two sides of the village, at the entry point and at the end of it, there were two powerful Scheduled Caste families, who were the dominant families of the villages and at war with each other. Let us call them Family A and Family B. The family which stood at the entry point of the village was an especially powerful one, symbolized by a palatial building with a dish-antenna on top of it. Let us call the patriarch of the family, Mr. Mondal. Mr. His palatial house also contained the ration shop for the villagers and he was also a teacher in the local primary school. His family also ran a grocery shop. Let us call the head of Family B, Mr Karmakar. They had a fairly big house but by no means as big as the house of Family A. In between Family A on one side and Family B on the other side lived the Santhals, divided into three clusters or paras. They varied in terms of economic standards, some were relatively better off than the others. They lived in their usual Santhal style mud houses. The village had electricity and water connections although the tap water was not always of very good quality. There were wells and a pond which however tended to dry up during the summer months.
This region is a relatively dry region of West Bengal and the soil does not produce more than one crop in a year. This is not the part of Bengal which has seen the green revolution of triple crop production in a year. The land is undulated and therefore the ones which were at a lower level tended to get more water than the ones which were at a higher level. Hence the land which was at the lower level tended to be more precious and usually belonged to the Scheduled Castes. The land that the tribals had was not very productive and therefore there was pressure on them to sell off this land. This pressure came from various kinds of businessmen, usually of the shady variety, who were setting up stone crushing units to manufacture stone chips. This was thriving business in this area. There was very little investment and certain amount of bribing of the government officials to transfer agricultural land into open mines was not very difficult. The somewhat naïve Santhals could be told that they would get a sizeable amount of income if they sold off their land and many of them willingly did so as the land was not fertile. Indeed many tribal families found it more convenient to work in the stone crushing units as daily wage labourers than to practice agriculture.
What made the situation complicated was the role played by certain groups with criminal background in this business of selling land. Thus the entire operation, from selling of land to the production of stone chips was to a very large extent illegally carried out. The stone quarries and crushers flouted all environmental safety standards. While the tribal people of the region, including that of village Mohua, found work in these stone quarries and crushers their health was affected. There was no resistance to such illegal operations from any political party, including the ruling party. The District Magistrate once told us that Birbhum lacks industry and therefore it was not possible for him to stop the stone quarries and also it seemed to him that the tribals as whole were not against it either.
In village Mohua the majority of the villagers preferred to be silent spectators, docile and subservient to people like Mr. Mondal. They were aware that behind the mild benevolent face of the primary school teacher there was a dangerous and violent man who could go to any extreme to eliminate his challengers. Adding to his clout was a certain notorious local criminal, whom we may call Mr. Sheikh. Everybody knew that the powerful people like Mr. Mondal had his spies and was aware of what was going on in every household.
I once had a conversation with an old Santhal tribal leader, traditionally known as Manjhi Haram. He told me that the tribal society was falling apart. Their own traditions, songs, rituals were getting destroyed and this had an impact on their mind-set as well. They were lured towards cash and hence were selling off their land and preferring to work in stone crushers. To some extent he was right. One could see the men drowned in alcohol, and the youth attracted to cheap illegally produced CDs which contained bollywoodised Santhali songs. The old identity of the Santhal was gone but not replaced by a new one. The scheduled castes, like Mr. Mondal on the other hand, had mastered the art of manipulating the new development institutions such as the Block Office, the Panchayats, the PDS system and the Primary School.
Within this volatile and violent atmosphere there were also many a surprising moment. Some of the villages surrounding Mohua village were breathtakingly beautiful, some of the tribal houses had wonderful murals painted on them. One could take walks across the undulated landscape and suddenly discover an abandoned stone quarry filled with crystal blue water reflecting the rising sun. Once I reached the village on the Monday morning eager to do ‘development work’ but found that a Santhal festival was in progress and everybody was dead drunk. An elderly woman came towards me with a jerry can and told me to sit down and drink the Haria, or rice beer. After finishing the jerry can I could only lie down and postpone my ‘development work’ for the next day.
I ultimately left for another job in another rural development NGO where I thought I would be able to learn the technical dimensions of rural development about which I had very little knowledge. There was also a serious threat to life from the criminal elements of the region such as Mr. Sheikh. In fact the feud between Family A and Family B probably saved me and a friend of mine. A member of Family B came and told us one night that we are not safe and should move. So we moved out to the house of a friend in a neighbouring village. We do not know whether the information that came to us was false or not. A few months later, the leader of NGO where I worked fell into a trap set for him and was implicated in false charges and had to spend some time in prison before civil society groups, family members and friends could bring him out of the mess.
In August 2010, the Chief Minister of West Bengal, Mr. Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee, has assured that the illegal stone quarries would be banned and safety norms of the industry would be strictly imposed (http://articles.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/2010-08-01/kolkata/28284694_1_stone-crushers-stone-quarries-tribals). He said this under pressure from an organisation that the tribals have developed in the mean time. Does this mean that the tribals of Birbhum have found a new identity? I hope they have.
XIII
Between 2001 and 2003 I had a chance to work in a rural development NGO in the district of North 24 Parganas. Before going into the specificities of that experience a short discussion on the civil society organisations of the state may be useful. Bengal has a long history, yet unwritten, of voluntary organisations which were part of the nationalist movement. They come from different kinds of ideological background – the Ramakrishna Mission from a Vivekananda perspective, Tagore Society from a Tagorean perspective, and many others which broadly conforms to the idea of “seba” rather than any distinct ideological perspective. However in the post- Naxalite period many who were not interested in the democratic centralism of CPIM sought to find their ways in the civil society movement. They started working on issues that were not a prime concern of the left in Bengal. For example, to name just a few, CINI and WBVHA started to work on health, Service Centre (formally DRCSC) started to work on sustainable agriculture, Vikramshila started to work on Education, Sanlaap on gender and trafficking, Durbar Mahila on the rights of “prostitutes” to be given the dignity of “sex workers”, APDR and Nagarik Mancha on human rights, Samikhyoni and Anjali on mental health, Don Bosco Ashalayam and Prajaak on child protection, so on and so forth. Together they represented a body of intellectual thought and practices that stood outside the more traditional variety of leftist thinking in the form of Left Front and the Naxalites. What I mean by the traditional left thinking is to concentrate on land reform, on trade unionism, on fighting the jotdars, so on and so forth. The relationship between the two lines of thinking was never a simple one – it ranged from antagonism on the one hand to total lack of communication on the other with a mid-way approach followed by some who believed that the state government can be influenced to make policy changes. However I do not think that I will be widely off the mark if I say that the ruling Left Front was suspicious of the growth of this sector although there was no violent clamp down on their activities.
The NGO that I started to work for was largely the product of an unusual kind of international collaboration. The key person was Dr. Sujit Sinha, a former student of Presidency College, who did a PhD from Princeton, worked at Bell Labs for a while and then returned home and finally settled down to build this NGO. He was joined by a former journalist from Amrita Bazar Patrika, Tirthankar Mukherjee. They were however helped financially by an NRI Bengali in UK who formed a trust to raise money for the NGO. Friends in US also chipped in to raise funds. The NGO started in 1989-90 by working in 5 villages and had expanded to about 30 villages by the time I joined. The theoretical model of the NGO was based to some extent on Dr. Sujit Sinha’s experience at Bell Labs. The field villages were seen as laboratories of different types of development experiments and if they were successful they were to be scaled up through influencing the government. By the time I joined there was already a substantial education programme, a programme on sustainable agriculture, a programme on Self Help Group based microfinance, a programme on basic health and mitigation of arsenic contamination and a programme involving the youth in the villages in development work. These couple of years was my own equivalent of a degree in rural development where I was able to learn the basic elements of innovative education methods, sustainable agriculture, micro finance and the problems of arsenic contamination.
Sustainable agriculture was beginning to find support from farmers during this period. North 24 Parganas is a relatively more prosperous district of the state where the impact of green revolution can be seen in the form of three crops in a year. However by this time the limits of green revolution were already beginning to be felt. Cost of agriculture was going up and because of the high population density the total cultivable land available to the farmer was usually quite small. Hence the idea of a kitchen garden using the land surrounding one’s village hut was becoming quite popular. It was still quite difficult to convince farmers to give up the use of pesticides and chemical fertilizers and adopt agricultural practices involving organic fertilizers and pesticides. Methods of renewing the soil through organic methods were also beginning to take root. The idea has spread quite fast in recent times.
Self Help Group for women and microfinance was also another important development during this time. I had mixed experience regarding this in these two years. When I joined the programme was having a serious problem of loan recovery and it proved to be quite a nightmare to improve recovery rate without using coercive measures as well as to create a management system where financial transactions could be managed by semi-educated rural staff. On the other hand it was wonderful to see housewives coming out of their home for the first time, getting trained at talking to men eye to eye with self confidence. Many of these women came from conservative Muslim background. The confidence to deal with money certainly made a difference in the self-perception of these women. The quality of the groups varied but the experience left me convinced that SHG is an important method of women’s emancipation although it may not be the only one.
The programme related to young adults of the villages was the most innovative one and received national recognition. It aimed at training young high school going students to do development work of their own villages including maintenance of data related to rainfall, vaccination of chicken and cleaning of tube wells.
While working and learning on various issues of rural development during these two years I carried out a short experiment regarding teaching of English to students who go to rural High Schools. But here again let me explain the context of this experiment. One of important debates on education in West Bengal is related to the decision by the Left Front Government to do away with English at the primary level. It is argued that this has resulted in a generation of students who do not know how to read and write in English and are therefore not capable enough to find jobs in today’s market economy. I found that the argument somewhat simplistic. The reason is that if one calculates the number of English classes a student attends from Class V to Class X then one would see that it not less than 40x5x6 i.e. 1200. So why is it that a student is not able to pick up a language after attending at least 1000 classes? The reason lies in the method of teaching and the content of the text books. English in Bengal’s schools are not taught using the standard methods of teaching a foreign language but has an excessive insistence on getting the grammar right and rote learning. The text books are full of long sentences which are too cumbersome for the children to understand. There are references to medieval knights in the stories and I had great difficulty in making the children understand what feudalism is. In other words the stories in the books were difficult to relate to. And above all, they were not encouraged to speak in English and were always afraid of making grammatical mistakes. Hence they never learnt to use the language, to play with the language.
Apart from such serious affairs there was also the sheer fun of hanging out in the villages and experiencing the breathtaking beauty of rural Bengal – watching the sun shine on the paddy fields in late afternoon, crossing the river in small boats, watching the rains burst out from the sky. Two funny incidents still stick to my mind. The first concerned some students who came from Princeton University on an exchange visit to spend some time in the villages. They came during their summer holidays i.e. our monsoon. While we had elaborately prepared a course for them, most of them ended up chasing snakes. The second was concerning a group who came from another NGO in Rajasthan to see our education programme. However the last thing they thought of during their stay was education. They were shell-shocked to see so many ponds full of water and kept on saying “Itna Paani, Itna Paani” (So much water, so much water)…
XIV
What was the nature of the rural society that I saw while working in Baduria block of North 24 Parganas? Whenever trained researchers look at rural society, especially in India, they tend look through certain categories such as caste, class or in case of West Bengal, “party-society”. Without in any way trying to belittle such well-accepted categories I would like to submit that these categories or lenses sometimes create barriers to understanding a society by creating certain formulaic notions about rural society. Rural society of course can be under stood through these categories but there is lot more to it than these categories.
The particular area that I am talking about was, unlike the village in Birbhum district, relatively close to Calcutta, in fact only about 50 kilometres from the city straight as the crow flies. However reaching there was not very easy. One had to take either a train from Sealdah station and then get down at a station and from there again make an hour long journey by “trekker” (a jeep used as a commercial transport vehicle) or a bus which were usually quite crowded. The other route was to go by bus to Barasat, headquarter of North 24 Parganas, take a van rickshaw for about a kilometer, and then take another bus to Baduria which again took about an hour. Any one who has traveled in these areas know that this is a district with one of the highest population density in India and therefore traveling, especially in the summer, was not fun at all. So this was a place that was relatively close to Calcutta but yet quite far away. Calcutta was, in the perception of the people I met there, the space of privilege, of concrete houses, of opportunities, of high salaries, cars and other things. In other words, for the people I met here, it was not very important that they were much better off than the people of less advanced districts like Purulia but that they felt a sense of deprivation vis-à-vis Calcutta. Time and again in the conversations with the people I met the sense of deprivation, the sense of lack of opportunity, the sense of a certain amount of jealousy came to the fore. This became evident in the way they reacted to me as well. The reaction towards me was both a matter of love as well as a matter of jealousy and hate. It took me some time to realise in fact that this response was less towards me as a person and more towards the babu from Calcutta who was lucky to receive quality education and therefore had the opportunity to move up in life.
There were two related features. The first was that a large section of the youth who were mentally urbanized but not living in urban societies. This meant that they were no more interested in farming as a means of livelihood but sought other ways, usually combining many different roles in order to earn their living. A school teacher in an NGO plus a LIC agent plus something else perhaps. When I first visited the villages I was quite struck by these multiple professions of the same individual. The second related feature was high level of petty corruption. This does not mean that every person I met was corrupt, but corruption was an important element of the society that I saw. Making money was important and it did not seem to be particularly important to make money through fair means only.
The other important feature was viscous rivalry. This rivalry, importantly, was not strictly along caste, class, religion or party lines but cut across all such categories. There were groups and the composition of the groups kept changing, which fought against each other. One group would try to destroy the livelihood of the other by for example by pouring oil on the ponds where another group was cultivating fish. Sometimes it seemed that one side of the river was against another side of the river (Ichamati), then after some time that equation no more worked. The most extreme case I saw was rivalry between two brothers in the same family. One had become somewhat famous by adopting sustainable agriculture practices. There were many urban visitors and even some foreign visitors to his farm. Apart from such glamour factors, the economic advantages of Sustainable Agriculture (SA) was abundantly clear but it became impossible to convince his brother to switch from (what was by this time) traditional agriculture. We could understand that it was the rivalry between the brothers that prevented him from taking up SA.
Yet, paradoxically, this was also an area which has over the years seen an extra-ordinary tolerance among Hindus and Muslims whose percentage were almost equal. North 24 Parganas is a district which has seen very little Hindu-Muslim tension or riot in independent Inida. Hindus and Muslims have lived side by side, not necessarily in respective clusters and in the NGO where I worked there was hardly ever any tension between the two communities although their was no shortage of inter-personal tensions. One explanation for this perhaps is that the Bengali identity was overwhelmingly more important here than the religious identity, unlike perhaps in a district like Murshidabad. There was indeed a romantic strain in the mind of the people I met for the two Bengals to become re-united someday.
To put things more academically, what I got to see in around the early part of the new century was a glimpse of post-land reform Bengal. Here was a rural society that had already seen the benefits of land reform, of panchayati raj and green revolution. There was a certain level of relative prosperity in comparison perhaps to the poorer districts and indeed many parts of India but there was also an acute sense of deprivation vis-à-vis Calcutta. They could smell the goodies of metropolitan life but could not have it as their own. This was also a time when there was hardly any social movement to take this society forward in terms of ideals for a better collective tomorrow. The result was a highly volatile, faction-ridden society where corruption was increasingly becoming a significant feature. The society that I saw was more Hobbesean than Marxian.
In the literature on West Bengal the party is often shown to be an extraordinarily powerful entity that decides the life of every individual in the society and the party is a monolith that operates on remote-control from Alimuddin Street in Calcutta. This was not the impression that I got. My impression was that the party reflected many of the features of the society that I have tried to portray above. Village politics clearly had many different fault lines and it was never only along party lines. Also at the local level the individual mattered. I have seen honest and respected people as well as dishonest and corrupt people working under the same party umbrella. They were treated differently at the local level. However this does not mean that party rivalry did not exist and it did matter in terms of benefits to be received from the Panchayat for example.
It would also be a simplification to think that the district bureaucracy were nothing but puppets in the hand of the party leaders. I had a taste of the district bureaucracy while doing a short research on SGSY programme in North 24 Parganas. The state government had appointed CARE to find out why so few groups were graduating to Grade 2 even though there were an astonishing number of Self-Help-Groups in the district. CARE in turn appointed a nodal NGO for each district to carry out the research. Even though we were armed with a letter from the state government, the district officials did their best to humiliate us and offered as little cooperation as possible. Ultimately however I and a colleague of mine were able to solve the mystery. It came out that the District Magistrate gives a target to the BDOs and the BDOs in turn gave a target to the Panchayats who in turn outsourced the process of group creation to small NGOs. The number of groups was the priority of the administration and not their quality. Thus many groups existed only on paper and very few matured into the Grade 2 level where the groups are expected to carry out serious economic projects. This process of functioning was entirely DM driven rather than driven by the Zilla Parishad and the Sabhadhipati was merely a titular head. If the party would have been all-powerful then the opposite would have been the case.
XV
In 2003 I had a taste of rural anger in the district of Murshidabad. Murshidabad, unlike North 24 Parganas, is a backward district. Meanwhile I had left the NGO I was working for and started working as a freelancer. One assignment I got was that of documenting case studies of the pulse polio campaign going on in the state. I was supposed to go to Murshidabad as a neutral observer, see how the campaign was going and bring back case studies showing what were working and what were not. This gave me a chance to see rural Murshidabad for the first time. Before going to the district I had heard that there were some opposition to the campaign and some villages were resisting the pulse polio drive. It came as a surprise to me that people could refuse to give polio vaccine to their children. Needless to say, I was curious. Hence on a hot soggy afternoon I reached Jalangi Block of the district and found my way to the field office of an NGO where I planned to stay for the next week or so.
I was quite impressed by the kind of preparations that were made for the pulse polio drive. There was a massive awareness campaign with posters, leaflets, banners, songs and village to village visits. Clearly the financing from UNICEF was not going to waste. The challenge was to ensure that not a single child was left out of the pulse polio drive. Hence a comprehensive data base was also generated so that the campaign could target precisely every household where a child needed to be immunized. There were some reservations expressed by some deeply conservative families who were not sure as to exactly what this was all about but the Muslim clerics converted to the cause and therefore there was lot of hope among those who were implementing the programme. This was good as the heat was unbearable.
A couple of days before the pulse polio day, there was a discussion within the NGO regarding a particular village which seemed to be still resistant. This was a rather remote village and it was planned that we would be visiting the village next day in order to convince the villagers. I thought I will get a good case for my documentation work.
So the next day we left in a car in the morning. The car dropped us at a particular place beyond which we had to go on foot. The village was located in such a place that there was only one way of going in and coming out. This was a kuccha road and quite muddy. Therefore we had to walk slowly to ensure that we did not slip. This slowed down the journey and we reached the village around 2 in the afternoon. The group of dedicated social workers, both men and women, started so go from household to household to discuss the issue and I followed them. It became clear that the villagers were suspicious of the government suddenly becoming so enthusiastic about giving polio vaccine when under normal circumstances the Health Centres treated them badly. If the Health Centres were treating them badly then why all of a sudden so much enthusiasm for providing vaccine to children? The social workers took great pains to explain that although there are many deficiencies of the Health system there was nothing wrong with the pulse polio campaign as such and it was designed to ensure that not a single child suffered from the dreaded disease in future. Some villagers said that there were other health related problems in the village but there was no attention paid towards them by the government. This was also true but the social workers explained that there can be separate agitations against the Health care system as such but it would be foolish to victimize the children by refusing to give them the polio vaccine. There was also a suggestion that all this was actually part of an American conspiracy against the Muslims to make the children impotent in the name of polio vaccination. UNICEF was considered to be an American agency and the social workers again took get patience to explain that this was just a false rumour.
As the social workers became more and more involved in the conversation with the villagers I saw a group of men trying to guide the conversation. They were constantly arguing on behalf of the villagers and raising issues of deprivation that were of course true but had very little to do with the issue of immunization of children. This made the work of the social workers more and more difficult and gradually the situation in the village became quite heated.
After a while I began to have a little bit of a doubt as to what this was all about. The sun had set and we were still locked in a remote village trying to convince the villagers regarding the pulse polio campaign. I started to doubt whether what was going on was actually a discussion or was there something else to it. One of the leaders of the group started to say after a point, “why don’t you stay with us over night and we will discuss all the issues in greater detail?”
We sensed that there was something quite unusual about the invitation and it was most probably a trap for us. It also seemed to me that the argument that the villagers were making were well-rehearsed and was meant to delay us rather than to arrive at a genuine solution. We decided not to take the invitation of staying at the village and started to walk back. By the time we reached the main road it was already quite dark. The shops were for some odd reason closed and there was no van-rickshaw available. We kept waiting for our pick-up car which was a little late in coming and finally we managed to get in the car and reach our base safely. The two women in the group especially breathed a sigh of relief. The experienced field coordinator told us that we took the right decision by not accepting the invitation to stay over as it was definitely a trap laid out for us. Who laid the trap? We had some reasonable guesses but it would be better not to put it in writing.
The pulse polio campaign was reasonably successful although it was not possible to vaccinate every child in the district. But it could have been even more successful, indeed perhaps even unnecessary, if the health system of the district would have earned the respect of the villagers.
Thus in different districts anger was taking different shapes and forms. The reasons were also different. In Birbhum it was one type, in more affluent North 24 Parganas it was of another kind, in backward Murshidabad it was again something different. I was able to see glimpses of this rising tide of anger. On other occasions when I visited North Bengal districts there was the feeling of the Northern districts being neglected by the Government. In Darjeeling the peace accord with GNLF was not able to fully restore peace and a new movement was simmering. In this context 2004 saw the starvation deaths of a few villagers in Amlashol in West Midnapore district. This sad event raised a media storm and put the Government on a defensive. The first reaction of the Party and administration was to claim that the deaths were caused by malnutrition related diseases rather than the result of starvation. Earlier a report by Pratichi Trust of Amartya Sen brought out a sad picture of the primary education in the state. This did not come as a surprise to the educationists of the state but the fact that Amartya Sen confirmed their perception was significant. In 2004 Government of West Bengal and UNDP published the Human Development Report for the state. This was a significant event although not sensational. The report, which in fact won an award for its quality, showed in no uncertain terms the disparities between the different districts of the state even though it praised the achievements of the state government over the years.
None of these however had any political implication at this stage. Thanks to a divided and weak opposition lacking in credibility Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee’s Government was secure in its seat of power. It swept the Panchayat Elections of 2003 and even the middle class were happy that at last the Left Front was beginning to show interest in industrialization. Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee as the Chief Minister enjoyed a level of popularity that was perhaps greater than that of Jyoti Basu towards the end of his career. In 2005 Left Front won back the Kolkata Municipal Corporation from TMC and in 2006 Left Front won a landslide victory in the Assembly Elections capturing 233 out of 294 seats. Clearly the different forms of anger and discontent that I was able to partly see in the districts did not at this stage take shape into anti-incumbency sentiment.
XVI
What was happening in the middle-class urban society around me during 2000- 2006? It is of course risky to try and generalize on the basis of limited experiential knowledge but nonetheless let me hazard a generalization. There was a distinct and significant change from the 70s and the 80s or even early nineties. Marxism was already irrelevant in the world around me. This took several forms. In the academic world the reigning God was Foucault rather than Marx; “discourse” had replaced “mode of production”, “power/knowledge” and “text” was the preoccupation rather than structures of “agrarian society” or “passive revolution”. This was certainly not the time to talk about ideology, class-structure, imperialism etc. This does not of course mean there was no academician who talked in terms of classical Marxist preoccupations but they were relatively small in number if one considers the important academicians of the state. Gender, difference, post-colonialism, Lacanian psychoanalysis, post-modernism was in, rather than “colonial mode of production”, stages of capitalist development etc. Chomsky’s critique of US imperialism had a certain following but there was not a single relatively young Marxist intellectual in the city who captured the imagination of the academic community.
In the world of serious cinema there was a sharp break from the days of parallel cinema of the 70s and 80s when films of the condition of the poor or oppression of the state was common as themes, to tensions of interpersonal life of the 90s and beyond. This was evident in the films of Rituparno Ghosh, Aparna Sen and Anjan Dutt. In the world of literature, novels such as Kalbela by Samsresh Majumdar disappeared and again the central theme of novels became, to a large extent, interpersonal relationships and the angst associated with it rather than dream of a better world. Themes related to sexual emancipation and gender rights, i.e. matters related to identity became more important than transforming the world of the poor. The poor more or less vanished from Bengali literature and serious cinema.
In Music also there was a transformation from the songs of Suman Chattopadhyay, who sometimes referred to dreams of transformation, to the songs of Anjan Dutt, Chandrabindoo and Bhumi. While Anjan Dutt’s songs combined romanticism with nostalgia, Chandrabindoo combined romantic songs with certain kind of irreverent nonsense lyrics which re-lived the college-canteen milieu. Bhoomi combines contemporary beats and instruments with a certain kind of shallow “folk” music and churned out hit numbers which hardly bothered about any kind of transformative agenda.
Within the development sector, “Capitalism” and “Marxism” were words that hardly had any currency. Events like the Seattle protests against the WTO in 1999 or the World Social Forum in 2001 did not have any serious impact in Kolkata. The sector was divided into various niche areas – education, health, agriculture, human trafficking, child protection, etc – but they never added up to a critique of capitalist exploitation. From debates around the “working class”, Kolkata had moved on to the debate as to whether “prostitutes” should be considered “sex workers” or not.
However it is not my intention here to say that middle-class Bengal was at fault by ignoring the classical concerns of Marxism. Rather I would say that the burning problems of the day did not have any solution within the classical Marxist terminologies. The days of famine, hunger and partition were over, prices of food were relatively stable and middle-class youth were not facing the kind of bleak prospects that they did in the 60s and 70s. Therefore the questions of identity became more important rather the questions of poverty and exploitation. In the society around me it would be wrong to say that there was no agenda of transformation but the agenda usually related to issues of personal choice in clothes, lifestyle or sexual preferences rather than economic transformation of the society. For some one who was trying to grope with her lesbian identity Marxism offered no solution nor was it particularly helpful for someone who was trying to find one’s dignity as a “sex worker” to think about WTO. During this time, within Marxism in Bengal there was no serious attempt to understand and respond to these various identity oriented questions. Rather Marxism came to be identified as something conservative and old, a thing of the past. I have written earlier that when I was a teenager I read “How the Steel Was Tempered” and felt inspired but once that Russian book disappeared there was no other book that could inspire the youth towards the red flag.
The primary concern in Bengali middle-class society was no more whether “another world is possible” but rather whether Bengal can make full advantage of globalization.
The anxiety of falling behind cities like Bombay or Bangalore in the race to build shopping malls or IT hubs was deeply felt. In this context Brand Buddha offered an interesting compromise. It talked about liberalisation, inviting private capital, insisting on providing a stable government and pampered the Bengali identity through cultural channels without taking up the cause of anti-capitalist struggle. Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee became the darling of the bhadralok Bengali looking forward to adjusting to global capitalism rather than to challenging its hegemony. Hugo Chavez did visit Kolkata but he failed to create any wave.
It is in this context that CPI(M) won a massive victory in the election of 2006. Immediately after the election, I remember watching the Chief Minister on television saying with an air of supreme self-confidence, “The TATAs are coming”. He was referring to a certain factory that the TATAs had promised to set up at Singur near Kolkata.
XVII
In November 2005, Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee inaugurated an ambitious project of Government of West Bengal named Strengthening Rural Decentralisation, popularly known as SRD. This was aimed at improving the panchayat system of the state and was being implemented by a special cell of the Panchayats and Rural Development Department. I had applied for a job in the project and was lucky to get it. Hence between January 2006 and mid 2009 I was able to work inside the Government as the Left Front Government rapidly pushed itself towards its own destruction. In 2006 only the Left Front could have defeated itself and that is what precisely they did. What happened between 2006 and 2009 is both well-known as well as shrouded in mystery. It is well-known that a series of events starting with the protests against the TATA project at Singur to death of unarmed people at Nandigram to police atrocities at Lalgarh resulted in a spectacular comeback of Mamata Bannerjee as the leader of all opposition forces and led to successive electoral reverses for the Left Front from the panchayat elections of 2008 to the Assembly Election of 2011. Yet there are many questions which remain unanswered. Let me nonetheless try to re-construct the narrative of the Left Front’s self-destruction. Let us start with Singur. For developing the narrative I have relied heavily on a timeline prepared by Asis Kumar Das which is available at http://www.scribd.com/doc/3604717/Singur-Timeline-18-May-2006-15-June-2008. Let me acknowledge my debt to him before moving on.
On 18 May 2006 West Bengal Government and TATAs held a joint press-conference in which they announced that the TATA has decided to set up the factory for their small car project at Singur in the district of Hooghly. Around 700 acres were required for the TATA factory and around 300 acres were required for the ancillary industries it was announced. It was also said that around 10,000 jobs would be directly and indirectly created as a result of this project. The news came as a surprise to most people including the farmers of Singur, a section of whom almost immediately started to protest. By the end of the month both TATA officials and officials of West Bengal government had to face intense agitation at the site of the project. An organisation named Krishijami Bachao Committee (Save Agricultural Land Committee) was formed and demonstrations were made in front of the BDO’s office. Industries Minister Nirupam Sen also faced an agitating crowd when he went to Singur to explain the situation and persuade the farmers. Between 19-24 July the state government issued 13 notices for land acquisition under Section 9(1) of the Land Acquisition Act of 1894. In response the agitators blocked the Durgapur Expressway and later in the month of August carried out several demonstrations in front of the panchayat and BDO offices and tried to halt the land acquisition process. The agitation was by this time big news and widely covered by the print and electronic media. In spite of the agitation West Bengal Government was confident of completing the process of land acquisition before the Pujas. By August 31 the authorities received consent for 303 acres.
The agitation however continued unfazed. A tactic that came to be used by the protestors was to put the women in the front and this helped to ward off the officials in the project villages. By September 2006 the issue was not only the most important one in the state but also thanks to internet and the electronic media, international news. In fact, at the Panchayat Department we were somewhat jealous of the kind of media attention Singur was getting. We thought we were doing something far more significant in terms of reforming the Panchayat system and trying to initiate grass-root planning etc but we received zero attention. The problem was that there was no drama in our work, no big industrialist versus small peasant, David TMC versus Goliath CPI (M). We could only watch what was going on.
There were several suggestions to the Left Front at this stage to re-think the project and urge the TATAs to set up the factory in an alternative site. But the ruling party felt that it need not re-think its strategy and it was only a matter of time before the weak opposition parties and sundry civil society groups would accept defeat. On 27 September SUCI and CPIML called for a 12 hour Bandh and there was an announcement on part of Mamata Bannerjee also that there would be a Bandh on October 9. At this stage Congress tried to play a mediating role. It on the one hand shared the dais with TMC after several years but also urged the Government to take the opposition in confidence. By this time also there were several alleged cases of police atrocity and a protestor named Rajkumar Bhool died on 28 September and was declared as the first martyr by the Singur Agricultural Land Protection Committee. Bandh was observed by the opposition on 11 October but the Chief Minister also confirmed that the Government was in possession of the 1000 acres of land.
During October there were several cases of allegations against lumpen elements associated with CPI (M) vandalizing property in protesting villages in order to create pressure on the protestors. One such act was to damage the pumping station through which water reached the fields of the protesting villages. On the other side noted activists Medha Patkar and Mahasweta Devi joined hands with the protestors. By early November state government started to deploy troops in the region. On 17 November TMC supporters blocked Central Avenue in Kolkata to protest against the acquisition of land which caused massive traffic dislocation. On 30 November Section 144 was clamped on the region and Mamata Bannerjee was not allowed to enter. In retaliation the TMC supporters torched buses and blocked roads. The TMC MLAs also ransacked the State Assembly. The state government meanwhile started fencing of the area around the project site. Several protesting villagers were arrested. There were allegations of atrocity on behalf of the Rapid Action Force (RAF).
On December 4 Mamata Bannerjee started a hunger strike at Esplanade in Kolkata. On 18 December at dawn the charred body of Tapasi Malik, a young woman was found inside the factory site. She was said to be one of the activists against land acquisition. An FIR was lodged in which it was alleged that she was raped and killed when she went for early morning nature’s call. After protests from KJBC and human rights activists the case was transferred to CBI by the state government. On 28 December Mamata Bannerjee ended her fast at Esplanade. On the same day an elderly couple, Tinkari Dey (55) and his wife Maya (50) who had parted with their land, were found dead under mysterious circumstances. They had earlier collected their cheques for compensation.
Thus by end of 2006 the project was in a giant mess with at least four persons dead. A significant number of city intellectuals like Mahasweta Devi and Kabir Suman and national level activists like Medha Patkar had joined hands with TMC, which helped to boost the image of Mamata Bannerjee as an opposition leader. On the other hand questions were raised regarding Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee’s Marxist credentials and his capacity as an administrator. From a small-car project by a private company it became a battle-royal between Left Front and TMC led opposition. The two sides stood adamant and unwilling to make a compromise.
Meanwhile in the same year the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme based on the historic National Rural Employment Guarantee Act was rolled out all over the country including West Bengal. It promised up to hundred days of wage labour to whoever applied for work at the local panchayats. This was potentially far more significant than the Singur project but received very little attention from the political parties, the media and the intellectuals.
The pattern described above continued through the early part of 2007. The year started with allegations by the opposition that there are discrepancies in the Status Report presented by the Government. While this was being debated on the electronic media there was another death, this time the uncle of Tapasi Maik, Astu Malik (48). In January the TATAs also started the construction of the factory with a Bhumi Puja. Some officials of TATA who wanted to show some panchayat leaders their community development work in Jamshedpur in order to gain trust were allegedly manhandled at Singur while the TMC staged protest in front TATA offices in Kolkata. On 23 January there were attempts on part of the protestors to enter the factory site and destroy the site where the Bhumi Puja was held. On 14 February, while protests were going on at Singur, The High Court said that the land acquisition was valid and in accordance with law but also quashed the imposition of Section 144. On 9 March the TATAs got possession of the land but in the same month on 11 March another farmer, Haradhan Bag committed suicide. On 18 March a minor explosion damaged the wall of the factory. Meanwhile the Government tried to improve the compensation package. It was also announced in April that youths from the Singur area would receive vocational training from the TATAs.
Through April and May skirmishes continued in the project area while there was also an emerging trend that the two sides should sit together to arrive at an amicable solution. On 4 June former Chief Minister Jyoti Basu invited Mamata Bannerjee for talk at his residence which Ms Bannerjee accepted. There was discussion regarding providing alternative plot of land to the “unwilling” farmers. However by 6 June Mamata Bannerjee backtracked. She refused to take alternative land for the “unwilling farmers” as a solution. She claimed that land that was acquired for the project site would have to be returned which the Government refused and hence Jyoti Basu’s mediation failed.
The Left Front however received a blow at this stage when on 28 June Suhrid Dutta, CPI(M)’s Zonal Committee Secretary from Singur was charged with the murder of Tapasi Malik by CBI. Another party leader Debu Malik was also arrested. CPI(M) denied that the two were involved in the murder. The next few months remained heated around this incident while sporadic skirmishes continued at the factory site. Suhrid Datta was charge-sheeted by CBI on September 15. Later on however he was released on bail by the High Court in February 2009. In a bizarre twist to the story the CBI investigator (Deputy Superintendent of Police, Crime Branch) Partha Sarathi Bose, was arrested for taking bribe and sent to prison.
On 22 September 2007 there was another case of death when Srikanta Shee (37) was found hanging from a tree. The police described this as a suicide. On 19 October there was another round of violence in Singur where at least 20 persons including some policemen were injured. Meanwhile the Supreme Court also gave a judgement which said that government does not have the right to acquire fertile agriculture land for a private company. This resulted in a fresh case being opened in the Calcutta High Court. Towards the end of the year, on 17 December another person, Shankar Patra (48) was found hanging in the cattle shed behind his mud house.
On 18 January 2008 the Left Front Government got a boost when the High Court dismissed all 11 petitions against land acquisitions in Singur. However the agitation at Singur continued and on 8 February the protestors and TMC blocked the Durgapur Express way which caused severe traffic congestion. On 25 February the West Bengal Industrial Development Corporation’s surveyors were heckled at the project site.
The next few months saw the Trinamool Congress reaping rich dividends in the Panchayat Election that took place in 2008. In Singur Block of Hooghly district TMC won 16 out of 16 Gram Panchayats although the Zilla Parishad went to CPI(M). Nearly fifty per cent of the Gram Panchayats of the state for the first time went to the opposition and two Zilla Parishads – South 24 Parganas and Purba Medinipur were also lost to TMC. Congress won the Maldah and Uttar Dinajpur Zilla Parishads and narrowly lost Murshidabad to CPI(M). The toll for CPI(M) was heaviest in southern Bengal.
Following this relative victory Mamata Bannerjee announced that Government must immediately return the land that was taken from “unwilling” farmers. She however clarified that she is open to the factory being constructed on 600 acres of land but 400 acres would have to be returned. The Governor Shri Gopal Krishna Gandhi tried to mediate between the two parties and did manage to bring the Chief Minister and the TMC leader on the same table but the tensions were not fully resolved. Under such circumstances the TATAs announced on 3 October 2008 that they would be shifting the project to Gujarat. Ratan Tata specifically blamed Mamata Bannerjee for the decision to pull out of the state.
I remember that the next day Anandabazar Patrika carried two public letters that Narendra Modi wrote to Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee and Mamata Bannerjee which were aimed at giving a slap on the face of the Bengalis.
There is no doubt however that the sustained agitation, coupled with the agitation at Nandigram during the same time, helped TMC to spectacularly revive its fortunes in the state. From a party that was hardly taken seriously after the wipe out in the 2006 elections, it managed to transform itself into a party with a strong peasant base and significant intellectual support. How CPI(M) could feel even after a year of trouble that it was not losing its peasant base will remain a mystery. Clearly the famous “machinery” of the party at the grass-root level was not able to send the right signals to the top or the people at the top were not able to hear. It will also remain a mystery as to why Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee felt that the TATA project was a prestige battle for him. It was after all just a project and it could have been left to the relevant department to handle just as the project I was working in was left to the Panchayat Department. That would have helped to reduce media hype if nothing else. There was also very little preparation in terms of awareness campaign, involvement of panchayats and developing a suitable compensation package beforehand. CPI (M) it seemed was willing to risk its peasant vote bank in order to win this battle and committed its first act of self-destruction. The second of course was Nandigram, happening simultaneously, to which we now turn.
XVIII
Unfortunately what happened at Nandigram remains a mystery except for some of the facts on certain important dates. The report of the CBI enquiry was never made public and newspaper reports were heavily influenced by the particular ideological stance of the newspaper. Nonetheless let me try to weave together some sort of a narrative based on the impressive timeline that Asis Kumar Das has prepared and is available on the net (http://www.scribd.com/doc/3604739/Nandigram-Timeline-22-August-2005-17-June-2008). But before we move on the specific case we must remind ourselves that the district of Purba Medinipur is a reasonably developed district, with human development indicators that almost matches that of Kerala. In other words it is one of the districts that have actually enjoyed the fruits of Left Front rule unlike a district such as Purulia or Uttar Dinajpur. Undivided Medinipur was a hotbed of nationalist politics and later of Leftist mobilization. In 2003 panchayat elections Left Front won almost all the seats. What is not clear to me is how strong was the anti-Left Front sentiment before the announcement of the SEZ at Nandigram. Was a tension developing between 2003 and 2006 that we are not aware of and did this tension finally help the opposition to mobilize the people against the SEZ? Unfortunately there is no clear answer as to what was happening in Nandigram prior to the announcement of the SEZ. With this unsolved mystery as a prelude, let us move on to the story of the SEZ itself.
The story starts in the Indonesian capital of Jakarta, where on 25 August 2005, Chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the Salim Group. It was agreed that the Salim Group would play the developer’s role to promoting an industrial park in the nature of a Special Economic Zone. At this point the matter did not raise any eyebrow in Bengal. Almost a year later, on 14 June 2006, Beni Santoso, Chairman of the Salim Group visited Kolkata. This was a much publicized event and although Mamata Bannerjee staged a protest, she had any following as her credibility was at its rock bottom. The next day, CPIM leader of Purba Medinipur, Mr. Laxman Seth showed Mr. Santoso the land that was proposed for the SEZ. Santoso was satisfied and said that the Salim Group would require 27000 acre to set up the SEZ out of which 15000 acre would be at Nandigram and 12000 acre would be at Haldia. An agreement to this effect was signed between the Government of West Bengal and the Salim Group on 31 July.
By August SUCI, TMC and Jamait-i-Ulema Hind and the Santosh Rana faction of CPI (M-L) had formed several organisations such as the Krishak Ucched Birodhi O Janaswartho Roksha Committee ((SUCI), Krishi Jami Raksha Committee (TMC). By October the news of land acquisition at Singur had spread to Nandigram and there was fear that massive amount of cultivable land would be acquired by the Government. Proving the fear to be true, the Haldia Development Authority issued a notice on land acquisition The next day, in a public meeting called at Nandigram bus stand the names of 27 mouzas of Nandigram I block were announced. By second January the list of earmarked mouzas were sent to concerned GPs of Nandigram I and Khejuri 2.
Clearly, Laxman Seth had overestimated his authority over the region. The next day the first clash between the police and the protestors took place at Garchakraberia GP. There were allegations of firing without any provocation. Five villagers were injured in the firing. As a result the villagers damaged roads and bridges and blocked roads with boulders and tree trunks to prevent police forces from entering the villages. What followed from here on wards in a classic case of failure to manage discontent on part of the administration under an inexperienced District Magistrate, Mr. Anup Agarwal, who was briefly in the panchayat department when I first joined as Research Co-ordinator. Whether a more astute administrator would have handled matters differently and better remains a question to which there cannot be any easy answer. But there was certainly room for better administrative skills.
On 4 January 2007, in a provocative move, a CPI(M) office was set on fire a Rajaramchak. Party office in Sonachura was put under lock and key. It is not clear exactly who did this. About 250 CPI(M) supporters were forced to flee from home. The various different committees of protestors were also brought under one banner, Bhumi Ucched Pratirodh Committee (BUPC), with local TMC leader from Kanthi, Mr .Sisir Adhikari, as its president.
Faced with this provocation, local CPI(M) reacted like an injured bull in the bull fighting arena. It set up a number of camps at Satkhanda in Khejuri 2 Block that surrounded the protesting villages. Arms were amassed on both sides. To add fuel to the fire, state-level veteran leader, Binoy Konar said on 6 January, “If they want to do things democratically, we shall reciprocate. But if they make things difficult for us, we are prepared to make life hell for them.” Hardly any body was in the mood to do things democratically, and by the evening of the 6th bombs were being hurled and bullets were being fired in a battle that lasted through the night and onto the next day. At least 6 persons died from both sides and house of CPI(M) leader Debangshu Sasmal was set on fire. BUPC observed 24 hour bandh. As expected, political parties blamed each other for the violence. However what is interesting is that even after 7 January the administration did not take strong measures to weed out the seeds of violence from the area and start a process of grievance redressal in a peaceful manner. It is also strange that arms could be acquired so easily by the hooligans on both sides.
The police did intervene but in a feeble manner. Six rounds of bullets were fired in the air to chase away protestors at Dinabandhunagar. But the fighting continued. Mr. Anup Agarwal, The DM called for an all-party meeting but did very little once that meeting failed to arrive at any solution. There was still time to establish administrative control over the region without using violent methods but that was not done.
On January 9 Chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee said that it was a mistake on part of the Haldia Development Authority to issue notice, and said somewhat dramatically, that it should be torn down (chirey felo). This showed confusion within the ranks of the CPI(M). On 10 and 11 two meetings between the SDO of Haldia and the BDO of Khejuri with BUPC failed. By the next day the situation acquired a national dimension as noted civil rights activist Medha Patkar held a meeting at Hazrakata in Nandigram and rather provocatively dared CPI(M) state leadership to come to Nandigram and say to the villagers that they are acquiring land. Meanwhile the SDO of Haldia called for another meeting on the 19th but BUPC did not attend it. On 10 February a policeman, Sub-inspector Sadhu Chatterjee, was found dead near an adjoining river. It is not clear as to who is responsible for this attack.
Meanwhile, on 11 February Chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee addressed a public gathering at Heria in Khejuri 1 and said that Government of West Bengal is in no hurry to acquire land and would first explain to the people how the chemical hub would benefit them. If they did not want the hub then the project would be shifted elsewhere. The situation cooled down a bit after this and in an all-party meeting at Tamluk on 19 February it was decided that there would be a cease fire between the two sides at least till the end of the Madhyamik exams (Class 10 level exam). On 5th and 10th March the District Magistrate called for two all-party meetings which the opposition did not attend. It was decided by the administration at this stage that the roads that have been dug up will be repaired. This however led to rumours in the villages that the police were planning to invade and brutally crack-down on the villagers and tension began to mount. Clearly, after Bhattacharjee’s speech on 11Feburary there was scope for launching a public relations drive by the administration to reduce tension and spread of rumours. Instead they called for closed-door meetings which the opposition boycotted. On 13 March Mr. Subhendu Adhikari of TMC sent a fax message to the CM that “police authorities have created panic among the common people of Nandigram.” The CM and the state and district administration clearly failed to read the message and understand the ground reality. BUPC on its turn once more decided to play the bull-fighting game of provoking the bull. It began to mobilize the villagers to come for a Puja and Koran reading session on the next day when the police would try to cross the cut made by the protesting villagers.
Therefore between 11 February and 13 March the situation once again became heated although it was already announced that land would not be acquired without consent. Here the situation was quite different from Singur where the Government was trying to acquire land. However Nandigram had become a big story in the television channels and that further added to the developing tensions.
On 14 March the police began to move toward the protesting villages at around 10 a.m. They faced a crowd of 20,000 – 25000 protestors led by women. It is not clear exactly why the police decided to open fire at an unarmed crowd led by women and children. Clearly they were not capable of thinking with a cool head. 14 people died and around 75 were injured. There were also allegations of rape and sexual assault. However this widely reported incident will remain to some extent a mystery. Were the women at the front instructed to insult the police? Was it a deliberate ploy to provoke the hot-headed and undisciplined police force? Or was it a deliberate attempt at teaching the protestors a lesson that they would never forget and break their morale? Unfortunately the CBI enquiry reports are not available to us. But there is no doubt that this incident reflected the failure of the district administration to understand the ground reality and act in an intelligent manner. This is true either way – if they lost their nerve or if they decided to teach unarmed protestors a lesson.
The incident, needless to say, became a massive media event and very rightly led to wide spread condemnation. Writers and artists like Mahasweta Devi, Sankho Ghosh, Nabarun Bhattacharya, Jaya Mitra, Aparna Sen, Kabir Suman, Bibhash Chakrabarty and Bratya Basu were among those who took the lead in the public protest. CPI-M’s pro-poor image was damaged beyond repair. The bull-fighting technique of the opposition worked perhaps better than they expected.
XIX
The events at Nandigram and surrounding the issue at Nandigram between 14 March and the Panchayat election of 2008 may be seen as a case of, what Ranajit Guha once said of a different context, “domination without hegemony”.
Immediately after the fateful incident at on 14 March A Division Bench headed by Chief Justice S. S. Nijjar ordered CBI probe. On 20 March Government of West Bengal ordered a CID probe into the incident.The Government had no option at this stage but to accept responsibility. On 29 March at a programme organised by DYFI, Chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee claimed full responsibility of the incident and said that the Nandigram project has been scrapped. However by early September a different line of thinking had emerged. On 3 September the Government announced that a chemical hub would be set up at Nayachar, 30 kilometres away from Nndigram. However the site would be finalized only after an environmental impact assessment.
By end of October the situation at Nandigram again became heated as there was fresh violence at the local level. On 28 October two party offices of CPI(M) were torched and TMC in turn alleged that a convoy of Mamata Bannerjee was hit by a bullet fired from a CPI(M) office while she was traveling in the Nandigram region. On 4 November, Brinda Karat, gave expression to the renewed sense of aggression on part of CPI(M) when she alleged at a meeting in Kolkata that TMC was indulging in opportunistic politics and those who were hatching this conspiracy should be given “dum dum dawai”. Perhaps Ms Karat’s aggression had something to do with the fact that SFI had lost the JNU student union election the day before. On the very next day, 5 November, there was a battle between CPI(M) and BUPC. This was the beginning of a war unleashed by local CPI(M) to regain control over villages over which BPUC was now reigning. By 6 November the situation had become such that Home Secretary, Prasad Ranjan Ray had to describe it as “war-like situation”. As CPI(M) continued to gain more and more control over the region its rhetoric became more and more aggressive. On 10 November CPI(M) accused the Governor Shri Gopal Gandhi of partisanship. Meanwhile intellectuals in Kolkata boycotted the Kolkata Film Festival.
On 12 November CPI(M) organised a “victory rally” at Nandigram. CRPF troops were able to enter the villages only after the victory rally was carried out. By this time Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee’s apologetic tone had disappeared. On the same day he said that the “opposition has been paid back in their own coin.”
Although by this time CPI(M) had by force regained control over its “lost” area there were signs of its loss of hegemony. The first indication of this was in a small school committee election on 10 February 2008 when CPI(M) lost in the two schools where elections were held. It was perhaps too small an incident for CPI(M) to take note of. Sporadic clashes continued between February and May. On 21 May Panchayat election results came out resulting in heavy defeat for the Left Front. TMC won the Zilla Parishad of East Midnapore for the first time. CPI(M)’s share in the Zilla Parishad was reduced from 50/52 in 2003 to 16/52 in 2008. On 27 May TMC carried out its victory rally.
While all these were happening, there were a couple of interesting incidents around me that perhaps deserves recollection. There is no doubt that Nandigram shook even the die-hard CPI(M) loyalists. Some of my friends began to admit that there was a rot in the party which needed to be arrested. However an interesting reaction came from a highly educated young academic. Her position was that yes Nandigram cannot be condoned, but the party was in danger and therefore the need of the hour was to stand by the party rather than to criticize it. The comment reflected a very strange kind of psychological dependence on the entity called the party which was almost like the Church, which had to be defended in its hour of crisis even though all was not right about it.
The second incident took place at a relative’s place after the panchayat election. A relative of mine is a member of the party, and one of the few who actually holds a doctorate degree within the party. He asked me, over a drink, what was my reaction to the loss of CPI(M) in the panchayat election? I said somewhat sarcastically that what does my knowledge matter when CPI(M) has its own famous machinery? He said that yes, they have internal information, but it would be good to have my opinion as an independent person working in the panchayat department. So I gave him my explanation. Then after a moment of silence he said that what was worrying was not that the party had lost the election but the fact that the party was unable to predict it, which means that the information system of the party was not working anymore. We agreed over the next peg that the district units have become used to bluffing Alimuddin Street and Alimuddin Street had no means of verification independent of the district units.
In January 2010 I had an opportunity to visit Nandigram. By this time TMC was firmly in power in the district. I had an opportunity to meet a cross-section of TMC leaders from panchayats to the Zilla Parishad along with some officials and development professionals. One of the persons I met was Mahadeb Bagh who was in the Nandigram II Panchayat Samity and had participated in the movement against the SEZ. He described the results of the election as an “oloukik ghotona”, a fantastic event, something that was beyond their imagination. When I tried to find out in what way TMC’s approach to panchayats was different from CPI(M)’s there was no clear and prompt answer. Usually the answer came after a bit of thinking, the most important of which was that TMC would not try to run the panchayats through “remote control”. Whether this was correct or not is not important for our narrative as it is not about TMC’s governance. What is important is that the new party had identified what was the element of CPI(M)’s approach to the panchayats that was most hated – the obsession with control by the party office which did not allow the panchayats to function on their own. In fact, in Amdabad II Gram Panchayat of Nandigram II block I found a rather curious case. When I visited the Gram Panchayat office police camps were still in place on the ground floor. In this panchayat CPI(M) won in 2008, but after the debacle of 2009 Parliamentary election the Pradhan, who was close to Laxman Seth, fled as a result of which there was a power vacuum in the panchayat. The majority CPI(M) members voted a lady from TMC to become the Pradhan as they found her to be the most competent among all the members. When I asked how this was possible in a state of intense political rivalry, the CPI(M) member I could talk to explained that the future of their villages came before party rivalries. I tried to find from them a first hand account of the violence during 2006-08 but they preferred to remain silent. At the most their faces exhibited a wry smile. I got the impression that they wanted to forget those days and move on.
XX
At both Singur and Nandigram, the West Bengal Police excelled in mismanagement, inefficiency and arrogance. The pattern continued at Lalgarh, a village in Binpur 1 block ofWest Midnapore. The story begins on 2 November 2008 when Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee was returning from Shalboni after laying the foundation stone of a steel plant to be set up by the Jindal Group. He was accompanied by Central Ministers, Ram Bilas Paswan and Jatin Prasada. The convoy narrowly escaped a landmine blast, which was the work of the Maoists who had managed to build a base in the region for some time.
While the attack on the Chief Minister and his convoy was deplorable, the situation quickly turned against the Left Front thanks to the West Bengal Police. Instead of carrying out an investigation into the incident in a professional manner the police went on rampage, physically tortured and abused the tribal population including women and children. An incident which took place on 4 November, two days after the blast, shows the incompetence of the police. Three school students, studying in class 8 to class 10 were returning from school and they were picked up by the police as suspected Maoists without any evidence what so ever. The incident sparked off widespread protests by enraged villagers who surrounded the Lalgarh police station demanding their release.
How far the Maoists were instigating the movement of the tribals against the police is not clear. But in all probability the movement at the beginning at least was a movement of the subaltern tribal population outside the umbrella of any political party or middle-class Civil Society Organisation/s. On 13 November 2008 a first-hand report by Partho Sarathi Ray was published in a blog (http://sanhati.com/front-page/1083/#1) which claimed that the police carried out a reign of terror on the night of the 6th in course of which poor men and women were brutally beaten up. Ray’s report clearly has its ideological biases but it is probably the first account by a person who actually went to the field and therefore I have chosen his account as a source of information. According to him a woman named Chitamoni Murmu was hit in her eyes by the butt of the gun and another woman, Panamani Hansda, was brutally kicked in her chest because of which she had multiple fractures. Both of them were hospitalized. Chitamani lost her eye. As a consequence of this brutality the next day the tribals rose in revolt and cut off roads, probably inspired by the events of Nandigram. Telephone lines and electricity connections were also disconnected. Ray mentions two traditional organisations at this stage of the movement – the Bharat Jakat Majhi Madwa Juan Gaonta and the smaller Kherwal Jumit Gaonta taking the lead in the movement. At this early stage the movement was not, according to him, controlled by any particular political party.
By November 15 a new organisation, Pulishi Santrash Birodhi Jonosadharoner Committee (People’s Committee Against Police Atrocities), was formed with Sidhu Soren as its Secretary and Chatradhar Mahato as its spokesperson. According to a report in The Telegraph (15. 11.2008) the new organisation was formed following a sense of betrayal by the Bharat Jakat Majhi Madwa, the traditional tribal organisation of the tribal elders. The report says that the police suspects that this new organisation was created by the Maoists although there is no clear evidence regarding this. Chatradhar Mahato, a former member of Chatra Parishad, the student wing of Congress and a supporter of Mamata Bannerjee, emerged as the most important leader of this organisation of the relatively younger tribals. Whether the new leadership were directly under the supervision of the Maoists is not clear, though CPI(M) and the administration had made such a claim, but there is no doubt that within a few days the Maoist had backed the movement. From another report by Partho Sarathi Ray on 16 November 2008 in the same blog mentioned above, it is clear that the traditional organisation of the elders were preferring a moderate line and were willing to negotiate with the administration but the PCPA, consisting of a younger generation, preferred a more aggressive stance. By end of November 2008 PCPA was clearly in the lead of the movement which had spread in many more villages in the district as well as in other districts. Apart from protesting against police atrocities they carried out some experiments with development work on their own. An important feature of their activities was a significant participation by women.
However it was not possible to maintain the non-political identity of the movement for long. The movement clearly became intertwined with Maoist movement against the state in course of the following months. PCPA also came close to TMC, helping the latter to build a base in the area. A pattern that was seen both in Singur and Nandigram was replicated – (a) a clueless inefficient administration unable to manage the situation, (b) politicization of the protests against a specific issue leading to a more general conflict with Left Front Government, (c) entry of middle-class “intellectuals” to lend support to the movement by attacking LFG, (d) local government kept completely out of the process of grievance redressal, (e) the issue getting lot of media attention, (f) escalation of violence between CPI(M) and those opposed to it, and (g) a local issue transforming itself into a national issue involving the Indian state and those who opposed it.
By the middle of 2009 Lalgarh became part of the ongoing war between the Maoists on the one hand and the Indian state on the other. On 17 June 2009 five companies of Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) and two companies of Commando Battalion for Resolute Action (COBRA) reached Midnapore. A combined force of the state police and the central forces thus initiated the Operation Green Hunt inWest Bengalfrom 18 June onwards. On 28 September Chatradhar Mahato, leader of the PCPA was arrested and the violence on both sides continued till the Assembly election of 2011 without any clear victory on either side. However the control of PCPA slowly became diluted as the political parties took the centre-stage of the battle. While CPI(M) lost and TMC gained from the situation, Chatradhar Mahato also lost as an independent candidate in the 2011 Assembly Elections from the Jhargram constituency.
As in Nandigram, Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee, both as the Chief Minister as well as the Police Minister failed to take quick action against the policemen who carried out atrocities which triggered off the series of events which led to the Lalgarh movement. It was possible for him to take exemplary action against the guilty policemen to restore confidence of the aggrieved people. However this he failed to do. From a situation that could have generated a sympathy wave for him following the assassination attempt he ended up as the villain who unleashed police atrocities and the Operation Green Hunt on the tribal population of Lalgarh. The dream of a steel plant and economic development went sour; guns took over the lives of a poverty stricken population.
It may also be worthwhile to see what were common and what the differences were between Singur, Nandigram and Lalgarh. All three cases involved land acquisition to create capitalist industry through Special Economic Zones. In all three cases the police and the administration failed to manage the conflict that arose and carried out unnecessary violence. The issue of economic development through industrialization became intertwined with firstly political rivalries between different political parties and secondly between local level bosses claiming allegiance to different political parties. In all three cases there were hints of an autonomous voice of the subaltern emerging but that voice became quickly subsumed under the control imposed by the political parties.
However there were also significant differences. At Singur land was actually acquired even though there was resistance to it while because of the resistance land was not acquired at Nandigram. At Lalgarh on the other hand the acquisition of land did not cause any tension but the conflict started following the completely unnecessary atrocities carried out by the police. In case of Lalgarh we also have a clear and marked presence of the Maoists while their role in the other two cases is alleged but there is no clear evidence of it. Lalgarh was also different from the other two cases in the fact that here the tribal population was involved and it was the first major tribal revolt in West Bengal for a long time. Also at Lalgarh the main grievance of the protestors were not against loss of land but against the humiliation that was meted out to them by the state authorities.
One aspect that was common to all three of course was the fact that the protests took place in ruralBengalalthough they had a significant impact on the urban psyche as well. The fourth major upheaval however took place in the city ofKolkatainvolving a young man’s mysterious death. To the story of Rizwanur Rahman we now turn.
XXI
On 21 September 2007 a thirty year old young man was found dead on a railway track between Dum dum and Bidhannagar stations of Kolkata with a wound at the back of his head. His name was Rizwanur Rahman, a computer trainer at a multi-media training centre. His unfortunate death had all the juicy ingredients of a media sensation. He was a Muslim young man, married to a young Hindu girl, Priyanka Todi, who came from a rich industrialist family. Priyanka was one of his students at the computer training centre. Love blossomed between the two and on 18 August they secretly got married according to the Special Marriage Act. The family members of both sides were not informed and only a few friends attended as witness to the signature ceremony. After the marriage Priyanka went back to his parental home and life went on as usual for a few days.
A few days later, Rizwanur decided to break the news to his elder brother Rukbanur Rahman. Following this Rizwanur brought his wife home on August 31 without informing the father of the bride, Mr. Ashok Todi. They wrote a letter to the police seeking protection from the possible threats from the Todi family.
What happened between August 31 and September 21 is a matter of legal dispute and therefore I would only present it as a story we could hear or read in the newspapers. The Todi family was shocked and did not like the fact that their daughter had got married to Rizwanur. This is not very uncommon when a marriage takes place that violates not only the class divide but also the communal divide. However what complicated the situation was the allegation that the Todi family used their class position to influence top level police officials of Kolkata to threaten the young couple. It is alleged that the police threatened Rizwanur that he would be charged with a case of abduction if he did not persuade his wife to return to her family (Indian Express, 7 October 2007). It is also alleged that as a result of this threat from the police Rizwanur decided to send Priyanka back to the Todis for a week. This was the informal understanding between the police and Rizwanur. Needless to say, solving marital disputes where no law has been violated was not exactly what the police was supposed to do. They had other things such as catching criminals to take care of.
However Priyanka did not return to Rizwanur’s home after one week. After a while Rizwanur was unable to talk to her on the phone either. On 19 September Rizwanur approached Association of People’s Democratic Rights (APDR) a Civil Society Organisation working on human rights issues (The Telegraph, 23 September 2007). He wanted to explore legal options of getting his wife back and also registered the threats he had received. He was supposed to meet the organisation once more on 21 September. But in the morning of the 21st his body was found on a railway track between Dumdum and Bidhan Nagar stations.
The matter received massive media attention and resulted in social outcry. The question was did Rizwanur commit suicide or was it a case of murder? Rizwanur’s family alleged that he was murdered while the Police Commissioner described it as a “simple case of suicide” even before the post mortem was completed (Times of India, 4 October 2011). The Commissioner, Mr. Prasun Mukherjee, became a target of scorn when he said that eloping even for adults was immoral and the police have always interfered in such matters. It also became clear through media investigations that some time back Prasun Mukherjee was elected as the President of Cricket Association of Bengal (CAB) with support from Mr. Ashok Todi.
An investigation by Kinsuk Basu of The Telegraph revealed within a week that the suicide argument was full of holes (The Telegraph, 28 September, 2007). The body was placed on the tracks with head up while usually in case of a suicide on the railway track the body is seen face down. There was only one major injury behind the back of his head. The shirt was spotlessly clean according to eyewitnesses. Finally, the eyewitnesses said that the body was removed with unusual alacrity, within half-an-hour of the phone call, whereas railway police usually takes more than three hours to come to the spot.
What was unusual about the response to the incident was that there was a massive and spontaneous middle-class outcry against the incident. Candle-lights protests were organised outside any party banner and youths who perhaps belong to the “apolitical” section of the society also participated in the movement for justice. In this sense the response was similar to the protests at Singur, Nandigram and Lalgarh – the first reactions came from outside the political parties. New terms “nagarik samaj”, roughly meaning “civil society” was floated to understand this segment which was protesting outside the party umbrella. The protests showed that there was a possibility of ordinary citizens protesting against something wrong.
However the course of the agitation also followed the pattern set by Singur, Nandigram and Lalgarh – citizen’s protests were quickly taken over by the political parties and TMC made the most out of it. Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee once again took almost a month to take any action against the police officers. On 17 October he said that all police officers whose names were involved in the case would be transferred with immediate effect. This announcement was made however only after the Kolkata High Court ordered a CBI investigation into the death. By this time Trinamool Congress leader Mamata Banerjee had already met the family of Rizwanur and pledged all support to them. Brinda Karat pledged the support of her party to the family of Rizwanur in November (The Hindu 5 Nov 2007) but she was late in doing so. By this time Rizwanur’s family had turned towards TMC.
The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) finally described the case as suicide but charge-sheeted Priyanka’s father Ashok Todi, her uncle Pradip Todi, maternal uncle Anil Saraogi, former deputy commissioner Ajay Kumar, ACP Sukanti Chakraborty, sub-inspector Krishnendu Das, and a person known as Pappu who allegedly acted as a link between the police and the Todis for abatement of suicide. However the final decision on this case is yet to be made.
In another gory twist to the tale, on 11 February 2009, Arindam Manna, the railway police officer who initiated the investigation on the Rizwanur case was found dead on the railway tracks in Mankundu station of Hoogly district. He had injuries to his left eye, right leg and had a deep cut on the throat. He was a key witness in the CBI charge-sheet. There is no information as yet as to what caused his death.
The agitation around the death of Rizwanur Rahman came roughly at the same time when the incidents of Singur, Nandigram and Lalgarh took place and therefore added fuel to the anti-CPI (M) fire that had been already ignited. It also added to the disenchantment of the Muslim community from the Left Front since the publication of the Sachar Committee report towards the end of 2006 which claimed that West Bengal is one of the worst states to live in for Muslims with only 2.4 per cent of government officials being Muslim even though they form nearly 25 per cent of the population.
All these events of 2006 and 2007 caught the over confident CPI-M state leadership off-guard. Suddenly the invincible machinery of the party seemed to be gasping for breath in the face of one challenge after the other which eroded its public support. Everything happened within a short span of time, a little too quickly for the party to understand, absorb and react. Unfortunately for the party more misfortune was in store. As if things were not bad enough in Bengal and while CPI(M) in West Bengal was desperately trying to salvage itself from the debacles of Singur, Nandigram, Lalgarh, the agitation around the death of Rizwanur Rahman and the damaging claims of the Sachar Report, the party leaders in New Delhi took the suicidal decision in July 2008 to withdraw support from the UPA.
XXII
In the 2004 parliamentary election no single party won absolute majority to come to power on its own. This was in keeping with recent trend of coalition politics in India. Out of 543 seats, Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) won 169 seats whereas Indian National Congress (INC) led United Progressive Alliance (UPA) won 222 seats. The Left Front achieved its best result so far with 59 seats. Clearly the Left Front was in a position to significantly influence national policy by supporting INC to form the government. A Common Minimum Programme was worked out; veteran leader and General Secretary of CPI (M) Harkishan Singh Surjeet played an important role in it and the CMP aimed to push the national policies towards a centre-left position. The Left Front chose not to join the Government but support it and influence its policies.
After assuming office there were several areas in which Manmohan Singh’s government was pushed to follow a pro-poor policy. The most notable was the passing of the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (2005) which led to the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (NREGS). This Act for the first time in the history of India gave a rural household the right to claim hundred days of unskilled employment from the government in a financial year. This was, at least on paper, different from the previous wage employment schemes of Government of India where the government decided to give employment through activities such as road building but the people of the country as such did not have any right to employment. Other important bills that were passed after the UPA came to power included the Right to Information Act (2005) and the Protection of Women from Domestic Violence Act (2005). While the left parties were alone not responsible for these progressive legislations, they did support them and pushed the government to pass them. It was in general agreed that the left parties were playing an important constructive role in the parliament and the fact that the left MPs had a clean image as far as financial corruption was concerned helped to boost their standing at the national level. There was a debate as to whether the left should have joined the government or not but nonetheless the overall image of the role of the Left Front in UPA 1 was good till 2008. The image was boosted by the performance of Mr. Somnath Chatterjee as the Speaker of the house. The 2006 landslide victory of the left in West Bengal further cemented the position of the Left Front in the country.
Meanwhile an important change took place within CPI(M). An older generation of pragmatic leaders such as Jyoti Basu and Harkishan Singh Surjeet gave way to a younger generation of leaders. Prakash Karat became the General Secretary in 2005 in place of Harkishan Singh Surjeet. This was in tune with change of guard in West Bengal from Jyoti Basu to Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee. This change, when it took place was welcomed and it showed that unlike many other parties in India which were ruled along family lines, CPI(M) was capable of choosing a new leadership through a democratic process. In 2006 all looked well – CPI(M) had a new leadership both at the Centre and at the state level, it had a significant number of seats in the Parliament, strong track record of land reform and panchayati raj, relatively clean MPs, and even the Speaker of the Lok Sabha came from the Party. The question was whether CPI(M) would be able to further increase its strength in the country in the coming years.
This rise of the parliamentary left should not be seen in isolation from a general rise of left wing parties in the country, in the subcontinent and elsewhere. The non-parliamentary left consisting mostly of the Communist Party of India (Maoists) had developed a significant presence in large parts of central India. Other leftist parties such as CPI(M-L) also had their pockets of influence. In neighbouring Nepal a left party also came to power in 2006 by overthrowing traditional monarchical rule. Latin America was undergoing a left revival with more and more countries choosing a leftist government of one type or the other.
At this historic juncture however the left parties of India failed to seize the opportunity that came before them. Instead of fighting their common class-enemies the Maoists revolutionary left and the parliamentary Left Front chose to see each other as enemies and failed to develop even a minimum understanding. They remained trapped in a battle with each other trying to settle old scores rather than developing tolerance for different forms of left movement as has happened in Latin America. This produced a disunited left in India with the two sides spending their energies to kill each other and even joining hands with non-left forces to win their battles. The result of this short-sightedness was that by 2011 the parliamentary left was reduced to insignificance and the revolutionary left was battling for survival against sustained para-military action.
Secondly, within CPI(M) there was a division between how the central leadership in Delhi saw the role of the party and how West Bengal unit sought to progress. While Delhi wanted to follow an ant-imperialist/anti-market reform policy, the Bengal unit preferred to be more open towards capitalism and invite capitalists to set up factories in the state. The duality perhaps sprang from two different compulsions – the central leadership wanted to critique the national pro-market policy while the state leadership had to find a way to industrialize within a pro-market neo-liberal regime by competing with other states in attracting investment.
Thus following its own ideological position, Prakash Karat’s central leadership found it impossible to continue with UPA when Government of India decided to sign the US-India Civil Nuclear Agreement in 2008, better known as 123 Agreement. For the Delhi leadership of CPI(M) the treaty amounted to a sell-out to American imperialism. The technicalities of the treaty were extremely complicated and there was no clear public opinion on this. What became most controversial and brought out the division between Bengal and Delhi in sharp focus was the decision to withdraw support from the government, thereby plunging the government towards a vote of confidence. The Bengal unit was at that point in time trying to recover from the wave of anti-incumbency that was generated by events at Singur, Nandigram, Lalgarh and the case of Rizwanur Rahman’s death; its best hope lay in keeping the opposition disunited and therefore the alliance with Congress was vital. This was also important in view of the fact that the largest number of MPs for the CPI(M) came from Bengal and the parliamentary election was only a year away. If the alliance with Congress fell then it was likely to create the opportunity for TMC to bridge the gap with Congress and go to the election with a combined opposition. While the rumour of left’s withdrawal was going around since 2007 as the discussions between US and India was progressing, Biman Basu, Chairman of Bengal’s Left Front ruled out any such possibility in a public statement where he said, “it is a gossip” (DNA, 16 August 2007). He was perhaps unaware of how the party leadership was thinking or was himself indulging in wishful thinking. A few months later in the report on the 19th Party Congress held at Coimbatore in April 2008 it was said that: “The CPI (M) will firmly oppose India becoming a subordinate strategic ally of the United States and thereby contribute to the strengthening of the worldwide anti-imperialist struggle” (http://cpim.org/documents/2008-19%20cong-pol-org%20report.pdf) but did not say that support would be withdrawn from UPA1. But while the chief architect of the Common Minimum Programme Harkishan Singh Surjeet was in his death-bed, on 9 July 2008 CPI(M) issued a press statement in which it said that the Manmohan Singh Government has violated the Common Minimum Programme and the “nuclear deal… is anchored in a US law, the Hyde Act,[therefore] it will hamper an independent foreign policy and restrict our strategic autonomy” (http://cpim.org/content/withdrawal-support-upa-government). The statement also blamed the UPA for not universalizing the Public Distribution System, not stopping forward trading on essential commodities, curb hoarding and speculators, etc. It accused the UPA government of following the same neo-liberal policies that the previous BJP government followed and said hence support to the government is being withdrawn.
While the decision to oppose the pro-US foreign policy of Manmohan Singh and the other criticisms made of Congress government was ideologically correct, the decision to withdraw support was a political mistake. It was a mistake on several counts. Firstly, if the Congress led government would have fallen then BJP would have made the maximum benefit, not CPI(M). Secondly, there was a strong public opinion in favour of a government lasting its full term. But most importantly, CPI(M) was not hundred percent sure that it would be able to pull off the vote of no-confidence. In the end Congress survived although through means that are being debated. To add to Karat’s embarrassment he had to face rebellion from Somnath Chatterjee, the Speaker of the House and important leader of CPI(M). Chatterjee was expelled from the party, a decision that reflected the inner conflicts within the party rather than its disciplinary strength as the same Somnath Chatterjee was later invited to campaign for CPI(M) in the Assembly election in West Bengal.
Once it failed to pull off the no-confidence motion, CPI(M) made, to my mind, an even bigger mistake by trying to forge a “third front” in the next parliamentary elections with parties with whom it had nothing in common ideologically. This extraordinary act of pragmatism was clearly inconsistent with the ideologically inspired decision to withdraw support from UPA 1. How could CPI(M) find an ally in a party like Telegu Desam and at the same time withdraw support from Congress for pursuing neo-liberalism? If Left Front would have gone for the elections on its own without trying to forge any kind of alliance with other non-left pro-capitalism political parties then at least one could have said that its decision to withdraw support was provoked by pure idealism, and not egoism, and it was willing to sacrifice power for the sake of its ideology.
What happened after the desperate attempt to create a “third front” was that Left Front lost the credibility that it was able to earlier establish as a moderate left-of-centre party on the national scene. I doubt how many members and sympathisers in 2008 saw CPI(M) as a “communist” party fighting to usher in a Bolshevik style revolution. On the other hand the party was valued in the national scene as a left-of-centre secular party with very few corrupt politicians which is a good antidote to extreme pro-market policies of Congress and BJP’s communalism but which was also not dogmatically opposed to market as such. This is a role that perhaps CPI(M) could have continued to play successfully till 2009 and then take a call as to whether it would continue with Congress or not. As it was formally not a part of the UPA Cabinet, withdrawing support was also not necessary to protect its leftist credentials. A wiser politician than Prakash Karat perhaps would have launched a fierce protest against the Civil Nuclear deal but continued to support the Government till 2009.
In the end no damage was done to United States and INC but in the next Lok Sabha Elections the Left Front lost 35 seats and was reduced to a position of almost irrelevance in the Parliament, with a total of 24 seats. Karat’s own party was the biggest loser with a loss of 27 seats, mostly from Bengal. Were these mistakes a result of political immaturity? I think so. In a statement in 2011, veteran CPI leader A.B. Bardhan said, “While withdrawal of support was imminent and inevitable, it should have happened earlier and not just a few months before elections…Support should have been withdrawn over some people’s issue” (Live Mint, 26 September 2011). However in 2008 he was not able to stop Left Front from taking the plunge towards disaster.
CPI(M)’s self-destruction was thus almost complete. The violence and incompetence of the police at Singur, Nandigram, Lalgarh and in the Rizwanur case had sparked off an anti-CPI(M) wave that was unimaginable in 2006. Important intellectuals of Kolkata such as Mahasweta Devi and Kabir Suman had made the support for Mamata Bannerjee clear and a new slogan “Paribartan Chai” (we want change) was in the air. They had realized that only Mamata Bannerjee had the mass appeal that could dislodge Left Front from power. A relentless and well-orchestrated media campaign by privately owned television channels had badly damaged the pro-poor image that Left Front had built over the years. Stories of human rights violations by CPI(M) which happened long back such as that of Marichjhapi were being re-kindled. In addition to all this the decision of CPI(M) central leadership to withdraw support from UPA made the electoral calculations easier by allowing TMC and Congress, bitter rivals otherwise, to join hands. Even in best of times Left Front managed to win regularly because the opposition vote remained divided but now that the opposition decided to go for an alliance, its chances of winning became slim. It is debatable as to whether CPI(M) would have lost power if support would not have been withdrawn but there cannot be any doubt that the decision helped the opposition rather than CPI(M) in West Bengal and nationally. As was expected, after several rounds of negotiations, on 11 March 2009 Congress and TMC announced an electoral alliance for the Lok Sabha Elections of 2009 (http://ibnlive.in.com/news/cong-tmc-reach-seatsharing-accord-in-bengal/87405-37.html).
The events that I have discussed so far – Singur, Nandigram, Lalgarh, Rizwanur’s death and the withdrawal of support from UPA 1 – are all widely reported events and fairly well-known though all mysteries have not been solved. However there is also, to my mind, another less discussed issue that was crucial for the fall of the Left Front in 2011 and this was Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee’s final mistake. I was able to see this mistake happening while working in the Panchayats and Rural Development Department between January 2006 and mid-2009 and as an external observer of rural Bengal till May 2011. Had he not committed this mistake, it is possible that he would have been able to turn things around or at least avoid a shameful defeat in rural West Bengal.
XXIII
In November 2005 Government of West Bengal with financial support from Government of UK launched an ambitious project called Strengthening Rural Decentralisation. Chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee inaugurated the programme. The formal launching of the programme was preceded by a period of designing of the Project which took place in 2003 and in the interval period a series of studies was carried out on the panchayat system of West Bengal aimed at informing the project once it starts. In popular parlance these two phases were known as the Design Phase and the Post-Design Phase. Making an application to Government of UK’s development department, DFID, is a long and complicated process and it also involves structuring the project in terms of a set of complicated jargon that is only understood by development sector professionals. However to put things in simple language one can say that the project aimed at a package of initiatives to improve the panchayat system of the state. This package included reform of archaic laws and regulations, creation of a road map for the coming years, capacity building of the panchayat representatives and officials, improving resource base of the panchayats through tax and non-tax measures, improving the financial management system of the panchayats, carry out a largish experiment with planning from below in about 300 gram panchayats and carry out research on specific issues so that policy makers can understand systemic problems related to the panchayats. The project was initially to be implemented in six relatively backward districts of Uttar and Dakshin Dinajpur, Murshidabad, Birbhum, Purulia and Purba Medinipur.
Government of UK put certain stiff conditions – certain amount of results would have to be achieved within two years, in order to receive funds in future. Thus additional contractual staffs were recruited for the project to be spread over the project districts and a separate cell was created within the panchayat department in Kolkata, known as SRD Cell. I applied for the post of Research and Studies Coordinator and was lucky to get the job.
The panchayat system of West Bengal, it may be recalled, is one of the proud achievements of the Left Front. It was Left Front who introduced the first panchayat election in the state in 1978, long before the 73rd amendment to the Constitution of India in 1993. Although it did not achieve the level of the panchayats of Kerala, it was nonetheless one of the better examples of panchayati raj in the country. Over the years a lot was achieved but a lot also remained to be achieved. In addition over the years systemic problems had taken root such as increasing bureaucratisation as was pointed out by one of the studies of the post-design phase on the organizational aspects of the panchayats. Thus the initiation of SRD showed will on part of the government to further improve the system.
In strictly political terms also the project presented before Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee a golden opportunity. He and the leaders of Left Front should have realised that launching a project to improve the panchayati raj of the state was good campaign material for the Front. Cadres of the party could have been mobilized to achieve planning from below the way it was done in Kerala during the People’s Plan movement under EMS Namboodiripad in the mid-nineties. In 2005-06, receiving funding from Government of UK was also not considered politically incorrect. If necessary the project could have been funded by the State Government itself. While on the one hand land acquisition related issues were creating anti-Left Front emotions, SRD presented the Left Front with the perfect opportunity to prove its pro-poor image. It also made perfect sense since the panchayat elections were due in 2008. What can be better than to go to the electorate saying that for the last two years Left Front has implemented a massive project to improve the panchayat system of the state? What could have been a better way of mobilsing the disheartened cadres than to train them to create people’s plan for the gram panchayats and give them the sense of pride in creating one of the best panchayat system of the country?
Indeed in 2006 Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee got another golden opportunity. UPA1, of which the Left Front was an ally, initiated the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme, as has been mentioned in the last section. It was a scheme for which funds was unlimited, the more that one could spend the more one would get. This scheme, if taken up with enthusiasm by the Left Front could have made substantial difference in terms of its image building and counter-attacking the campaign of the opposition which sought to portray the Left Front as anti-poor. Even after Singur and Nandigram the Left Front failed to take any serious initiative to involve its famous party machinery to implement this project in the districts. Along with NREGS there was also a state-sponsored scheme called Provident Fund for Landless Agricultural Labourers (PROFLAL), which also could have been implemented with greater enthusiasm in order to win the support of the alienated rural voters.
Similarly, following tragic hunger related deaths at Amlashol in 2004, the Panchayat Department carried an interesting exercise based on Census data to find 4612 villages (roughly 10% of total villages) in the state that were less developed. Such an exercise at the village level was a pioneering exercise in case of India. After this the villages were officially designated as “Backward Villages” and a budgetary allocation was made for them. Once again, here was an opportunity, an initiative of the state government that could have been taken up by the Left Front in order to counter the campaign of the opposition after Singur and Nandigram. Majority of the “backward villages” in Purulia and West Midnapore belonged to the tribal population and sustained development work in these districts could have had an impact on the tribal population that was becoming alienated.
Unfortunately, Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee did not visit a single gram panchayat where SRD was being implemented even after he saw that Mamata Bannerjee was frequently going to the villages and that was having a substantial impact on the villages. The steps that Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee took instead were bizarre. Firstly, an incompetent person, Bankim Ghosh, was made the Minister of State for the Panchayats to support Mr. Surya Kanta Mishra who was Minister for both Health and Panchayats, an impossible task to achieve. Secondly, once the Parliamentary election was lost, Mishra was removed unceremoniously from the Panchayats department and a new Minister was appointed and finally when the Left Front realised that they made a mistake in choosing Bankim Ghosh as the Minister of State they did not give him any ticket to stand in the next election. But that was a little too late.
Why am I harping on this failure? This is because development projects and schemes, especially in a state like West Bengal, can achieve only moderate results if they are left to the bureaucrats. It is the task of the Chief Minister and the party leaders to make it clear to cadres in the districts what is the priority of the Government and what must be implemented beyond the routine administrative level. This Left Front astonishingly failed to do even after receiving the setbacks of Singur and Nandigram early in its tenure. The fact that the setbacks came early means that Left Front had the opportunity to counter-attack and score goals of their own. There were golden opportunities waiting to be taken up by the Chief Minister. He failed to see them. In fact it seemed that the Chief Minister was only interested in industrialization and nothing else. If his idea was to turn Bengal towards capitalism what prevented him from pushing the cause of a project like SRD or schemes like PROFLAL or putting the backward villages on the top of his priority list? Did the multinational come to him and told him not to invest time and energy in the social sector? Most importantly, why did the party leadership fail to see the political benefits of implanting such schemes?
What actually happened instead was pathetic. In the absence of serious support from the Party, my colleagues had to develop personal equations at the bottom and convince the local leaders to implement the project. Where such equations could be developed things went well, where it could not progress was slow. However as CPI(M) came under fire things actually got worse, in some districts party leaders started to say that SRD is actually creating trouble and turning the people against the party. Note the irony – a project that was inaugurated by the Chief Minister was being suspected by his own party members. West Bengal flopped in NREGS as well and PROFLAL was carried out in routine manner as one of the unimportant schemes of the state. I was personally responsible for coordinating an evaluation of the “Backward Villages”. We surveyed 92 villages in 7 districts and produced a report by 2007 which showed not only that development has not reached these villages but also showed that the enthusiasm for poverty alleviation in these villages was missing. Seven other reports were prepared on various issues related to the Panchayats. All eight studies brought out a negative picture. It was however the credit of the Minister, Surya Kanta Mishra, that he signed on the file that proposed that the researches should be made public.
However the situation changed after the loss in the Lok Sabha Elections. The first important step was the removal of Surya Kanta Mishra and the file related to the publication of the reports became inactive although a major international publisher had shown interest. Some of the best officers of the department, including the Principal Secretary and the Project Director of SRD, left for the Health Department along with some other bright junior officers. The rumour was that Surya Kanta Mishra has taken them away as retaliation to the move to remove him from the charge of the department. The new Minister was a relative green horn in panchayat matters and was hardly able to improve things.
The failure of the Chief Minister to put the rural development projects on his priority list as much as industrialization led to a situation where in the campaign to 2011 election the Left Front had hardly anything to show. If they could have said that poverty has been substantially reduced in the backward villages, NREGS has been successfully implemented along with schemes like PROFLAL and a reform programme like SRD was bringing new life to the panchayats then that would have been a powerful counter-attack to the campaign that was launched by the opposition. In the absence of such ammunitions, Left Front was left only with empty rhetoric regarding what it wishes to do in the future, conspiracy theories and televised histrionics by leaders like Gautam Deb. It is possible that the pro-Mamata wave would still have voted the Left out of power but in all probability the margin would have been more respectable. Instead almost all major leaders including the Chief Minister were wiped out by the angry electorate. The results of 2006 were almost completely reversed, with TMC and allies winning 226 seats and Left Front winning 62 seats. CPI (M) was reduced to the third position with 40 seats while Congress got 42 seats and TMC winning 184. Surya Kanta Mishra was the only leader of some stature who won in the election.
A small clarification may be in order here. It may be recalled that Classical Marxism of Marx-Engels-Lenin-Stalin-Mao-Castro which inspired Bengal in the sixties and seventies was almost non-existent in public discourse by the turn of the century as I have said earlier. What I have tried to discuss in the last few sections is how CPI-M as a party committed a series of suicidal mistakes that led to the fall from power in 2011. What needs to be discussed next is what TMC under Mamata Bannerjee did right in order to achieve its spectacular rise. When I say “right” however I use the word not in the sense of being ethically correct but in the sense of tactics that proved to be successful in beating the opposition.
XXIV
Mamata Banerjee comes from a lower-middle class but upper-caste family of Kolkata. Her political career began with the West Bengal branch of the Indira Congress as a youth leader. She became the General Secretary of the Mahila Congress(I) in 1976 and remained in that post till 1980. In 1984, she tasted her first major political victory when she defeated Left leader Somnath Chatterjee in the Jadavpur constituency of Kolkata in the Lok Sabha election following Indira Gandhi’s assassination which saw a pro-Congress wave in the country which brought Rajiv Gandhi to power. However she lost in 1989 Lok Sabha election, but again won in 1991 after the VP Singh government fell, this time from Calcutta South. She retained this seat between 1991 and 2009. In 1991 she became the Union Minister of State for Human Resource Development, Youth and Sports and Women and Child Development. In 1998 she left Congress and formed her own party All India Trinamool Congress and became an ally of the BJP in the National Democratic Alliance (NDA). In 2000 she presented her first railway budget as the Union Minister for Railways. She left that alliance in 2001 and allied with Congress and in 2004 became the Union Minister of Coal and Mines and again the Union Minister for Railways in 2009.
Her party, Trinamool Congress, which emerged as a Bengali regionalist party had limited success till 2009. In 1998 Lok Sabha election TMC won 7 seats. It increased the tally to 8 in Lok Sabha by election in 1999. In 2000 TMC won the Kolkata Municipal Corporation election for the first time, thereby signaling a shift of the Anti-CPI(M) vote of Kolkata from Congress to TMC. In the 2001 Assembly election TMC won 60 seats. However the fortunes of TMC began to fall in the next Lok Sabha Election in 2004 when it won only one seat, that of Mamata Banerjee. In 2005 Kolkata Municipal election TMC lost to the Left Front and again in the 2006 Assembly election of 2006 it won only 30 seats.
Thus till 2006 Mamata Banerjee had established herself as a popular leader of the anti-Left Front camp but her party had mixed fortunes with not much to show. It was her good fortune that during this time neither BJP nor Congress was able to perform well and therefore she remained the most important anti-Left Front leader. There were regional charismatic Congress leaders such as Adhir Chaudhuri in Murshidabad but no one who could appeal to the anti-CPI(M) electorate as a whole more than she could. But perhaps more importantly, she was able to acquire a reputation as a fearless enemy of CPI(M) who would never bow down to any pressure from the Party. In course of time she acquired a particular style of melodrama of being under attack from CPI(M) that made an emotional connect with the masses perhaps in the same way that folk dramas (jatras) and popular Bengali cinema did. She deliberately chose to wear a white Sari and hawai chappals and live in her lower middle-class ancestral home to prove her ordinary background. So “Momota” or “Didi” was definitely a household name by 2006, and the most important mass leader of the anti-CPI(M) electorate, which was never small in percentage but remained divided between Congress and Trinamool Congress.
Apart from building a new party Banerjee had a particular problem that was perhaps unique to West Bengal. She was popular but never really taken seriously the same way popular Bengali films like Minister Fatakeshto sell but do not have respectability. Her many acts of melodrama on the streets and in the Parliament were reported but laughed at in the respectable society of Bengal and helped the Left Front to project her as a mercurial and unreliable person and the fact that her party did not have any definite ideology was also useful in portraying her as an intellectually confused person. As a counter to this belief she tried to gain respectability by writing several books and even claimed to be a painter but such display of intellectual prowess did not have many takers. During this period Mamata Banerjee and Trinamool Congress received very little academic attention also, except for one article by Dwaipayan Bhattarchayya in Economic and Political Weekly (Dwaipayan Bhattacharyya, Making and Unmaking of Trinamul Congress, EPW, April 3-10, 2004, pp. 1529-1537). Bhattacharyya commented:
One of the greatest paradoxes of the policies of the TMC is that the party always took pain to prove that it is not lured by the positions of authority and can readily sacrifice such positions to protect the interests of West Bengal, or the poor, or the victims of CPI(M)’s ‘atrocities’ yet it never dithered in its attempt to invoke the strong (and undemocratic) arm of central authority at the slightest pretext. In other words, the party wobbled uneasily between its short and long term objectives, between its intent to project itself as a part with a difference and its repeated submission to the run-of-the-mill description of a political party steeped in the calculus material benefits, blackmailing, arm twisting and of course, corruption. (pp.1533-34).
He also pointed out that unlike Mayawati in UP for example Banerjee did not have a stable section of population as her party-base. He further commented very rightly that:
Whenever she stood by the urban toiler, the illegal slum-dwellers, the displaced population or even the rural poor, her voice…appears as a sporadic, unconvincing and, ultimately, driven by the urge to buy quick attention…The TMC therefore failed to translate its electoral promises into a social presence which could have been its only guarantee against a premature demise. (p.1537)
However since the humiliating defeat in 2006 there was a crucial change in her moves. To some extent this transformation is a mystery. She managed to make all the right moves and grab all the opportunities that came her way. The first crucial step was to de-link from BJP. Then she jumped onto the agitations at Singur and Nandigram and crucially managed to win over a group of influential intellectuals of Kolkata who were anti-CPI (M) because of various reason, some even personal, but not pro-Congress or BJP. Of these I think the three most important persons were Mahasweta Devi, Debabrata Bandyopadhyay and Kabir Suman. There were others like painter Suvaprasanna and Jogen Chaudhuri, theatre personalities Shaoli Mitra and Bratya Basu and singer Pratul Mukhopadhyay. Kabir Suman, in his memoir “Nishaner Naam Tapashi Malik” has given a detailed account of how he became a political ally of Mamata when she was fasting against the land acquisition at Singur. There was of course a political/ideological/intellectual alliance but in Suman’s memoir one also gets the feeling that Mamata could actually become like a younger sister to him, referring to him as “Kabir-da” in a very Bengali idiom, talking to him not about big issues but looking after small things like ensuring that he always got his cup of tea or could smoke his cigarette. I remember listening to Mahasweta Devi once on TV before Mamata came to power and she also said that she found in Mamata a warm human being who would listen to her and develop a genuine emotional connect. Mamata was a refreshing change to big ideas and mechanical party discipline of CPI(M) which deliberately cultivated a faceless image. While CPI-M followed the traditional method of projecting party discipline as its strength where individuals do not matter Mamata Bannerjee deliberately developed the opposite image of a Bengali “Didi” who talks in common man’s improper Bengali but pays respect to seniors, even Jyoti Basu who once threw her out of Writers Buildings.
Secondly, Mamata Bannerjee was able to realise whom she needs and build a team around her. Thus on issues related to land she had Debabrata Bandyopadhyay, one of the important architects of land reform. To talk to the English language media she had Derek O’Brien, whose skills in front of the camera could hardly be matched by anyone in the Bengal CPI(M). For organizational issues she relied on Mukul Roy, who did a good job. She also showed flexibility in incorporating erstwhile Congress leaders like Subrata Mukherjee and Somen Mitra.
Thirdly, she understood the importance of the electronic media long before CPI(M) leaders did. While it is possible that the private capital in the media boosted her to pursue a deliberate anti- left agenda, it is equally true that she was more accessible to the ordinary reporter than her CPI(M) counterparts.
Similarly, she realized the significance of speed in taking action as soon as a situation developed and reaching the field before anyone from the opposition could. A good example is the way she won over Rizwanur Rahman’s family and even made Rukbanur, elder brother of Rizwanur, a MLA from her party.
Fifthly, she understood the strong undercurrent of Bengali regionalism in contemporary Bengal. Thus, after becoming the Railway Minister she proved herself to be a disaster as a Railway Minister for India (http://indiatoday.intoday.in/story/indian-railways-bankrupt-under-mamata-banerjee/1/127266.html) but won the heart of the Bengalis by showing open partiality towards Bengal and even staying most of the time in Kolkata.
Crucially, between 2006 and 2008 she found for her party an ideology and a class-base that was lacking earlier. The ideology became Bengali Nationalism, reflected in the name of the party organ Jaago Bangla (Arise Bengal) and her class base became the peasantry afraid of losing their land. But she also carefully avoided an extreme left position that would be too scary for the industrial lobby and those who wanted to see industrialization in Bengal.
Finally, she showed political maturity when she agreed to form an alliance with Congress for the Lok Sabha elections. Once the Lok Sabha election was won, she was able to establish herself as a potential Chief Minister of Bengal.
Once these steps in the right direction were made, other things fell on her side. Most of the newspapers and channels who were anti-CPI (M) saw in her the chance to topple CPI (M) and therefore went out of the way in projecting her. More and more media persons, intellectuals and academicians came to join her as she looked like the winning candidate. The Telegraph even carried an article by Shobhaa De who pondered over the question as to whether Mamata is sexy or not and finally gave the verdict that she is certainly sexier than Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee (http://www.telegraphindia.com/1110427/jsp/frontpage/story_13908116.jsp).
I think the hysteria around Mamata Bannerjee had a dimension that could not be grasped through any narrative of events or any empirical sociological study. Somewhere deep within the Bengali psyche there was a fundamental transformation, at least among a significant section of the population to dramatically change the electoral landscape of Bengal. A significant portion of the Bengali society were no more interested in complex theoretical statements that are so characteristic of Marxism or any other intellectually charged ideology. This was a time when no ideology as such was able to show a clear road ahead. Hence in this ideological vacuum what seemed to be appealing was belief in the power of democracy to throw out a ruling party. Instead of high culture, intellectualism and regimentation of Left Front a significant section seems to have preferred the non-intellectual emotional melodrama of Mamata Bannerjee and rallied around the deliberately vague slogan of “Paribartan Chai” even if the nature of change in future was uncertain.
My own position around this time was that I was happy to see that the arrogance CPI(M) being challenged. But what I wanted to see, though it was wishful thinking, was a strong civil society in Bengal which is capable of raising questions before the political parties rather than a simple swing from the hegemony of party to another. In a thought provoking open letter published in Mainstream, Sumanta Bannerjee had raised the question as to whether in trying to dislodge CPI(M) intellectuals like Mahasweta Devi et al were doing the right thing by supporting Mamata Bannerjee (http://www.mainstreamweekly.net/article2307.html). In reply Dipanjan Raychaudhuri wrote that although Mamata Bannerjee is not expected to achieve something radically better, nonetheless “A CPI-M defeat will raise the spirits of the people and strengthen the movement for democracy. As the new rulers start falling into the ruts of class rule, people will learn that storming the state is much more than changing a government, but that is a different narrative” (http://www.mainstreamweekly.net/article2306.html). I replied to this and said that:
The idea that firstly the CPI-M has to be removed and then only everything else will follow is a dangerous line to take. Why not start building a civil society movement even before the elections are decided? Instead of focusing on strengthening the civil society movement which had sprung up during Singur, Nandigram and the unfortunate death of Rizwanur Rahman, the intellectuals have ended up strengthening the TMC as they believe that only if the TMC wins and the CPI-M loses that West Bengal can hope to have a better future. The answer is clearly no. The future of West Bengal will depend on how far the people of West Bengal are able to push their government (whichever be the party in power) towards better governance. (http://www.mainstreamweekly.net/article2306.html)
My position was of course a marginal position. As far as the election was concerned I preferred to stay away, did not vote, and watch on television from Delhi the euphoric moment for TMC when it achieved the impossible on 13 May 2011. The result was not unexpected but I was surprised and unhappy by the scale of victory. But Bengal seemed to prefer one dominant party in power rather than a strong opposition.
While the high drama of events from Singur to the election of 2011 played out there were several important studies that were conducted on West Bengal during this time. Some of these were published while others were not. We now look at what these studies were saying to understand a deeper crisis within West Bengal.
