Author: Udayan Namboodiri
Publication: The Pioneer
Date: July 1, 2011
URL: http://www.dailypioneer.com/349913/Bengals-transition-between-dystopias.html
The CPI(M) desertified Bengal by concealing
murder and plunder in a democratic garb. Mamata Banerjee's panacea is to make
the mill stone of democracy heavier for the Bengali neck by reviving bicameralism
and promoting unwieldy committees
One of the many clichés used as a balm
by liberal intellectuals to soothe India's mass discontent with everything
that comes with bad governance is "in a democracy, people have the power
to change a government". Actually, this is worse than an untruth - it's
a conspiracy.
The modern state of West Bengal is where all
this nonsensical talk began -in the heyday of the freedom movement - and it
i s there that Saturday Special travels this week to understand the method
behind this madness. To 85 million Bengalis, 0democracy is a mill stone around
the collective neck. Between 1977 and May 2011, the CPI(M) carried out unspeakable
crimes against humanity but collected kudos from the national chatteratti
of Delhi through an effortless system of packaging terror in a democratic
garb. They were cheered for "devolving" power to the panchayats,
but little did the innocents in the national capital understand the macabre
rites of the village soviet process which the CPI(M) transplanted on Indian
soil.
One wonders today how many Bengalis remember
Dr Bidhan Chandra Roy, their first chief minister. Dr Roy was a shining beacon
for the rest of India, a giant of a man in every sense of the term, who navigated
modern West Bengal from the hell of partition to numero uno status among states.
Today, Mamata Banerjee goes around North Block
and Yojana Bhawan with a begging bowl, seeking "special consideration"
for West Bengal, as if it were some north-eastern or backward state. In Dr
Roy's time, many Bengalis wished for poorer neighbor Bihar to merge with West
Bengal so that the two could form a formidable economic powerhouse. Of course,
the idea was decimated by the democratic process.
"Democracy" has reduced West Bengal
to a basket case today. If the villages were carpet bombed by corrupt panchayats
who mouthed rhetoric about "democratic devolution", the huge industrial
complex bequeathed by Anglo-Indian enterprise and consolidated by Dr Roy was
systematically destroyed in the name of "labour rights." With time,
there were no more CPI(M) Bengalis and non-CPI(M) Bengalis. There were only
Bengalis who chose to leave West Bengal and Bengalis who surrendered to the
"system" and stayed on.
The bigger tragedy is that even after succeeding
in throwing off the CPI(M) yoke, the new rulers seem to be seized by a greater
compulsion to install "perfect representation" rather than address
poverty, illiteracy, malnutrition and the other legacies of Communist rule.
Mamata Banerjee is bent on reviving the bicameral legislature system in the
state which was scrapped in 1969. Now, as if a Rs 2.3 lakh crore debt stock
and 3.7 per cent tax to SDP ration were not bad enough, her zeal for "perfection"
in democracy seems certain to land the people of West Bengal with a new parasitical
organism with 57 legs (MLCs) which would need salaries, perquisites, free
railway passes, pension and, who knows, its own residences and clubs?
Simply put, the proposed Vidhan Parishad is
a death wish. But it would suit the political and intellectual elites fine,
because poverty is the spring well of Indian democracy. The CPI(M) came to
power as the ideal democratic force, replacing a draconian Congress regime
under Siddhartha Shankar Ray which played football with people's basic rights
in the 1973-77 era. The Marxists moved fast to institutionalise elections
to rural local bodies because it was seen as an ingenuous way to expand the
power base and install a gravy train which would ensure allegiance over an
indefinite length of time. Of course, we found out what the agenda was only
later, much later.
Rajiv Gandhi's famous statement about only
15 paise from every government Rupee actually reaching the aam admi was actually
a national average; in Communist West Bengal it was only about 1.5 paise.
The rest of the money was sucked up by an efficient siphon which transported
these funds to the CPI(M)'s private coffers which made the party the most
propertied entity in India -and also the biggest employer considering there
are over 2.6 lakh "whole timers" who have to be paid.
None of this would have been possible without
the collusion of intellectuals. They are the only people who knew what was
going on, but maintained strategic silence. On June 4, the result of their
crimes was all too apparent. In Benichapra village under Gorbeta block in
West Midnapore villagers forced a police party to dig up a trench located
close to the ancestral home of former minister Susanta Ghosh. From it emerged
the remains of an uncertain amount of people, all of whom were evidently massacred.
These are believed to the remains of a large
number of Trinamool Congress supporters who vanished on September 22, 2002.
It does not require extraordinary imaginative skills to realise that happened
to them - like in countless other places of the state in the 35-year period,
they were shot Einsatzgruppen style after being forced to kneel on the edge
of ditches. While DNA tests would reveal the true number of the deceased and
their identities, the people of West Bengal would not care to wait for a long-winded,
technical process to deliver the retribution they yearn for. And they are
getting it.
In numerous villages across West Bengal since
the fall of the CPI(M) on May 13, the hunter has become the hunted. In the
words of Biman Bose, the party's all-powerful state secretary, "thousands"
have become "ghor chara" (refugees) and are fleeing from place to
place, often with wives and children, in search of shelter. This is a different
Biman Bose from the one who functioned like a middle-aged Sanjay Gandhi through
most of the 35 years of CPI(M) rule. When Congress, Trinamool Congress and
BJP supporters were living on railway platforms or under the shade of trees
in Kolkata's parks, Bose laughed at the suggestion that there could be "ghor
chara" in liberal, progressive West Bengal.
While the CPI(M) banished people for questioning
their power and authority, the Trinamool is merely seeking revenge. It is
a sad commentary on the value of Indian democracy that this mindlessly savage
system is not bursting on the national centre stage, but merely being treated
as a provincial side-show. It was similar indifference which led to the flourishing
of countless private arsenals across the state in the 1977-2011period. As
Saugor Sengupta's (Lookback) article reveals, the CPI(M) literally implemented
Mao Zedong's "power flows from the barrel of a gun" maxim. Why did
the CPI (M) need Ak-47s, "hand cannons" and explosives if it was
in the business of perfecting democracy? This is a question for its champions
in Jawaharlal Nehru and Delhi universities to answer. Now that the Trinamool
supremo is turning the state and its people over to a new laboratory, how
long would it be before another democratic dystopia consumes the Bengali?
- The writer is Senior Editor, The Pioneer
and author, Bengal's Night Without End, New Delhi, 2006