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Bengal: Escape into magical realism

Bengal: Escape into magical realism

Author: Premen Addy
Publication: Business Line, Web Edition (Financial Daily)
Date: February 13, 2001

``I have seen the future and it works,'' is the remark attributed to an enthusiastic visitor to the Soviet Union in the 1920s. A few years later, Sydney and Beatrice Webb described the USSR as a ``new civilisation''. In a way it was. None of the old civilisations could have matched its gulags or its Kafkaesque show trials. Or the pace of its forced industrialisation and the titanic struggle which helped destroy the obscenity of Hitler's Third Reich.

None in his right mind would compare the Left Front-ruled West Bengal to the world's first revolutionary socialist state. It boasts none of the grandeur of high tragedy; there are no Stalins, Trotskys and Zhukovs to keep historians and intellectuals engaged with this seedy run down corner of India. A local wag called the late Promod Dasgupta, general secretary of the CPI(M) in his day, ``Sealdah's Stalin''. For the uninitiated, Sealdah station lies at the intersection of central and north Calcutta. It summed up the intellectual and political reach of a Tammany Hall boss.

It would be unfair to deny the comrades any achievement in over two decades in government. Their land reforms released productive forces in agriculture, which made West Bengal self-sufficient in foodgrains and has done much to lift the curse of primordial rural poverty. But vote rigging, political and social intimidation, the flagrant misuse of the government machinery for narrow party ends and the growing corruption among CPI(M) cadres -- ``all men are equal, but some men are more equal than others'' -- have let loose an orgy of violence in the countryside not seen since the declining years of the Mughal state. The CPI(M) capped social mobility for fear that the upwardly mobile would acquire subversive tastes and loyalties; that they would eschew the safe anchorage of party theology for the open seas of an enterprise culture and its riches.

However, it is in Bengal's urban areas that the Communist failure stands out most starkly. The endless strikes and gheraos, mindless union militancy, the incessant ideological incantations that are part of a daily ritual, have taken their toll of industrial growth and inward investment. There is now only booming unemployment. West Bengal's higher education, once its pride, is its shame today. Presidency College, a hallowed institution associated with the flowering Bengali intelligentsia, is scarcely recognisable from its earlier incarnation where I had the privilege to study. Such names as J. C. Bose, Satyen Bose, M. N. Saha, P. C. Ray, P. C. Mahalanobis, Jadunath Sarkar and Ramesh Majumdar and many others were its ornaments. Under the Left Front dispensation, there has been a levelling down and Presidency College is a ruined hulk. Excellence is a bourgeois crime and mediocrity a proletarian virtue. The education system produces an assembly line of semi-literate zealots, whose principal function is to keep the school of resentment in good working order.

December and January are pleasant months to be in Calcutta. To this may be added the seasonal arrival of the Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen who is never less than generous in his counsel of perfection. He talks nobly of education and welfare, apparently oblivious to the dire straits to which both have sunk in West Bengal. But the CPI(M), in time-honoured Communist tradition, claims Professor Sen as one of its own: not a party member may be, but a ``progressive intellectual'' whose sage advice the party values.

Not a day goes by without the Nobel Laureate's appearance on the front pages of the local dailies in the company of ministers and others belonging to the fraternity of the great and the good. The Indian History Congress, which convened in Calcutta, was notable not for the pronouncements of the country's professional historians, but for the presidential speech of Professor Amartya Sen and the trite ideological harangues of Chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharya and his octogenarian predecessor Jyoti Basu. Like the Siberian crane, Professor Sen disappears at the appointed hour to keep more pressing trysts in the West.

This year, his presence was augmented by the arrival of the acclaimed Indian-American short story writer Jhumpa Lahiri, whose marriage to an American reporter with the Time magazine evoked a frenzy of curiosity. There were reams of print and pictures galore of the happy couple. It is a sad reflection on a fallen society that it perceives its non-resident offspring as an escape into the lush pastures of magic realism. The pity is that this form of entertainment is ephemeral, for the entertainers do not truly entertain. At best they titillate.

There was, thus, no cause to beat my tom-tom at the sights, sounds and smells of Kolkata and its hinterland. But David Gardner, India correspondent of the Financial Times, arguably the most informed British newspaper and up with the best of our global village, produced a paen to Jyoti Basu and West Bengal's Communist regime. Mr Basu was more a Tagorean humanist than a true Marxist. His office had a picture of the poet, but none of Lenin. Better still, he had studies law in London, so presumably he was wedded to the rule of Law. Victims of West Bengal's spreading lawlessness would be struck dumb to read this. One is reminded of the American preacher who enthused that Chairman Mao's Communists were simply agrarian reformers.

The Financial Times is firmly free enterprise capitalist. Mr Gardner forever rails against the Indian government for being tardy about economic reforms. Yet, here he is extolling the virtues of a man who would halt economic liberalisation if he could. On the other hand, Mr Basu could be relied upon to adopt a less robust regional strategic posture. As Prime Minister, the Basu doctrine would have cheered the West as much as the Gujral doctrine. Mr I. K. Gujral was lavished with praise in his time. He was projected by one newspaper as a gifted Russian linguist and the most intellectual Indian Prime Minister since Jawaharlal Nehru. Truth clearly is no longer sacred. It is a commodity to be bartered for political gain, an instrument of propaganda.

One of Mr Gardner's favourite topics is the rise of Hindu extremism. He belabours the authorities for not doing enough to protect minorities and address their insecurities. The bombing of Christian churches in South India was confidently ascribed to Hindu fanatics. When the bombers turned out to be members of an Islamic Anjuman group, Mr Gardner, in his disappointment, failed to acknowledge the fact. There was no retraction, no apology.

And so we return to the CPI(M). Mr Gardner appears to be blissfully ignorant that for years the party took as its role model, Nicholae Ceaucescu's Romania. The Romanian dictator, like Mussolini before him, fell victim to the rough justice of the countrymen. But Ceaucescu had his uses. Britain awarded him an honourary knighthood. What was true of Ceaucescu is true of Mr Basu: both have their uses.

At such moments, one recalls the memorable lines of Humbert Wolfe: You cannot hope to bribe or twist thank God! the British journalist. But seeing what the man will do unbribed, there's no occasion to.

(The author, a visiting tutor in Modern Asian History at Kellog College, Oxford, is editor of the London-based India Weekly.)
 


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