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.)
