[lg policy] Bengal: To be or Not to be

Wed Nov 11 15:27:22 UTC 2009

Defeat sometimes begins at the moment of victory. In 2006, the ruling
Left Front had thundered back to power in West Bengal, winning for the
seventh consecutive time with a resounding three-fourths majority.
Today, just three years later, the same invincible Left Front has just
suffered yet another electoral disaster in last weekend’s bypolls.
Twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of
communism, it looks as if it’s the end of communism in West Bengal
too.

Most piquant of all is perhaps the Shakespearean tragedy of Buddhadeb
Bhattacharjee, who this week begins his tenth year as chief minister
of West Bengal: the man of destiny who suddenly finds himself
consigned to redundancy. Once he was the nationally hailed ‘Brand
Buddha’, Azeem Premji called him the best chief minster in India. He
was a friend of Manmohan Singh; he was the playwright-communist whose
destiny seemed to be to become the Deng Xiaoping of the Indian Left
who would transform communism into a new mantra of progress and
positive thinking. The mandate of 2006 was a mandate for Buddhadeb. It
was he who was singlehandedly responsible for large sections of the
urban business vote and middle-class vote that came to the Left. But
within a year of his victory, hit by the twin blows of the Singur
agitation and the killings in Nandigram, Buddhadeb, the successful
brand, became Buddhadeb the Market Failure.

Now with Maoists rampaging in Midnapore, even pulling off an audacious
train hijack under the government’s nose, the gigantic mandate of 2006
has become a distant memory. Instead, short-term history is dominated
by the almost shocking triumph of the Trinamool in the general
elections this year, a victory that has thrown out the doughty satraps
of the Left from seats they had held for decades. Compared to the
storm against the Left building in Bengal’s rural areas — a storm
Mamata Banerjee looks all set to harness to her cause — Buddhadeb
Bhattacharjee’s brave words of a twin-pronged strategy of force and
development to fight the Maoists sound hopelessly futile.

Perhaps Buddhadeb became a victim of the same politics and society
that the Left has created over its 32-year-old rule in West Bengal. It
has created a society where institutions are brazenly politicised,
where violence has been legitimised, where the Bengali (with
honourable exceptions) has been reduced to a narrow-visioned,
envy-filled individual whose dominant mindset is reverence of dead
heroes and contempt for all contemporary success. The constantly
sneering contemptuous Bengali is a far cry from noble spirited
nation-building ancestors like Rabindranath Tagore and Rammohun Roy,
and is a result of the fact that the Left failed to encourage a true
meritocracy in West Bengal. Instead of generating talent, it
encouraged only an envy of talent. No wonder the opportunity-seeking
Bengali youth fled, thriving in institutions where their native
intelligence was not seen as ‘anti-Party’.

Change is bound to be regarded with suspicion in a society that has
fallen into stasis. A personal popularity cult like Buddha’s was bound
to  breed jealousy and factionalism within a party unaccustomed to
genuine charisma. With all his advantages, Buddhadeb sadly failed to
build the political support needed for reform, relying on his
communist cadres who had become accustomed to imposing their writ by
force. He failed to unite the party to the cause of reform or initiate
a massive outreach programme between party and people that would have
built new bridges between leaders and people. Buddhadeb tried to
create a development-friendly government but failed to realise that it
was his own government that was creating a development-unfriendly
society.

Two decades of an anti-English language policy had brought to a halt
the fluency in a language Bengal once spoke better than any Indian
state. The lack of political competition had meant that there was no
incentive to deliver governance and human development, unlike Kerala
where a two-party system and a welfarist ruling tradition have created
an impetus to provide primary education and healthcare. Today in the
so-called ‘intellectual’ state of India, the school drop-out rate is
78.03 per cent. Only Bihar, Nagaland, Meghalaya and Sikkim fare worse.
The flooding of educational institutions by party faithful has meant
that generations have been consigned to mediocre teachers. There has
been no entrepreneurial movement in Bengal since the 1960s. The
destruction of Bengal’s intellectual capital, the culture of
negativism, the numbing inertia of its government machinery meant that
Bengal’s society was simply not ready for Buddhadeb’s new industrial
policy and the radical changes that it entailed. And sadly, the CM
lacked the political and administrative shrewdness to push his
policies in a hostile environment.

A Kolkata newspaper recently held a debate where the motion was ‘The
Resurgence of Bengal is an impossible dream’. Mamata Banerjee made an
impassioned speech against the motion and won the audience vote. Come
2011 when assembly polls are held again in Bengal she may well win the
chief minister’s chair while  Buddhadeb goes back to writing plays.
But a mere regime change will mean nothing if one set of party
faithfuls replaces another set of party faithfuls, and one violent
cadre is replaced by another violent cadre.

Bengal doesn’t just need a new government. A brain-dead Bengal needs
severe shock treatment. A decaying society needs to be kicked awake in
every sector, in education, administration and business. Bhattacharjee
went far, but he could not go far enough and succumbed to the social
forces his own party had created. Mamata Banerjee has given no signs
so far that she can administer the shock treatment needed. Caught
between a dejected Buddha and an unfocused Mamata, Bengal must await
its messiah.

http://www.hindustantimes.com/To-not-to-be/H1-Article1-474951.aspx

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