Road to regression

By Swapan Dasgupta

It is inconceivable to imagine a place 100 km from a metropolis but cut off from what is happening in the rest of the country and, indeed, the whole world. Curiously, that was my experience when I spent three days of the Durga Puja celebrations in my mother’s ancestral village.

Actually Guptipara is more of a market town that boasts a railway station, two ATMs, an engineering college and an ASI-protected temple.

In ordinary times the village is served by both newspapers and local cable TV. But last week wasn’t ordinary. First, the outer perimeter of the Cyclone Phailin resulted in incessant rain and strong winds. This ensured that the TV in my cousin’s bedroom was unable to receive signals — not that anyone watches news channels during a grand family reunion.

But what about newspapers, at least the Bengali ones which are avidly read, digested and discussed in rural Bengal? Strange as it may seem, there were no newspapers in West Bengal for four days.

The journalists were willing to work and the workers were ready to keep the printing presses rolling. Unfortunately, the highly unionised newspaper hawkers decided that it was inappropriate to distribute newspapers on the days Ma Durga was coming home.

Most states in India have local holidays when no newspapers are published. But whatever the local variations, the four-day holiday was unique. Yes, that used to be the practice with Bengali newspapers once upon a time.

But the practice had been abandoned during the latter part of Left Front rule when the communists belatedly recognised that for West Bengal to revive, capitalist values — managed by a Marxist party — must stage a comeback. Now, with the reds in full retreat, regression appears to have set in.

Nor is the four-day Durga Puja an aberration. Driving along the Old Delhi Road, parts of which were also the Grand Trunk Road, I was struck by two things. First, that this road had not been re-surfaced for years, so much so that it took nearly two hours to travel the first 45 km towards Kolkata.

Some­time ago a Trinamul Congress legislator suggested that the old Jessore Road should be renamed Uday Shankar Sarani because going through it involved unending body movement. The Old Delhi Road could do with a similar name change.

I read recently that Union rural development minister Jairam Ramesh, the man with clever answers to questions, had promised Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee the necessary funds for the maintenance of roads in West Bengal.

The question then is: Was funding of schemes such as Pradhan Mantri Gram Sadak Yojana withdrawn after the Trinamul Congress withdrew support to the UPA-2 government? Alternatively, does West Bengal secure a “developed” state label in the Raghuram Rajan Index? The Centre spends a lot of money on all sorts of things, including underwriting the media with advertisements for Bharat Nirman. Yet, it doesn’t have money to maintain important link roads.

The second feature of the bone-shaking drive along the Old Delhi Road was the cruel sight of acres and acres of land, behind high boundary walls, occupied by factories that had closed down. The term “rust belt” has a particularly resonance in this part of West Bengal that happens to be not too far from Singur where rust set in even before the machines had been fully installed.

That many, if not most, of these industries shut down owing to irresponsible trade unionism by the comrades with red flags is undeniable. That most of these units will never reopen under their existing managements is also an unfortunate reality — some were actually bought over by ponzi schemes to showcase mythical investments.

It is also a fact that a number of erstwhile manufacturing units have been converted into warehouses for cars and chemical fertilisers. But by and large, there is a vast stretch in the heart of West Bengal that has been turned into ghostly relics of a once-grand industrial age.

It is such a colossal waste. The process of re-industrialisation of West Bengal came to a halt on the issue of land acquisition from small and marginal farmers. Ms Banerjee champ­ioned the cause of the marginal peasants, drove out the Tata Nano plant from Singur and created the conditions for the electoral defeat of the well-entrenched Left Front.

The Singur experience frightened industry and reinforced the perception of West Bengal as an inhospitable place. Since Singur there has been no large scale investment in manufac­turing in a state that was till the mid-1960s second only to Maharashtra. West Ben­gal has, in effect, become a trading hub and a permanent branch office.

To turn adversity into opportunity requires more than just inspired political leadership. It also necessitates a disavowal of the mindset of envy and cussedness that bred Bengali Marx­ism. Tragically, there is little evidence of any mental transformation.

Bengalis, it is said, are productive outside their homeland. That may well be a reality rather than a racial stereotype, but is it always destined to be so? In the aftermath of the UPA’s Land Acquisition Act, industry is sullen on account of not merely the costs but the complex process of bureaucracy monitored rehabilitation of the dispossessed.

There are sniggers that far from preventing farmers being short-changed by real estate sharks, the act will promote an underground Land Use Change industry.

The fears are yet to be tested. However, the many thousands of acres earmarked for industry lying non-utlised is a national waste. There is a compelling case for the state compulsorily re-acquiring land occupied by closed industries and auctioning these to investors who are anxious to secure land to establish manufacturing units.

Had the Tatas been given lands occupied by closed industries along the Old Delhi Road, the Singur kerfuffle may never even have happened. Instead, we may have seen a resurfaced road linked to the Durgapur expressway, existing space for smaller ancillaries and, perhaps, even a workforce willing to wipe away a past history of disruption.

It didn’t happen that way. But it doesn’t mean it can’t ever happen.

Asian Age/ Deccan Chronicle, October 18, 2013

Journalists and the economics of truth

By Swapan Dasgupta

The collapse of the Saradha Group, said to be a ‘Ponzi’ scheme, has created political ripples in West Bengal. Accusations have been levelled against MPs and other functionaries of the Trinamool Congress for both patronising and providing political cover to a flamboyant entrepreneur who ended up either short-changing or cheating many thousands of people of modest means their limited life savings. The West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee, unaccustomed to handling charges of financial impropriety, has reacted in the only way she knows: by levelling shrill and sometimes outlandish charges against her political opponents, particularly the CPI(M) and Congress. She has also raised hackles by suggesting that “what is lost is lost.”

That the Chief Minister and the TMC would bear the brunt of the outrage over the Saradha collapse was only to be expected. The so-called “suicide note” that Saradha’s founder chairman Sudipta Sen sent to the CBI before his arrest in a Kashmir resort make it quite clear that he indulged some people close to the TMC because it provided him a measure of protection. He also said that that he paid a whopping Rs 40 crores to two Marwari businessmen and the office-bearer of a prominent football club for the sole purpose of “managing the SEBI” officers in Mumbai. These businessmen claimed proximity to a Congress politician who has risen to a very high Constitutional post. In addition, he paid consultancy fees of approximately Rs one crore and took care of the hotel bills of the wife of a senior Cabinet minister because he was told that “if this…family slightly stand by me then I will be (sic) great clout in India.”

Since a man who is charged with grave offences may well level grave charges against prominent individuals to deflect attention and, indeed, politicise a straight-forward financial scam, it may well be improper to repeat the names of prominent people whose palms Sen claims to have generously greased. In any event, most of these names are now in the public domain and their identities are no longer a well-guarded secret or a subject of speculation. However, since the moral credentials of a man who presents himself as a sincere entrepreneur who was ignorant of SEBI guidelines on accepting deposits from the public and who in turn was both blackmailed and duped by others more unscrupulous than him, hasn’t yet been fully established, it is best to view the contents of his “suicide note” with a large measure of caution.

Yet, while the political aspects of Sen’s defence of his misconduct have got full play in the media, there is another facet of his protestations of innocence that have been glossed over. In the concluding part of his 18-page dying declaration, Sen wrote: “My over all business fall down is due to the media entry, extortion from the above named persons and blackmailed by my own staffs and executives.”

Since the CBI, it has now emerged in the course of the Coalgate controversy that threatens to destroy the Mammohan Singh Government, is accustomed to consulting the executive to check the grammar of its depositions, it may not be too hard for them to have Sen’s “last statement” translated into English.

In a nutshell, Sen’s accusation is startling. Once people got wind of the fact that what the Saradha bosses and their agents were doing all over eastern India, they started viewing him as the proverbial milch cow. Leading this pack of predators were not politicians, but people who ostensibly claimed to be from the media. Thus, in order to save himself from attacks in the media, Sen decided to invest in the very people who were either conducting so-called investigative journalism or threatening to expose him. He bought Channel 10, a Bengali news channel, for some Rs 30 crore and engaged his erstwhile tormentors to provide him content for Rs 60 lakhs each month. The erstwhile tormentors gave him “assurance that (on) execution of this agreement they will protect my business from the government i.e. State Government and also Central Government and I will be able to get a smooth passage…” Blessed with this assurance, Sen sunk in Rs 50 crore into the channel and started three dailies.

Ironically, Sen’s entry into the media resulted in all the media hyenas rushing to his door with the same threats and blandishments. The estranged wife of a former Congress minister at the Centre used her political clout to pay Rs 25 crore to establish a channel for the North-east. Another Rs 28 crore was paid to the former minister himself for 50 per cent share of another channel beamed at the North-east. A Congress MLA from Assam sold him a printing press and a newspaper for Rs 6 crore. And one enterprising freelancer extracted Rs 50 lakh and more from Saradha to set up an English channel.

What emerges from these revelations is a very disturbing phenomenon: instead of being a watchdog against evil and wrong-doing, as it claims to be, a large section of the media has become a part of the problem itself. Just as Bollywood became criminalised from the proceeds of the Mumbai underworld, a large part of the media has become a cover for criminal enterprise. From chit fund scamsters to real estate sharks, the media has become a tool for buying influence. To me, that is the most disturbing lesson from the Saradha scandal. 

Deccan Chronicle/ Asian Age, May 3, 2013

Kolkata rises, shines

By Swapan Dasgupta

On April 2, Kolkata witnessed the spectacular inauguration of this year’s Indian Premier League. Like most opening ceremonies of sporting events, the celebration had less to do with cricket than with Bollywood and contemporary Western music. It had even less to do with the Tagore-centric high culture of West Bengal that Bengalis love to flaunt — although there was a ritual genuflection to the bard’s Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high.

It was also an event where the politicians took a back seat. Chief minister Mamata Banerjee did press a huge red button to start the proceedings at the Salt Lake Stadium, which is better known for gala musical events and football, rather than cricket. However, the organisers, with an eye to TV audiences rather than the forthcoming panchayat polls, cut out all celebrity speeches, an omission that also deprived Union minister Rajiv Shukla and the Board of Control for Cricket in India’s point-man for the IPL, his moment of glory.
Having secured the privilege, courtesy a friend who is a big-wig in the BCCI, to get one of the best seats, I can vouch for the fact that the audience loved the show, not least the gyrations of Deepika Padukone and Katrina Kaif. And Pitbull’s music, though not to my taste, had the youngsters converting the latter part of the proceedings into an impromptu dance party. Overall, it was good, clean fun and an event that Kolkata will not forget in a hurry. Unlike last year’s hurriedly organised felicitation of Shah Rukh Khan and his victorious Kolkata Knight Riders, there was nothing tacky about this year’s professionally choreographed spectacle which, judging by the gimmicks on display, must have cost an absolute bomb — estimates ranged from `20 to `30 crore.

The important thing about the event was not merely its entertainment value but the fact that it was organised in Kolkata.

The decline of Kolkata from a bustling metro which was only second to Mumbai till the late 1960s has been repeated incessantly to the point where the people of Kolkata believe that the growth story of India has bypassed them substantially. The underlying sense of dejection that you encounter in Kolkata, particularly among the members of the old bhadralok families, is sad. An event such as the IPL opening jamboree helps re-establish some faith in the city.
At this juncture, the morale of the city is truly low. This has got very little to do with the physical state of Kolkata. On the surface, it gives the impression of a truly vibrant and bustling city. Unlike the 1980s, when the appearance of Kolkata was grim, there has been a spectacular measure of improvement. New shopping malls are opening all over central and south Kolkata, the New Town in Rajarhat looks promising and many of the old houses, built in the heydays of the 1940s and 1950s, have witnessed renovations and acquired a fresh coat of paint. And although anecdotal evidence suggests that the new wealth is largely concentrated in the hands of the Marwaris (a term that doesn’t always imply those who came from Rajasthan to seek their fortune in the city), Bengalis haven’t lost out entirely. Bengali-dominated suburbs such as Dum Dum, Jadavpur and Garia have shed the appearance of being erstwhile refugee colonies and natural bastions of the Communist Party of India (Marxist).
The modest revival of Kolkata can be traced back to the Left Front’s change of stance after the retirement of Jyoti Basu. However, to be fair, even Ms Banerjee’s wildly erratic style of governance hasn’t been able to reverse the process entirely.

At one level, the present chief minister conveys the impression of being a complete maverick who hasn’t been able to get over her long preoccupation with street politics. Naturally temperamental, and with an evolved belief in conspiracy theories, her real problem is that she is unable to transcend her abiding interest in the affairs of the mohulla. Whether it is an insensitive off-the-cuff remark on the Park Street rape, her comic intervention at a meeting of industrialists to invite investments and her confrontation with the state election commissioner over arrangements for the panchayat polls, Ms Banerjee has the habit of courting controversy over trivial matters. Burdened with a political organisation whose activists have long been accustomed to agitational politics (sometimes in the face of severe odds), she has systematically given the impression that her interest in the big picture is fleeting.

There is an additional problem that may land her in a big political mess. The Trinamul Congress’ resounding election victory two years ago owed a great deal to the en masse shift of the Muslim vote. This support still remains, but there has been a collateral fallout. For the first time since Independence, there is a growing recognition in the Muslim community that it can make or break governments. There has been a visible rise in communal Muslim politics for the past two years, so much so that last month witnessed a big rally in Kolkata in support of the Jamaat-e-Islami leaders who have been handed out death sentences for assisting the Pakistan Army’s war crimes in Bangladesh in 1971. Shadowy figures such as the firebrand imam of the Tipu Sultan mosque have suddenly acquired prominence and have made a habit of making sectarian pronouncements. Coupled with sporadic disturbances with communal overtones — such as the arson attack on Hindu homes in a South 24 Parganas village and the murder of a policeman in Metiabruz — there are growing fears that the pattern of pre-1947 politics may revive, leaving Ms Banerjee unable to buck the trend.

Many of these problems have their origins in the sustained low economic growth of West Bengal since 1967. The state needs a massive booster dose of economic activity to channel the frustrations of a people whose mental horizons are shrinking with each passing day.

Perhaps Ms Banerjee is aware of this, but her mercurial ways have ended up scaring potential investors who have other choices in eastern India. West Bengal isn’t stagnating, but its low growth cannot tackle the problem of Bengal’s impatience. The state needs a sustained spell of purposeful and predictable government. Tragically, Ms Banerjee remains a loose cannon, a reason why IPL tamashas provide a respite.

Asian Age/ Deccan Chronicle, April 5, 2013

On a whim and dare

By Swapan Dasgupta

Earlier this month, West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee convened a meeting of industrialists in New Delhi. The purpose was obvious and unexceptionable: to talk up West Bengal and invite investment to a state that, for all practical purposes, had dropped off the economic map of India.

Unfortunately for her, the exercise proved self-defeating. It is not that those who responded to her invitation came with a closed mind. Most industrial houses, especially the older ones, had a substantial presence in West Bengal, at least until the early-1970s when new investment plans were shelved. For corporate India, West Bengal is a state whose turn-around was overdue and would be enthusiastically welcomed. So far, and despite being more than a year in power, Mamata has been able to achieve little forward movement.

Yet, it was not merely the absence of concrete action on the ground that deterred those who came to hear the Chief Minister in Delhi. What struck many of those present was the leader’s complete lack of seriousness. In many ways, with her impulsiveness on full display, Mamata gave the impression that she didn’t understand the first thing about business. Her utterances were all over the place and there was no focus. At a time when there is furious competition among states to attract capital and create additional employment, West Bengal’s was an amateur act.

The irony of the situation is that Mamata is blissfully unaware that she is not doing something right. That she means well is undeniable. She works hard, often late into the night in her offices at Writer’s Buildings. She travels extensively throughout the state and is not averse to interacting with ordinary people. And she takes a keen, often over-bearing, interest in every aspect of government and political functioning.

Perhaps it is this penchant for micro-management that warps her priorities. No problem is too small to not warrant her direct intervention. Whether it is the shortcomings of a police officer in a local thana or a factional feud in a Block committee of the Trinamool Congress, the Chief Minister is always at hand to lead the charge. If Jyoti Basu was the archetypal aloof Chief Minister who was too imperious to bother about niggling local details, no problem is too small or inconsequential for Mamata. She is always willing to dive headlong into every cesspool.

Take two cases that earned her enormous disfavour with the very same middle class that has backed her resolutely since she stormed into the political world by defeating the redoubtable Somnath Chatterjee in 1984. The gang-rape of a woman in the vicinity of Park Street was a heinous crime that should have been investigated thoroughly and professionally by the Kolkata Police. As Chief Minister, Mamata’s role lay in instructing the police to get on with their job and improve the efficacy of late-night policing in the city. Instead, she decided to get enmeshed in the nitty-gritty of the case, smelling a monumental political conspiracy to defame her government where none existed. She ended up making outrageous statements, punishing a senior police officer for doing her job professionally and conveying a picture of insensitivity.

It is this penchant for paying disproportionate heed to local tittle-tattle and smelling conspiracies that explained her bizarre over-reaction to the circulation of an innocuous cartoon over email by a teacher of Jadavpur University. Regardless of whether the said gentleman was a CPI(M) supporter or not, the point is that Mamata had absolutely no business to get herself directly embroiled in such a controversy. Nor did she do herself any favour by flying off the handle and denouncing a young student who asked her an insolent question on TV as a Maoist.

A Chief Minister is expected to conduct herself with a measure of even-handedness and detachment. Throughout her political career Mamata has preferred a grassroots approach—which also explains the fierce loyalty she commands among the TMC cadre. The problem is that in becoming a Chief Minister of the grassroots, she has set the tone for governance by flights of whimsy. Mamata has lost clearly lost sight of the big picture.

However, to conclude that her temperamental behaviour and her utter failure to make West Bengal a source of ‘positive’ news has also jeopardised her politically, is to over-read her vulnerability. As of today, Didi has certainly become an object of ridicule to a section of the middle-class bhadralok who were hoping that the end of the Left Front’s cadre raj would be replaced by a meaningful, economic revival of the state. What it sees instead is a process of drift which, if unchecked, will steer West Bengal towards social anarchy.

The gloom and doom of the ‘respectable’ classes is not universally shared. Mamata still retains the goodwill of a vast section of society, the most important of which is the Muslim community which is witnessing a silent assertiveness. In addition, the defeat of the CPI(M)-inspired petty tyranny in the countryside is still too fresh in the minds of rural folk for any immediate backlash to set in.

Yet, as 2012 turns to 2013 and a general election looms closer, Mamata would be foolish to disregard the stray writings on the wall. To endure politically, a government needs to show a few tangible achievements or fall a victim to unfulfilled expectations. Mamata just has to forget the mohulla squabbles and start addressing the big picture.

Deccan Chronicle/ Asian Age, December 28, 2012 

Pranab Mukherjee: Ethnically Bengali but politically man of the Centre

By Swapan Dasgupta

Selecting the greatest Indian since the Mahatma was always a daunting project in a pathologically argumentative country. But for the organisers of this exercise, there were two particularly awkward moments and both, predictably, were Bengali creations.

First, there was the legitimate query, as to why Satyendra Nath Bose, after whom the ‘boson’ of the Higgs boson or “God particle” derives its name, was not considered. Secondly, there was the inevitable question: why has Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose been omitted? The organisers could hardly respond that Netaji died in 1945 in an air-crash because that would have resurrected the controversy over his death—a controversy not lacking in conspiracy theories.

Strange as it may appear to outsiders, a huge section of Bengalis are inclined to view the history of the past 100 years as a monumental conspiracy by first, the British, and then a Delhi-centric political class, to deny them recognition and justice. This colourful saga of unending victimhood that has created a permanently aggrieved people, personified by is the mercurial Mamata Banerjee.

When the diminutive Pranab Mukherjee, dressed hopefully in his hallmark dhoti rather than an incongruous achkan-churidar, takes his oath of office on Wednesday morning, will the Bengali sense of hurt be assuaged? Will the first Bengali in Rashtrapati Bhavan be seen as the Congress Party’s atonement for Subhas Bose’s removal as Congress President by a wily Mahatma Gandhi in 1939? That incidentally was the last occasion a Bengali made it to the very top.   

There are few reasons to believe that Bengalis will melt in gratitude at being finally offered this ceremonial lollipop. In an interview last month on TV, Mamata was asked about her views of Pranab—a “son of Bengal”—as the next President of India. “Son of Bengal?” she asked incredulously, “He is a son of the world.”

The message couldn’t have been clearer. To the rest of India, Pranab Babu with his unmistakable Bengali accent may be the quintessential bhadrolok. In a cultural sense he undoubtedly is. Politically, however, his roots have never been in state politics but in Lutyens’ Delhi. Ethnically he is a Bengali but politically he is a man of the Centre.

To Bengal this matters. The tallest Congress leader of Bengal was, by a long shot, Dr B.C. Roy who was Chief Minister from 1948 to 1962. His fame stemmed not only from his legendary skills as a medical doctor or his no-nonsense style. Dr Roy is regarded as the man who gave West Bengal whatever little post-Independence economic development it experienced. From the steel plant in Durgapur, the barrage in Farakka and the development of Salt Lake, most of the public investment in Bengal is attributed to Dr Roy.

The only person who came close to the legendary Chief Minister was A.B.A. Ghani Khan Choudhury who, as Railways Minister, nurtured the development of his home district of Malda.  The reputation of Barkat Da, as he was affectionately called, has invariably been juxtaposed with that of Pranab Babu—and the results have not been edifying for India’s President-designate.

Politically, Mukherjee was always of greater significance than the portly patriarch from Malda. Yet, it has been suggested that he didn’t leverage his enormous clout at the Centre to do anything special for Bengal. In a phoney war between a proud people and a heartless imperial authority, Mukherjee has often been painted as a collaborator.

The dominant intellectual current in Bengal has never been separatist. Despite the endless of charges of discrimination by the Centre, Bengalis haven’t even considered a future outside India. Yet, ironically, the folk heroes of Bengal have invariably been upholders of local pride. Chittaranjan Das and Bose were hero worshipped for their sacrifice and, above all, their opposition to Gandhi; Dr Roy was admired because he kept Nehru (who he addressed as Jawaharlal) at an arm’s length; Jyoti Basu earned respect for being culturally detached from the Hindi heartland; and Mamata is indulged because she doesn’t care a fig for authority.  By contrast, Pranab Mukherjee has got where he is by playing by the rules set by lesser beings in Delhi. In Bengal, that makes him an oddball.


Times of India, July 23, 2012

Kolkata battles with its schizophrenia

By Swapan Dasgupta

There were two stereotypes of Kolkata that jostled for primacy amid the huffing and puffing over the midsummer euphoria surrounding the victory of the Shah Rukh Khan-owned Kolkata Knight Riders in this year’s IPL.

The first were the voices of dismay from intellectuals and Leftists disgusted by the show of frivolity at Eden Gardens last Tuesday. What compounded the offence in their eyes was the enthusiastic participation of a Chief Minister in a party dominated by Bollywood and Tollywood stars. For those appreciative of a Jyoti Basu who rationed laughter and a Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee who found inspiration in revolutionary verse and subtitled films, a leader at one with popular culture was more than a departure: it was heresy. By facilitating a carnival on a humid May afternoon, Mamata Banerjee struck a devastating blow at the over-refined self-image of Bengalis. As one angry Communist MP spluttered on TV that evening, the celebrations had nothing to do with either cricket or Bengal.

Yet, the seemingly irrational over-exuberance also corresponded to a parallel stereotype: that of the excitable Bengali. In the rush to deify the effete Bong, the outsider’s perception of those who inspired Rudyard Kipling’s ‘banderlog’ (in Jungle Book) is often glossed over.

The cruel truth is that Bengalis have preferred collective assertion to individualism. The first Test match in India to experience a full-blown riot happened in Eden Gardens on New Year’s Day in 1967, and was marked—or so legend has it—by West Indian players making a mad dash from a tear-gas filled stadium to the Grand Hotel. In his day, Jawaharalal Nehru called it a “city of processions” and by the time his grandson ruled the roost, it was dying from enforced holidays, when traffic stopped and street cricket took over.

It is tempting to relate last week’s spectacle of a lakh of people gyrating to the rhythm of rock groups Bhoomi and Chandrabindu and celebrating KKR’s success to the Bengali penchant for hujuk—an evocative term that signifies infectious craziness. In the past, Kolkata has gone berserk over Pele, Nelson Mandela and—for those with longer memories—Nikita Krushchev and Fidel Castro. Was the spontaneous frenzy over Shah Rukh and his team in keeping with a tradition of excitability?

The answer is self-evident. From the five days of worship and gluttony during Durga Puja to Shah Rukh’s number with Juhi Chawla, Kolkata has loved street parties and carnivals. Why, even the annual Book Fair sees more food consumed than books sold. There is an inverse correlation between economic activity and collective frenzy, and Kolkata is living proof of that. Why then the feigned outrage over Mamata’s party for Shah Rukh?

The answer, it would seem, can be located in Kolkata’s institutionalised schizophrenia. Like Ireland, middle-class Kolkata is blessed with a diaspora larger than the resident population. The exiles, who look back wistfully at the city they grudgingly abandoned, have nurtured an image of a Kolkata that corresponds to their own self-image: gentle, cultured, idealistic, romantic and blessed with an innate sense of decency. It is not that such a Kolkata has ceased to exist, but that this constitutes a fragment of the many enclaves that make up the city.

In a wonderful novel Calcutta Exile set in the 1950s, Bunny Suraiya narrated the touching story of the intersection between the Anglo-Indian community of Ripon Street and the upper-class Bengali of Ballygunge. It was set in a city that was marked for its creativity, commerce and the good life. That Kolkata disappeared with the advent of the Reds. In its place are multiple ghettos of despondency, each bound by the feeling of having been left behind. For today’s Ryan family, the grand-daughters are in Melbourne and the Mookerjee heir is comfortably placed in a Manhattan job. An unchanging Kolkata is just a memory they want to cling on to.

No city in India has been the object of so much pitiable condescension as Kolkata, a city that has forgotten the taste of success. In the KKR victory the city finally had something to celebrate. For India’s other metros, preoccupied with life and business, T-20 victory would have been just one of those things.


Sunday Times of India, June 3, 2012 

Didi versus Bhadralok

By Swapan Dasgupta

Last Sunday, Mamata Banerjee celebrated the first anniversary of Trinamul Congress’ victory and the Left Front’s defeat in Assembly elections in inimitable style: by organising a large padayatra.

Accompanied by many of her ministerial and political colleagues, she walked some 12 kilometres on a scorching May afternoon in Kolkata. If nothing, she demonstrated that one year in Writers’ Buildings has not deprived her of the common touch that was instrumental in her famous victory last year.

However, unlike last May when the sheer magnitude of her victory prompted spontaneous celebrations in locality after locality, the first anniversary celebrations were decidedly more muted.

The 41-year-old taxi driver who takes me around on my visits to the city was probably the most enthusiastic, waxing eloquent about Didi’s stamina and her determination to do something for Bengal. A self-employed vehicle owner with views about most things, he personified the Trinamul Congress’ loyal support base.

In a powerful essay earlier this month, Left intellectual Ashok Mitra (a former finance minister under Jyoti Basu) proffered his own evocative description of this political constituency: “the formidable army of lumpens made up of the various underclasses…; slum dwellers leading a wretched existence under the most unsanitary conditions and with uncertain, often shady, means of livelihood; laid-off workers out of a job for years on end; petty office-goers and teachers of diverse academic streams who are convinced society has been deliberately unfair to them; second or third generation migrants from what was once East Pakistan barely scraping a living…; the multitude of frustrated youth who try to earn some money by hawking whatever they can lay their hands on; shirkers and lazybones, misfits and misanthropes of all descriptions and, finally, thugs and rowdies.”

Mitra’s disdain has two dimensions. First, there is the classical Marxist suspicion of a class of disadvantaged people outside the ranks of the organised, class conscious proletariat. But more important, Mitra, in his acerbic style, reflected the traditional bhadralok wariness of the outlander.

If Siddhartha Shankar Ray and Jyoti Basu comprised the creamy layer, and Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee the respectable middle, Mamata was precariously perched on the twilight zone between bhadralok society and something lower down the social ladder. With her crumpled white sari and rubber flip-flops, she never quite made it to the inner chambers of bhadralok society. She was always viewed with a measure of amusement and wariness.

This may explain why the chattering classes of Kolkata have viewed her first year in office with indifference, bordering on hostility. Yes, they too had joined the anti-CPI(M) bandwagon after Nandigram and Singur with enthusiasm, and had joined the queues of voters who gave a resounding thumbs down to the Left in 2009 and 2011. But theirs was a limited agenda of paribartan: to rid West Bengal of the CPI(M)’s intrusive control over all the state’s institutions.

It was partly a vote against the Left’s smugness and arrogance, and partly a yearning for a truly de-politicised society where people could be free to do their own thing without some apparatchik breathing down their necks. It is wrong to say that the Mamata government has totally failed to meet these expectations. Kolkata is definitely basking in a new found freedom, and this is reflected in a new energy in the arts and city life. But there have been significant violations, too.

In hindsight, the new chief minister will probably regard her quixotic conduct on the rape of an Anglo-Indian lady and the arrest of a Jadavpur University lecturer over the infamous “vanish” cartoon as her two big boo-boos in the past year. Her conduct may well be explained by impulsiveness, inexperience and the refusal to admit mistakes.

Whatever the political and psychological explanations, these two incidents kindled the pre-existing bhadralok wariness of the new chief minister. There was an additional factor, too. After the CPI(M) blundered over Nandigram, Mamata had carefully enlarged the scope of anti-Left politics by actively wooing a class of people that constitutes a sub-stratum of bhadralok society: the intellectuals. Mainly drawn from the world of literature, art and the performing arts, this group revelled in the importance Mamata gave to them.

It was such a contrast from the CPI(M) that carried too much of an ideological baggage to give highly individualistic free-thinkers a place in their establishment. But Mamata too used the intellectuals and the media to build up the anti-CPI(M) momentum. She had absolutely no interest in displacing her loyal foot soldiers with these biddyajan, loosely translated as men of letters. It made absolutely no political sense. Secondly, mindful of the overall influence of Left thinking in the intelligentsia, she was determined to not allow the CPI(M) any opportunity to cling on to positions of influence under the new dispensation. Having first learnt her politics in the wild days of the early-1970s when the Congress ruthlessly put down the Naxalite movement, she also had no time for the Maoists and their fellow travellers.

These may explain why, despite the torrent of adverse publicity she has been subjected to, Mamata will not go out of her way to repair her relations with those who are willing to march shoulder-to-shoulder with the CPI(M), desperate for a quick, back-door re-entry.

As far as she is concerned, the pesky intellectuals are dispensable. She has set the stage for another bout of class warfare. As long as she doesn’t disappoint her core support base, she has no immediate reason to be fearful.

Deccan Chronicle/ Asian Age, May 18, 2012

Mamata goes the Leftist way

By Swapan Dasgupta

There are few politicians who have made the journey from the sublime to the ridiculous in so short a time as West Bengal’s Mamata Banerjee. A year ago, as the well-entrenched Left Front Government floundered, the leader of the Trinamool Congress emerged as a Mother Goddess, hell bent on slaying the Marxist demons who had intimidated an entire people for three decades.

It is not that everyone regarded Mamata as the perfect avenger. Her temperamental ways, her inability to treat colleagues as equals and her determination to wage total war on her opponents regardless of the issues did arouse fears. However, since taking on the CPI(M) unflinchingly and unwaveringly for a sustained period required exceptional determination, Bengalis were inclined to allow Mamata an exceptional degree of license. After all, it was said, you had to be slightly crazy to take on the Left in an apparently unequal war.

A Bengal that elected Mamata with a staggering majority in May last year was always a bit wary of her ability to make the transition from rebel to Chief Minister. However, the fact that she came to power on the crest of popular goodwill, the blessings of the middle classes, the unequivocal support of the Muslim minority and even the endorsement of the over-unionised labour suggested that her ‘poriborton’ (change) journey would involve a balanced approach. Above all, the real expectation from Mamata was that she would put an end to the petty tyranny of the CPI(M)’s fabled ‘cadre raj’. In short, having experimented with quasi-radicalism for 35 years, Mamata would strive to steer West Bengal in the direction of normal politics. West Bengal was tired of being the permanent contrarian.

It has taken less than a year for disappointment to overwhelm the state. Far from abandoning reckless populism and getting down to the serious business of governance, Didi appears to frittering away her energies in trivial pursuits. Whether it is the curious decision to paint large parts of Kolkata blue, a silly prosecution of a middle class professor who had forwarded a cartoon on email and her diktat to her supporters to shun all social contacts with CPI(M) supporters, Mamata has focussed attention on her eccentric ways. Coupled with her peremptory treatment of party colleagues who dared to be a little different, she seems hell bent on making governance in West Bengal over the next four years a Mad Hatter’s Party.

The natural rebel in Mamata appears to have snuffed out her momentary inclination to emerge as a statesman, with one finger in national politics. It is true that the local media, particularly that section which endorsed her enthusiastically in her battle against the Left Front, has been merciless in the attacks on her. But far from viewing criticism as a wake-up call, a beleaguered Mamata has been quick to detect conspiracies. Why the rape of a girl in a posh area of Kolkata or the assault of a college principal in North Bengal should be evidence of a monumental gang-up to destabilise her government is a matter of mystery.

What is not bewildering is the fact that the Chief Minister has unwittingly borrowed the language and the imagery of the very Left she claims to despise. The incessant talk of conspiracies is so reminiscent of a Left which had grown up on a diet of counter-revolutionary paranoia. Conspiracy or ‘chakranta’ was a favourite term of the Stalin lovers who spent the first two decades of Left Front rule declaiming against a diabolical Centre.

Likewise, the social boycott of the CPI(M) that Mamata has begun advocating is borrowed almost entirely from her Communist foes. The cadre raj that was unleashed in Bengal by the CPI(M) did not always generate physical violence. The strategy of the comrades also consisted of enforcing social ostracism of a target, denying him labour, livelihood and community services till the point where the victim either left the locality or grovelled before the party Local Committee. For the Left, which believed in a total control of society, social boycott was a lethal and effective weapon. It yielded results but it was also responsible for the anti-Left backlash that found expression after the Lok Sabha election of 2009.

It is this unthinking drift to copy-cat Leftist politics that is at the heart of Mamata’s woes. Sometime in the early-1990s, Mamata arrived at the conclusion that the old-style blend of bhadralok and jotedar (petty landlord) politics would not suffice to oust the Left. Like the Congress of Siddharth Shankar Ray that matched Left-wing extremism of the CPI(M) and Naxalites with Indira Gandhi’s radical rhetoric, Mamata chose to beat the Left at its own game. It paid rich dividends and her unrelenting opposition to muscular land acquisition in Nandigram and Singur secured for her the support of Left-inclined intellectuals who glorify poverty and loath development.  

No doubt the CPI(M)’s loss of monopoly control over Leftist rhetoric played a role in the electoral transformation of Bengal. But where Mamata seems to have miscalculated is in believing that the cussedness and obstructive ways of the Left is a source of inspiration to Bengal. That may have been the case a decade ago but the poriborton people voted for in 2011 was meant to usher in liberation from economic stagnation and despondency. Mamata doesn’t seem to realise she is going the way of the Left.


Asian Age/ Deccan Chronicle, April 20, 2012

Don vivant

Tapan Raychaudhuri dominated South Asian studies at Oxford. Swapan Dasgupta reviews his memoir, which reveals the history behind the historian

To understand history, E H Carr had advised in his celebrated Trevelyan lectures in 1961, it helps to also understand the historian.

Over the past five years or so, the publishing world has witnessed a relatively new phenomenon: historians writing about themselves, and biographies of historians. There is Hugh Trevor-Roper’s celebrated Letters from Oxford, his wartime diaries and the enthralling biography of him by Adam Sisman; at least three readable accounts of the colourful life of the contrarian A J P Taylor; a collection of Richard Cobb’s indiscreet letters to sundry dons; the Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm’s erudite autobiography Interesting Times; and, of course, the late Tony Judt’s memoirs that have secured rave reviews on both sides of the Atlantic.

Apart from providing interesting glimpses into the cloistered and often petty world of the High Table and Senior Common Room, the historians’ literature has helped demolish a stereotype. The caricature of the grumpy medievalist poring tirelessly over forgotten manuscripts and waging purposeless departmental wars against equally obscure colleagues has been replaced by the figure of the glamorous, cosmopolitan, bon vivant historian, at ease in the city of dreaming spires, in business class lounges and in TV studios. As the soaring careers of, say, Niall Ferguson, Andrew Roberts and even our very own White Moghul suggest, historians can be every bit as interesting as their bestselling narrative histories.

India, as usual, has been slow to cotton on to the trend. There is very little information, except stray anecdotes that rarely travel beyond rarefied circles, about the lives, predilections and preferences of the old masters. Apart from their published works, do we know anything significant about the loyalism of Sir Jadunath Sarkar or the strong political views of R C Majumdar? Why does intellectual history not embrace the lives and experiences of India’s historians? Is it connected with the overall Hindu disdain of history and the bored bewilderment with the strange animal that goes by the name of “scientific history”?

For some three decades, Tapan Raychaudhuri was the presiding deity of Indian (or should we say South Asian) history studies in Oxford. Erudite, intellectually alert, easygoing and, most importantly in the context of the old university, clubbable, he guided many generations of students through their gobbets, the final year special paper and their DPhils. His intellectual horizon was vast, and he was as much at home discussing abstruse clauses of the Sunset Laws as he was with French cooking. Blessed with social skills — without which Oxford can either be a nightmare or a very lonely existence — he could negotiate his way through departmental committees and supercilious colleagues. Along with his wife Hashi-di, whose cooking skills were legendary, Tapan-da was the father figure of the Indian community in Oxford.

Yet, and curiously, it is not the accounts of his long stint in Oxford first as a research student at Balliol and subsequently as a don at St Antony’s College that makes his memoirs a must-read. There is an underlying sense of disappointment and bitterness with a community of otherwise enlightened scholars that refuses to acknowledge that empires by definition personify evil. What distinguishes Raychaudhuri’s story of his life from similar accounts by more famous historians is the narration of a childhood spent in the district town of Barisal (now in Bangladesh).

Comparable in many ways to Nirad Chaudhuri’s description of the Hindu bhadralok way of life in the small town of Kishorganj in the early decades of the 20th century, Raychaudhuri’s paints a vivid and sensitive picture of a zamindari class in decline. From descriptions of a joint family where indolence and fractiousness was combined with active intellectual pursuits and pen portraits of old family retainers, to accounts of the lavish but homely Durga Puja celebrations at the old ancestral house, Raychaudhuri captures the ambience of the lesser zamindars of East Bengal.

What makes the section compelling is that Raychaudhuri brings his historian’s perspective into the narrative. This enables him to move from simple nostalgia — important as that may be — to a clinical analysis of the untenable facets of noblesse oblige. The point he drives home repeatedly is that a system based on the collection of rents and cesses was insufficient to justify a lifestyle centred on pretentiousness.

At the same time, he is careful in indicating that a life based on fractured rentier income and weighed down by litigation wasn’t necessarily decadent but intellectually invigorating. Economic stagnation and decline did co-exist with the larger Bengal Renaissance. And, alongside a desire to usher an independent India into existence was a corresponding fascination with Western civilisation. Raychaudhuri brings out the many-faceted complexities of a people that loved England and hated the Raj.

Equally revealing is the account of the nationalist movement as experienced in Barisal. The sense of composite nationalism and adherence to the leadership of Mahatma Gandhi was, in East Bengal, a Hindu bhadralok phenomenon. The failings of the movement lay in the disconnect from a Muslim peasantry which had begun harbouring very different ideas of the shape of post-Raj Bengal.

However, it is in the treatment of the underlying communal tension between Hindus and Muslims that Raychaudhuri takes evasive action. The reader gets a sense of the looming tensions in the outside world and a sense of the pain and despondency that engulfed the family as it left Barisal for the journey to an inhospitable Calcutta. For most Hindu migrants from East Bengal, it was the final departure that was most traumatic. What triggered the final decision to move in Raychaudhuri’s household? How did they cope in the final days? These are questions that arise in the minds of the reader. Unfortunately, Raychaudhuri deals with the subject perfunctorily, as if he is unable to relive the pain.

The denial of the human tragedy of Partition is a feature of the “progressive” Bengali intellectual. It is sad that Raychaudhuri, no doctrinaire Marxist, has succumbed to the same evasion, perhaps in the fear that explicit accounts of experiences and true feelings are fraught with dangerous consequences. In his Forgotten Land, on the monuments and memories of the Germans expelled from East Prussia, Max Egremont notes a similar sense of denial. As a historian, Raychaudhuri should have transcended the base considerations of contemporary politics. His Oxford friend Nirad Chaudhuri did. Which is why, as even Raychaudhuri concedes, The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian will always remain a classic.

This book came perilously close to complementing Nirad Babu’s work. If only Tapan-da had not been so guarded and diplomatic. Writing memoirs is implicitly hazardous: it invariably involves offending some people.

Business Standard, March 10, 2012

REIGN OF TERROR - Mamata Banerjee as Bengal’s new ogre

By Swapan Dasgupta

Ever since the time a CPI membership or connection was the best passport for entry into journalism, the Indian media has been excessively charitable to the Left. A loosely Left-liberal set of assumptions including anti-Americanism, a distaste for the private sector and a loathing of ritualised religion were hallmarks of the English-language media—at least until aggressive TV news channels with sharply divergent value systems re-established balance.

The most important consequence of this slanted politics was that the Communist parties (and their fellow-travellers) were able to punch much above their weight. In its 34 years of government, the Left Front in West Bengal benefitted considerably from the goodwill and generosity showered on it by a national media enamoured of its progressive credentials. Copious tears, for example, were shed when the CPI(M) Politburo turned down the United Front’s invitation to Jyoti Basu to become Prime Minister of India in 1998. However, very few column inches were devoted to examining the realities behind Basu’s reputation as a capable administrator. For an influential section of the editorial classes that had once fought battles on behalf of Jawaharlal Nehru and his daughter, the Communist parties were the holy cows and West Bengal their sacred pasture.

Mamata Banerjee by contrast was always an object of intense suspicion. Ever since she emerged to occupy the main anti-Left space in West Bengal she was portrayed as a maverick, an incorrigible populist and an utterly irresponsible individual. This reckless image persisted through the 2009 general election when it was lamented that Prakash Karat had facilitated his own party’s downfall by his decision to withdraw support to the Manmohan Singh Government over the Indo-US nuclear agreement. Indeed, a section of the fourth estate clung on to the belief that her Lok Sabha success was a fluke and that she would be stopped at the gates of Writers’ Buildings by a determined Left. Even as late as a month before the May 2011 Assembly poll, the media watering holes in Delhi were full of tales of how there was a ‘late swing’ to the Left resulting from a popular realisation that Mamata would be too costly a burden for West Bengal. The results told another story.

The Congress which had entered into a grudging ‘mahajot’ with the Trinamool Congress after the Left withdrew support to the UPA Government was both a producer and a willing consumer of the negative perceptions of West Bengal’s most famous Didi. Sonia Gandhi and the Prime Minister were no doubt grateful to Mamata for teaching Karat a lesson he wouldn’t forget in a hurry, but this was coupled with concern over the consequences of the gentlemanly Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee being replaced by an unguided missile. In 2011, the Congress wanted the Left Front to lose but it hoped that the TMC would fall short of an outright majority and enable it to play a balancing role—a euphemism for insisting Mamata dance to its tune for the next five years.  

These calculations were upset by last summer’s resounding and categorical endorsement of Mamata by the West Bengal electorate. Mamata was now her own boss with very clear ideas of how she would manage relations with her national ally.

At the local level she moved fast. First, she gave inconsequential portfolios to the Congress ministers she inducted into her ministry. Second, she sought to undercut the remaining Congress bases in North Bengal.

The Congress High Command didn’t respond to these provocations too adversely. Traditionally, the Congress has always viewed its local units as subordinate to the national party. As long as Mamata played ball in the Centre, the Congress was willing to turn a blind eye to her local transgressions.

Unfortunately for the Congress, Mamata had her own ideas. Angry at being fobbed off with mere lollipops instead of the grand Bengal package she had banked on, she did what most non-Congress chief ministers from Jayalalithaa and Narendra Modi to Nitish Kumar have done: elevate the battle to a principled tussle over federal relations. It is federalism that has governed Mamata’s prickliness over matters as diverse as the Teesta Waters Treaty with Bangladesh, the Communal Violence Bill, the Lokpal Bill and the Food Security Bill. In addition, she used her representation in the Cabinet to raise awkward questions on fuel price hikes and the decontrol of retail trade. More to the point, she used her numbers in Parliament to join hands with the Opposition and embarrass the Government.

The CPI(M) had a position similar to Mamata’s in the four years it provided ‘outside support’ to the UPA between 2004 and 2008. It used its strategic clout far more discerningly and in characteristic Communist style: to support the ‘progressive’ initiatives by Sonia Gandhi and oppose the ‘neo-liberal’ policy moves of the Prime Minister. In addition, it used it good offices to secure the appointments of ‘progressives’ in positions of influence and authority, particularly in the realms of higher education. The CPI(M) more or less replicated the approach of the CPI between 1969 and 1977 when it upheld the ‘progressive’ regime of Indira Gandhi, particularly in her fight against the ‘reactionary’ Syndicate.

Mamata, on her part, has not been so calibrated in her approach as the Comrades. She has been principled insofar as she has focussed on the big questions and not bothered at all with trivial issues of appointments to governorships and quangos—something the Congress is innately more comfortable with. The result is that Mamata does not have backers among either those who look to 10 Janpath or those with one eye to the wisdom emanating from Race Course Road. After she embarrassed the government in the Rajya Sabha over the Lokpal Bill, the exasperation of the Congress with her scaled new heights—to the point where senior ministers are now singing praises of the sweet reasonableness of the Left. As of today, Mamata is regarded as the joker in the UPA pack and the Congress is itching to be rid of her.

For the Congress, the way out of West Bengal lies in Uttar Pradesh. For the past month, relevant circles in Lutyens’ Delhi have been abuzz with talk of ‘secret’ negotiations between the Congress and Samajwadi Party. According to those who make it their business to fish in troubled waters, the ‘deal’ involves a post-poll coalition between the Samajwadi Party of Mulayam Singh Yadav and the Congress in UP and the SP joining the UPA at the Centre in return for Cabinet berths. The Congress, it would seem, has made up its mind to swap the TMC with the SP. This may explain why Mamata has sharpened the intensity of her attacks on the Congress.

There is still one imponderable. The Congress needs both the TMC and either the SP or the Bahujan Samaj Party to get its candidate into Rashtrapati Bhavan later in the year. It would be in difficulty if a discarded Mamata decides to back a united opposition candidate. The possible way out, which is being explored courtesy a Politburo member of the CPI(M) is for the Left to bail the Congress out in return for an agreement on the candidature of the present Vice President.

The Left has been playing a quiet role in accentuating the differences between the Congress and Mamata. Having been severely battered in the Assembly election, its only hope of a recovery lies in Mamata self-destructing and a split in the anti-Left votes in West Bengal.

No wonder the stage is being set to portray Mamata as Bengal’s new ogre.


The Telegraph, January 20, 2012