Author: Swapan Das Gupta
Publication: The Pioneer
Date: March 18, 2007
There is an irresistible temptation to gloat
over the CPI(M)'s ignominy over the cadre-directed police action in Nandigram
which left 14 people dead and forced many hundreds to flee their homes. Always
intolerant of criticism and political opposition, the party transformed a
small corner of East Midnapur into a war zone last Wednesday. It did so not
because it wanted to sweep away pre-capitalist obstacles in the path of industrialisation
but because it wanted to re-establish its physical control over an enclave
that had seceded from Red Bengal.
Those who maintain that this state-cum-cadre
heavy handedness is not politics but terrorism are only partially right. For
the past 30 years, the CPI(M)'s near-impregnable control over rural West Bengal
has been based on sanctimonious populism enforced by coercion. The CPI(M)
has created two classes of villagers: Those who are with the party (out of
choice or compulsion) and those who are the outcastes. In the heartland of
rural Bengal (the border districts are an exception), where the CPI(M) majority
is weighed rather than counted, it takes fierce, unflinching courage to flaunt
a political affiliation which is not to the liking of the all-pervasive local
committees. The CPI(M) not only preaches Stalinism; it practices it with brazenness
in West Bengal. Under the smooth veneer of progressivism lurks a brutal party
dictatorship.
The beneficial spin-off from Nandigram is
that the ugly face of the CPI(M) has been exposed nationally. The next time
the fellow-travellers from Sahmat get all worked up over a film which can't
find a distributor in Gujarat, the next time Brinda Karat gets herself photographed
outside Parliament in the company of happy tribals (as she was last Thursday),
and the next time Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee spouts a verse from Mayakovsky or
Neruda, you can offer one word of retort - Nandigram.
Nandigram was not the first in the bloody
history of Communist movements and nor will it be the last. Yet, for the moment,
it has become a euphemism for the smug arrogance of a group that pompously
declares history is on its side.
And yet, gloating over Nandigram is painful.
True, the CPI(M) has been put on the backfoot and the duplicity of the Congress
leadership exposed. The Left intellectuals are in disarray and many have discovered
their lost conscience. The debate over Special Economic Zones has merged into
the national concern for the deepening crisis of agriculture throughout the
country and triggered a populist backlash which will have a debilitating impact
on the UPA Government. The Opposition NDA has rightly sensed an opening and
drawn considerable strength from the Government's discomfiture - even if that
involves parroting the likes of Medha Patkar. Amid this headiness, one minor
point appears to have been forgotten - the likely impact of the Nandigram
kerfuffle on West Bengal.
This year marks the 40th anniversary of the
beginning of the flight of capital from West Bengal. The first CPI(M)-dominated
United Front Government began the assault which the Naxalite movement and
Congress hooliganism complemented. The decline of Bengal was, however, not
purely economic. The upheavals bred a strange political culture based on self-pity,
cussedness and envy - what a perceptive British commentator, in another context,
described as the "grievance community." This negativism is not confined
to the Left; it has infected the anti-Left forces as well. The protests -
the product of a strange combination of the Trinamool Congress, the ultra-Left
and Islamists - in Nandigram epitomise this self-destructiveness.
Investment in West Bengal is certain to be
the biggest casualty of the Nandigram violence and the controversy over Singur.
The turbulence of politics has offset all the promise and hope that its Chief
Minister held out during last year's Assembly election. Ratan Tata, if not
the Salem group, must be ruing the day he decided to repose faith in West
Bengal.
Other investors are unlikely to make the same
mistake. West Bengal has yet again scored a self-goal. Together, the CPI(M)
and its opponents have thrown the baby out with the bath water.