Author: Swapan Das Gupta
Publication: Free Press Journal
Date: March 26, 2007
URL: http://www.samachar.com/features/260307-features.html
If over-kill and pig-headedness hadn't been
the hallmarks of the CPI(M)'s re-conquest of Nandigram on March 14, conspiracy
theorists may well have been justified in claiming that the incident was a
diabolical ploy by the flatearth society to discredit Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee's
perestroika.
That the doctrinaire Left-somewhat over-represented
in the top echelons of the politburohad been less than happy with a Chief
Minister who was visibly impatient with his ideological inheritance was apparent
even during last year's Assembly election. The cracks were, however, expediently
papered over because Bhattacharjee appeared to be surprisingly successful
in selling a commodity that had been woefully in short supply in West Bengal
since 1967: hope.
For the CPI(M), the events in Nandigram have
been a colossal embarrassment--and quite justifiably so. Blessed with a stupendous
arrogance stemming from the conviction that they are always on the right side
of history, the party apparatchiks blessed a police-cum-cadre action that
had in the past invariably yielded results.
Those familiar with the by-lanes of state
politics may recall the horrible killing of 10 Trinamool Congress activists
followed by the re-conquest of Keshpur, also in East Midnapur district, in
January 2001. There was also Marichjhampi, the lynchings on Bijon Setu and
so many others. The assault on Nandigram, allegedly to facilitate the homecoming
of 2,500 party supporters who had been turfed out, followed precisely the
same precedents and was governed by the brute logic of exemplary terror.
The depredations and strong-arm methods used
by the CPI(M) to crush dissent and opposition have been well documented. Yet,
while these human rights abuses may have created local ripples, they rarely
occasioned national outrage.
With its reserve army of intellectuals and
fellow travellers, particularly in the editorial classes, the CPI(M) was successful
in projecting West Bengal as an island of enlightenment in India. The rotten
underbelly of 30 years of Left Front rule was always concealed by a membrane
of progressivism. The imperious Jyoti Basu even took sanctimoniousness to
dizzying heights by contrasting West Bengal's apparent civility to Atal Behari
Vajpayee's "barbaric" government.
The progressive edifice was always built on
fragile foundations and, after Nandigram, shows signs of tottering. For the
first time since the Naxalite movement of the late-Sixties, the CPI(M) is
confronted by the revolt of the intellectuals.
Over the past 10 days there have been more
protests by "intellectuals" than Jyoti Basu's "business trips"
to London each summer. Those notables the party had flaunted to mock the "upcountry"
Ram bhakts, denounce Narendra Modi and ridicule empirical historiography have
suddenly discovered their inner voice.
With melodramatic Tagorean overtones, self-professed
Left intellectuals have returned honours conferred on them by the state-presumably
these were not awarded for services to the party-and described Nandigram as
"worse than Jallianwala Bagh" because the killings happened under
Left rule.
The Chief Minister has been called a "killer"
by those who had previously reserved this epithet for his Gujarat counterpart.
The Minorities Commission, hitherto an obliging instrument of secularist indignation,
has despatched a team to Nandigram-although it is doubtful it will do anything
beyond claiming TA/DA. Incensed by the harsh treatment of colleagues who had
gone to report on the happenings, even the media has turned hostile and replaced
deference to CPI(M) stalwarts with probing insolence.
That the CPI(M) has been horribly scarred
by Nandigram is obvious. In a statement marked by uncharacteristic humility,
CPI(M) General Secretary Prakash Karat confessed that "The people have
turned against us. We know that the people of West Bengal have high democratic
consciousness and they have disapproved the police firing which resulted in
13 deaths in Nandigram."
Although this contriteness was not in evidence
among Marxist MPs who prevented Parliament from discussing a "state subject",
Nandigram has done to the CPI(M) what the Hungarian uprising of 1956 did to
the Communist parties in Western Europe-punctured its self-created aura of
moral infallibility. Nurtured on the puerile assumption that the party is
always right and supreme, Nandigram has planted the seeds of honest doubt
among those who still perceive themselves as idealists in the murky world
of politics.
The reverberations from Nandigram are certain
to be particularly damaging to Bhattacharjee. Although it is quite apparent
by now that the March 14 assault was a party decision imposed on a supine
administration and had absolutely no connection with the proposed Special
Economic Zone, it is the Chief Minister's reformist zeal which will be the
first casualty. This is apparent from the rant of the progressives against
the West Bengal Government succumbing to the temptations of market economics.
The spirited denunciation of Buddha-nomics
is not surprising. It is a feature of beleaguered ideologies to fall back
on hoary certitudes to explain setbacks and debacles. Marxist headbangers,
for example, continue to attribute the collapse of the Soviet bloc not to
the inherent inefficiencies and distortions of bureaucratic socialism but
to Mikhail Gorbachev's "betrayal".
Likewise, West Bengal's eclipse from the Resurgent
India storyline has not been traced to the stagnation of the Jyoti Basu years
but blamed on Bhattacharjee's own revisionism-which, presumably, originated
from keeping the wrong sort of company.
Monty Johnstone, a former Stalinist who became
an enthusiastic convert to Euro-Communism, once proffered a devastating critique
of Trotskyism that has a relevance to some of the debates around Nandigram.
Trotsky's revolutionary approach, he wrote, amounted to this: "Imagine
the most desirable possible solution. Endow it with the force of imminent
reality. And from that lofty premise revile all lesser objectives."
To the critics of the Bhattacharjee's hesitant
market-led re-industrialisation programme, Sonar Bangla is a rural Arcadia
dominated by "toiling peasants" who are naturally against the evil
forces of globalisation and "neo-liberal economics". In this caricatured
recreation of a morbid Ritwik Ghatak film, the goons of the fat-cat speculators
attacked a community of contented peasants and triggered a wave of popular
revulsion that finally forced an insensate Government to eat humble pie and
call off the march to modernity.
It comes as no real surprise that this mushy
view has found ready takers in a state which has overdosed on romantic piffle
about mass movements, popular struggles and insurrections-the political mythology
that has sustained the Communist movement. Add to this a popular mentality
centred on entitlements-which translates into envy, cussedness, smug insolence
and general bloody-mindedness-and it is possible to gauge why Nandigram has
become the leitmotif of that Bengal which steadfastly refuses to change with
the times.
In the Nandigram resistance we can gleam the
mindset that has facilitated the Left's hegemonic control over West Bengal.
The CPI(M) must rue the fact that the excesses of its control junkies has
placed it on the wrong side of the permanently aggrieved.
In the natural course, and outside West Bengal,
its sympathies would have been with Luddites of the Medha Patkar variety,
the Islamists who sense their time has come to make a political mark and,
of course, Leftist dinosaurs. This wrongfootedness is, however, unlikely to
be more than a temporary blip.
The CPI(M) appears to have recognised that
it is not worthwhile building a gateway to India Inc in West Bengal if it
leads to a corresponding dilution of draconian political control. Like its
political mentors in China, the CPI(M) will always try to manage capitalism
with a Stalinist face.
If unwavering political control proves impossible,
the programme of economic modernisation will be cast aside effortlessly. Nandigram
may signal the end of the all-toobrief flicker of hope for West Bengal.
