Author: Soutik Biswas
Publication: Outlook
Date: December 3, 2007
URL: http://www.outlookindia.com/full.asp?fodname=20071203&fname=Cover+Story+(F)&sid=4
Introduction: The Left has always been brutal.
Worse, its young cadre is uber-hip too.
Step back from the Nandigram media maelstrom.
Take a break from news channels showing wiry, lungi-clad gunmen stalking Bengal's
lush farmlands, irate anchors shouting down stubborn Communist leaders and
bhadralok intellectuals teetering on the edge of emotional collapse. Haven't
you heard the question ad nauseam by now: how could this happen in Bengal?
Now jog your memory. Flip through some headlines
from March 1972, five years before the Communists stormed into power in Bengal
and went on to rule the state for the next three decades. The state elections
are taking place, and there is absolute anarchy as the Congress rigs the polls.
"Indira (Gandhi) calls on toughs to win back West Bengal," says
a worried Economist magazine, before talking about how the police "even
actively assisted" her party's youth wing leaders. The Economic and Political
Weekly from the same month says in West Bengal "the CPI(M) has been subject
to organised political terror with the connivance of a pliant governor's administration".
Much later, the Communists described 1972 as the year of "semi-fascist
terror".
Sounds a bit like Nandigram 2007? History
is repeating itself in Bengal. The Communists are doing precisely what their
tormentors-the Congress-had done to them in the '70s. It helps them that today's
opposition comprises a rag-tag group of some delinquent and disillusioned
Congressmen-Trinamul or otherwise. It also helps the Communists that their
brute power squashes the opposition much more effectively than the marauding
Congress of yore.
The tables have turned. The Bengali middle
class and bhadralok intelligentsia that comprised the backbone of the Communist
movement seem to have withered away; and the modern-day uber-cadre-who has
never seen the party struggle, and is typically a product of three decades
of urban and rural blight in Bengal-is the new face of an ideologically confused
party. These cadres turn out in huge numbers for party-sponsored gatherings
not because of any conviction, but because the party provides for them. In
fact, they are very similar to the '70s Congress goons who terrorised the
state.
The acerbic Bengal Communist, Ashok Mitra,
told me an interesting story earlier this year. When a CPI(M) leader was entering
a party class, he overheard a new recruit complaining, "Why should I
go for the lecture? I have joined the ruling party." The irony is that
Bengal's intelligentsia took so much time to fall out of love with the Communists.
This is, in part, because many of them were also beneficiaries of the party's
network of political patronage-and, therefore, deliberately kept silent even
after the CPI(M) had become the refuge of Bengal's lumpen proletariat.
By '84, disillusionment was setting in with
the way the Communists were conducting themselves after being voted to power
on a mass upsurge against repression, lawlessness and the authoritarian rule
of the Congress. Social scientist Partha Chatterjee wrote in April '84 that
there was a need to set the "more popular feeling against repression
and lawlessness on more secure foundations". Instead, the Communist leaders,
he wrote, "chose the easier path of consolidating their narrow sectarian
interests not only by compromising with the entrenched lobbies within the
bureaucracy and the police but by actually making their politics dependent
upon the use of state machinery". As early as '88, the party admitted
that 70 per cent of its members in Bengal had joined it after '77. Over the
next decade, Bengal slipped into a coma. And just six years ago, during the
2001 state elections, the party leadership and armed supporters took the lead
in regaining similarly lost enclaves in the Panskura-Kespur-Garbeta region.No
filmmaker, singer, poet or artist budged then-after all, by producing films,
sponsoring cultural festivals, feting friendly academics, the government had
won in coopting the culturati
So there is something hypocritical about this
indignation by Bengal's bhadralok over the "carnage" in Nandigram,
basically a bloody turf war between political goons, with innocent people
caught in the middle. One reason is obviously the seductive charms of 24/7
news television where everybody is assured 15 minutes of fame. Yes, the party
has lost touch with the peasantry. Yes, by blackballing the governor, daring
the courts and spiting the media, the party has revealed its Stalinist core.
Yet, none of this is anything new.
Jyoti Basu, the enfeebled patriarch of Bengal's
communism, told me earlier this year that he was "unhappy that the Communists
had not advanced to other states" beyond Bengal, Kerala and Tripura.
"Things would have been different if we ruled India," he said. "We
would have then depended on socialism-not capitalism-to attain our goals.
India would have been different by now." The mind boggles. While Bengal's
bhadralok can now wake up and smell the coffee, the rest of India can breathe
easy.
