Focus::Bengal at crossroads as last Communist bastion falls

Focus

Bengal at crossroads as last Communist bastion falls

By Vikas Roy

A lot has been said about how India’s beleaguered ruling coalition and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh have earned themselves a respite from their mounting troubles by winning three of five regional elections on Friday, overturning two communist state governments in the process.

But spare a thought for West Bengal amid all this rhetoric. The world's longest-serving democratically-elected communist government – the Left party coalition had been in power there since 1977 – may have been toppled at long last, but there is an all too real danger now that the eastern Indian state may sink further into the economic morass that 40-odd years of partisan and populist politics has pushed it into.

This disturbing prognosis is based as much on Bengal’s long economic and industrial decline under the communists as the undistinguished track record – as an administrator – of the maverick founder and chairperson of Trinamool Congress, Mamata Banerjee, who is set to take over as the new chief minister of Bengal after her landslide triumph. But more of that in a while.

Calcutta, as Bengal’s capital was known until the recent switch to Kolkata, was the national capital of British-ruled India until 1911. Known as the ‘City of Palaces’ then, Calcutta was one of the world’s richest cities in the 19th century, and few cities in India even today can compete with its legacy of huge mansions, a royal racecourse, clubs and huge parks.

Strategically situated near Southeast Asia, its ports could have been the centre of India’s ‘Look East’ policy of attracting investment from China and the Asian tigers. Even in 1960, Bengal had the highest per capita GDP of any state in India, a sign of the vibrancy of its industry and rich farmland that often belied the widespread poverty that the communists began to exploit when they first became part of a coalition government in 1967. It was no surprise that people from as far afield as Punjab and Rajasthan flocked to Calcutta to benefit from the economic boom.

Economic growth had begun to slow down during the 1960s itself as the culture of political violence, strikes and industrial action began to take root. But even so, there were high hopes from the Left Front coalition government when it was first elected in 1977. The Left Front began a land reform programme that split up huge farming estates and handed plots to over a million small farmers; it also established self-governing village councils called panchayats.

The communists soon began to dominate the schools, universities, police, civil service and virtually every aspect of society even as big business began to move out of the state. In the 1980s, the Communists banned the teaching of English in primary schools, sparking a brain drain to other parts of India that is costing Bengal dearly now. Trade unions brought economic activity almost to a halt and although long-serving chief minister Jyoti Basu belatedly tried to undo the damage by attempting to woo business back to Bengal, he was unsuccessful. The cities were the first to see a loss of communist support, followed in recent years by farmers angry over land conflicts such as in Singur and Nandigram. Barely two years ago, the World Bank said Kolkata was the worst major city to do business in India – and it is hardly a surprise that Bengal is now heavily in debt.

As India’s economic juggernaut gathered pace, Bengal began to stall – after all, the Left Front has resisted change even before 1991 when economic reforms opened up the economy. Kolkata grew to 15 million inhabitants, but relatively few full-time jobs were created. As even farm productivity began to decline, Basu’s successor as chief minister, Buddhadeb Bhattacharya, began a desperate and heavy-handed push for industrialisation to prevent Bengal from slipping further behind other states. Ironically, the desperation to turn things around after doing so much to drive away industry in the first place pitted the Left Front against its once fervent grassroots supporters – the farmers, arguably the only set of people whose living standards improved under communist rule.

The badly managed drive to industrialise the state sparked political violence as peasants were enraged by the government’s heavy-handed and unduly hasty acquisition of their land during 2005-06 to help set up a plant in Singur to build the world’s cheapest car, the Tata-owned Nano. The communists said this would help provide much-needed jobs. 

The peasants, who received little compensation, did not agree and staged several protests. The communists' violent repression of these demonstrations alienated their core supporters, who moved over to the rabble-rousing Banerjee, 56, and embraced her populist slogan of 'Maa, Mati, Manush (mother, land and the people).' Banerjee quickly assumed the leadership of the farmers and milked the protests for her own political ends, forcing Tata Motors to shift its prestigious industrial project to Gujarat after a stand-off that claimed 14 lives.

Amid all the bloodshed, farmer suicides, shrill political sloganeering and emigration to Kolkata for jobs, Bengal lost more than a factory and much-needed jobs. It also lost its reputation, already eroding, for governance. Banerjee may have gone from strength to strength in the local, national and state elections that followed in the four years since the Tata group beat a hasty retreat. But her actions and statements during the Singur stand-off – and her penchant for populist and economically suicidal measures during her subsequent tenure as Union Railway Minister – have heightened fears that her rule could be one of anarchy and policy drift. Her populism – and lack of policy – have raised doubts about her ability to revive the moribund state economy.

Banerjee has said she represents “good governance, impartiality and a return to normalcy”. Her election manifesto was sparse, but included introducing cruises on the Ganges River “in line with River Thames of London” and converting Bengal’s tea-growing Darjeeling district into the “Switzerland of the East”. She also plans to revamp a famous park outside Kolkata along the lines of “Kew Gardens, London”.

She may be sketchy on policy details, but the Trinamool chief cannot be faulted on her integrity, commitment and lifestyle. Her trademark rubber slippers, simple white cotton sari, spartan lifestyle and humble persona have struck a chord with millions – Kolkata is the world’s eighth-largest metropolis, larger than Los Angeles and London, while Bengal has 90 million people, a population equivalent to Germany’s.

The unmarried Banerjee still lives with her mother in a small house in Kolkata with a corrugated iron roof, not far from the famous temple to Kali, the Hindu goddess. A crematorium lies nearby and the stench from a nearby stream of sewage can be overpowering at times. Readily accessible, she enjoys mass support, some of which can be ascribed to her use of folksy rhetoric with which she has over the years relentlessly lampooned her communist opponents, often using native limerick and doggerel. Minutes after routing the communists, Banerjee told her exultant supporters: “This is a victory of democracy… We will give good governance. There will be an end to autocracy and atrocities. This is the victory of the people against years of oppression,' she said.

In recent years, the Trinamul chief has become a “super-inclusive politician”, winning the support of peasants, intellectuals, the urban jobless and the working class – precisely the alliance the communists managed to forge before their hold on power began unravelling a few years ago. If anything, Banerjee has managed to checkmate the Left by embracing the very issues the Left once championed and the danger is that like them, she may spend more entrenching herself in power instead of trying to make Bengal an economic powerhouse again.

Her track record of opposing unpopular, fiscally necessary measures such as raising fuel prices, cutting down subsidies and allowing more foreign investment in insurance – as well as her penchant for populist but economically unviable measures – bodes ill for Bengal as well as the Congress-led national coalition in New Delhi. Banerjee can be unpredictable, reckless, populist and anarchic and has a short temper too. She once grabbed an MP by his collar and marched him out of Parliament, has danced on the bonnet of a political opponent’s car and had her skull cracked by Left activists 20 years ago. The Trinamool chief can be extremely stubborn and is known to be a tough bargainer who has refused to kowtow to her alliance partners, who have variously included the Congress and the Hindu nationalist BJP. However, she has been stridently anti-Left throughout her career, quitting the Congress in 1997 when she felt it was cosying up to the communists.

But the Banerjee of 2011 vintage seems to be more mature than earlier and has been courted by India's big business. Even US diplomats in India have recommended that Washington cultivate her, according a 2009 cable released by WikiLeaks. “Consensus exists that she is conscientiously trying to transform her image from political maverick and firebrand to a woman ready, able and willing to lead India's fourth-most populous state,' they wrote in an assessment. “Scepticism remains whether Banerjee's makeover truly represents a new product – cooler, more level-headed, and willing to accept outside advice – or simply the season's new political make-up.”

In the hours after her historic triumph, Banerjee consciously toned down her rhetoric, as if aware that she needs the support of everyone and every politician/ political party if she is to engineer a stunning turnaround for Bengal. She enjoys goodwill in plenty but will have to hit the ground running. It will be difficult once the honeymoon is over and, make no mistake, the strains will begin appearing sometime. But Banerjee has scripted some amazing comebacks right from the time she won one of the safest communist seats in Bengal as a feisty 29-year-old, defeating a Left stalwart. If she can once again defy all the odds and revive the state she will have won herself a new set of grateful supporters, among them this writer who happens to be a voter in the South Kolkata parliamentary constituency from which she has been elected in every election, bar one, since 1984.

Source: khaleej Times   Photos: The Hindu/NDTV