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| Vol. 4, Issue 5 May 2012 |
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Reporting & Essays |
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Reportage |
Takeover
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| Scenes from the last days of communism in West Bengal |
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ARIJIT SEN / HT PHOTO |
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| Trinamool candidate Manish Gupta, who served as chief
secretary under Buddhadeb Bhattacharya, defeated his former
boss by more than 16,000 votes.
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| “A |
RROGANCE.”
This was Manik Hazra’s single-word
explanation for the electoral
loss that would soon end the 34-year
reign of the Communist Party of India
(Marxist) in West Bengal. |
Manik looked up at me, sitting rigidly in his wooden
chair, and waited for my response. I was busy tucking into
my third maamlet, a peculiarly Bengali name for a dish
that’s really indistinguishable from an omelette, hoping he
would continue. But he sat, silently, looking at me with his
grey cataracted eyes, trying to discern precisely how I had
changed in the 37 years since he last saw me.
I last visited Manik, my grandfather’s first cousin, in 1974.
Back then, the Bengali film star Uttam Kumar had far more
fans than Amitabh Bachchan; Indira Gandhi, a former student
at Rabindranath Tagore’s Visva-Bharati University in
Bengal’s Birbhum district, was the prime minister of India
and had just conducted the country’s first nuclear weapons
test in the Rajasthan desert. Bengal was under Congress
rule again, after the brief tenure of a non-Congress coalition
government that included the communists. The Congress
chief minister, Siddhartha Shankar Ray, had crushed
the ultra-left Naxalite movement in the state a few years
earlier, and Bengal’s rural hinterland was waiting for a
change. At that time, they didn’t call change “poriborton”—they called it revolution.
But all this is distant history—about as real to me as
my faint recollections of my last visit to this place, my
ancestral village of Gramdihi in Bardhaman district, as
a three-year-old in 1974. These memories, in other words,
are manufactured by what others have told us about the
past. Now, a generation later, any real memories of my first
visit to Gramdihi—and of the establishment, three years
later, of the world’s longest-serving elected communist
government—have been swamped by what came after the
Glorious Past.
According to the standard narrative, the arrival of the
CPI(M)-led Left Front government headed by Jyoti Basu in
1977 marks the start of the decline of Bengal. In the manufacturing
hub of Calcutta, factories started shutting down
with the arrival of the communists; the great jute mills in
the port city stopped production thanks to workers’ unions
demanding unreasonable work hours for unreasonable pay;
the city that was the capital of pre-1911 British India was allowed
to moulder with infrastructure development practically
coming to a halt. All because a political party—the Big
Brother in the Left Front coalition, the CPI(M)—had to be
fed and strengthened at the cost of the upkeep of the people
and the state.
And yet, even before the spectre of communism swept
over Bengal, the state had felt the effects of grinding tectonic
shifts. The sectarian riots of 1947 that bathed Calcutta
with blood had exposed the brittle relations between Hindus and Muslims in Bengal even in newly independent
India. Ultra-left violence—inspired by Mao’s ‘revolution’
in China—kicked off in the late 1960s in the north Bengal
village of Naxalbari as a peasant uprising against
landlords, and then morphed in the early 1970s into an urban
guerrilla war fought by radicalised “intellectual” anarchists
against a petit bourgeoisie that was represented both
by government and society. All this happened well before the
Left Front entered the seat of power in Calcutta, Writers’
Building.
But by the 1990s, when I was in university and many of
us were being harangued in the silliest of ways by student
unions affiliated with the CPI(M)—English speakers were
‘class enemies’, computers were evil because they would
neutralise human labour, rock music was ‘a cultural pollutant’—the myth of the Glorious Past had been firmly established:
before the communists came to power, things were
hunky dory, a continuation of the magnificent era of Rabindranath
Tagore, when Bengal set the pace for the rest of
India in social reforms, economics and culture, a time when
the line “What Bengal thinks today, the rest of India thinks
tomorrow” wasn’t yet mere corny nostalgia.
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