"ARROGANCE."
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.
"YOU'VE PULLED DOWN SO MUCH," said a feisty elderly lady in a white sari who turned out to be another cousin of my grandfather. "You were such a chubby kid." One could say pretty much the same about the Left Front government, a tottering fellow six years younger than me who's grown suddenly and abruptly old and wizened, only a few years after scoring one of its biggest electoral victories in 2006.
I was sitting with Manik-dadu inside a two-storey house that belongs to his nephew, and my father's cousin, Tarun Hazra, who oversees the family land. The room was cool and comfortable, with a Panasonic television set ready for evening action. Outside, acres of flat farmland stretch to the horizon: this is the heart of Bardhaman district, the 'Red Fort' that has been the epicentre of support for the CPI(M) in West Bengal, and the breeding ground of its cadres, legendarily well-oiled and networked into every nook and cranny of social life, ever since the Left Front first planted its flag in the ground.
I had come to Bardhaman at the CPI(M)'s weakest moment: four days before the assembly polls. I was inside the Fortress of Solitude just in time to watch Superman keel over and die, and by 13 May, the invulnerable Government of Steel had withered in the face of Mamata Banerjee and her green Trinamool kryptonite.
The tide had begun to turn decisively in 2008, when the Trinamool Congress won panchayat elections after Banerjee hitched her pony to agitations against the Left Front government's farmland acquisition and industrialisation programme. In 2009, the script continued to play out with a convincing Trinamool rout in Lok Sabha elections; in 2010, the Trinamool swept the municipal polls, which Banerjee—looking forward to the assembly election—dubbed a "semi-final" match. All signs pointed toward the complete ouster of the CPI(M) at all levels of governance in West Bengal in the 2011 assembly elections.
When I visited Kolkata in January, however, I heard rumours of a CPI(M) recovery: cadres who had mutinied against the party high command after a policy pirouette—the industrialisation spree launched by chief minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharya and his industries minister Nirupam Sen—were said to have been wooed back. The talk, even weeks before the six-phase assembly elections started, was that the CPI(M) had picked itself up from the mat and was going for a calculated knockout. "Despite the previous results, the rural electorate will return the Left Front to power. They value their decades-long security provided by the party," a senior journalist told me in April, while stirring his cup of sugarless 'infusion'—black coffee—in that old haunt of poets, intellectuals and aggrieved students, the Coffee House on College Street in Kolkata. In other words, when it came to the crunch, the people would be rather stay secure with the Left than opt for change with the Trinamool.
The evidence in Gramdihi, however, was rather less encouraging for the CPI(M). Bhatar, the rice-rich constituency of a rice-rich district where Gramdihi lies, has been voting for the CPI(M) since 1982. But when I asked Manik-dadu if his reference to "arrogance" meant that the CPI(M) had taken its supporters for granted, he didn't mince words. "You could say that," he replied, before adding that it was "time they are taught a lesson."
Coming from the sinewy Hazra patriarch, this struck me as a curious statement. The effects of "Operation Barga", the Left Front's agricultural land redistribution programme, which began in 1978 and had empowered sharecroppers throughout Bengal right into the mid-1980s, were still visible as a kind of calling card for the Left Front in this part of Bengal, untouched by the depravities of hunger and poverty that you might see in nearby West Midnapur. Bardhaman was rice-rich, and a good advertisement for the Left Front government's achievements. In Gramdihi, a typical dusty Bardhaman village split into a Muslim locality ('Musalman para') and the rest of the village ('the Village'), the easy relationship between the landowners (Hindus) and sharecroppers (Muslims) resembled that between happy employees and contended employers.
"So have things deteriorated here?" I ask Manik-dadu, still hoping to get some answer.
"No. Things have been good. The crops have been good. Has Tarun shown you your fields? The new road from [Bardhaman] town also makes travelling so much quicker." The red earth road was certainly better than many of those I had travelled on over the last few days, some of the pucca streets in Calcutta included. But it still didn't explain why anyone here in the heart of Bengal's rice-bowl, with enough being earned to be passed around, wanted—or, at least, said they wanted—a regime change.
"Oh, we need change," Tarun-kaku had said with a chuckle when he brought us to the house, as if the chuckle itself was the explanation.
Earlier, I had passed circular silos heaving with the weight of dusty brown stalks of harvested rice piled up high. With a yellow-painted mosque next to us, this was the area where the people who did the actual farming lived and worked.
A man in a lungi and a sleeveless undershirt had been looking at me and Arijit, who was busy taking photos, for a while now. As the minutes progressed, did I sense some hostility? As I sat down next to him on a ledge marked with a Trinamool Congress poster, he asked me where the hell we were from. Well, he didn't actually say, "Where the hell are you from?" But as he asked me, the parachuting city slicker, the question, he avoided any eye contact. The 'hell' in his query was implicit.
I told him that we were there from Delhi to report on the assembly elections. That didn't soften him up as I had expected. Instead, he swivelled his stare towards Arijit and asked him, in much the same vaguely threatening manner, why he was taking pictures.
The tension was broken by an unexpected source. "Oh shut up! Let him take pictures," said a woman perched on a nearby cart, with a laugh. Before the man turned even surlier, Tarun cut in: "He's Shibu Uncle's grandson."
It turns out that my grandfather, Shibdas Hazra, a gynaecologist in Kolkata, would come to Gramdihi twice a year, to hang out with his folks, oversee his land and collect his share of the earnings.
"You should have told me you're Shibu-jaetha's grandson!" the man said, breaking into a smile. "I actually work on your land. See that land? That's the one." He pointed to a vague rectangular patch in the distance.
I asked him whether he sensed a shift in the political climate in Bengal. A Muslim sharecropper, after all, might well have a different perspective from the members of my landowning family."Oh, I don't know," he said. "I know farming, not politics. I'll just vote." That was where he left things, and I was left wondering how to decode his response: did his hostility to an outsider like myself suggest that he might be unlikely to vote for an unfamiliar new party after years of communist rule?
When I learned that the Trinamool candidate in Bhatar constituency was a man named Banamali Hazra, I thought this might explain why all the Hazras in Gramdihi were determined to vote for change. But this theory soon fell flat: the 66-year-old Banamali was running for the fourth time, and he'd lost the previous three elections to CPI(M) candidates.
"Nothing will really change," Manik Hazra said, by way of a conclusion, as he studied my face, trying to match it with his faint memory of the child he'd last seen almost four decades earlier. "But poriborton should come."
On 14 May, the day after the election results delivered a resounding victory to the Trinamool Congress all across Bengal, I checked the newspaper to see whether poriborton had in fact come to Bhatar. Banimali Hazra, who had lost three races since he first ran for the assembly in 1987, finally managed a victory—by 298 votes.
A WEEK BEFORE MY VISIT to Bardhaman, I was in Kolkata to watch the city go to the polls in the third phase of Bengal's six-part elections. The Left Front has always garnered the most intense loyalty from the rural peasantry, and has—as if to rationalise its relative lack of urban support—always made a habit of downplaying the importance of votes in Kolkata.
But Kolkata still matters. For one, it's the capital, home to both the seat of government and the headquarters of the state CPI(M), Muzaffar Ahmed Bhavan. More importantly, it's where many of the big-ticket contests take place, under the close gaze of the city's notoriously partisan media.
The Kolkata voter has been anti-Left Front for a while now and, slowly but surely, has come to gather around the iconic-cum-iconoclastic, sari-wrapped, chappal-wearing figure of Mamata Banerjee. It was in Kolkata that the artist Suvaprasanna, an early Trinamool Congress supporter, coined the party's cri de guerre, 'poribortoner hawa'—wind of change. It was also in Kolkata that Mamata Banerjee developed from being a firebrand Congress leader to an effective oppositional force as the head of her own Trinamool Congress party.
It was at the southern edge of Kolkata, in Jadavpur, that Mamata Banerjee won her first electoral battle, defeating the veteran CPI(M) leader Somnath Chatterjee in the 1984 Lok Sabha elections—and where the Trinamool wave of 2011 reached its highest point, defeating even Buddhadeb Bhattacharya, who had won every assembly election here since 1987.
The roads of Kolkata on election day are practically empty of any vehicles. So the city, with buildings daubed with a coat of unremovable grime, either looks as if it's waiting for its ever-delayed construction to be finished, or like a pleasantly undamaged, post-apocalyptic zone devoid of citizens.
I walked down a tiny lane in Jadavpur, leading to one of the polling booths that would soon deliver defeat to Bhattacharya; it was festooned on both sides by flags, flags and more flags, both the red rag bearing the hammer-and-sickle and the green one with the Trinamool's pair of three-leafed clovers, which looks more like an illustration accompanying a nursery rhyme than a party symbol. A boy in his early teens was slicing carrots inside Pradeep Snacks, a ramshackle room doubling as a food shack; Hindi film music, either Mukesh or Mohammad Rafi, I can't say for sure, blared from a radio. Out of the window of an invisible household kitchen farther along, I passed the smell and crackle of vegetables being fried, and more film music, contemporary this time.
I kept walking until I reached the Baghajatin Market Complex, a two-storey structure of stunning ugliness. There were a couple of shops open, but business was slow. The man sitting behind a row of jars in one of the shops didn't seem like he sold anything—and he didn't look like he wanted to sell anything if it meant having to stop reading the newspaper undisturbed.
But there is a story to be found at the Baghajatin Market Complex, and it's told by an inscription on one of the walls, which says that the market's foundation stone was laid by Buddhadeb Bhattacharya, then the state's home, information and broadcasting, and culture minister, on 19 March 1997.The market was inaugurated by the mayor, the inscription says, on 29 August 2007.
Nothing can possibly capture the deadening pace with which things happened in Kolkata under Left Front rule than the fact that it took 10 years to build this miserable pile of concrete. The construction of the Sealdah flyover, which today connects eastern and central Kolkata, took up the entirety of my early and late childhood, while India's first metro system, whose blueprint was drawn up by West Bengal's second chief minister, Bidhan Chandra Roy, in the 1960s, didn't start running until the 1980s. Today it remains essentially a single line rather than a real metro network; the only real "updates" made to the metro in the last decade have been renaming the stations to honour popular Bengali heroes—and this was undertaken by Mamata Banerjee in her capacity as the Union railway minister.
It was against this backdrop that Buddhadeb Bhattacharya tried—and failed—to speed things up. The route he pursued during his 11-year tenure was to try to set up industries in a Bengal that had booted them out during the reign of his comrade and predecessor Jyoti Basu, the venerable Gandalf of Indian communism.
Bhattacharya was Basu's protégé—and served as his home, police, information and broadcasting, and culture minister. A classic Bengali bhadralok, living an austere life, Bhattacharya is a dyed-in-the-wool party man who understood that running a communist regime entailed making the party indistinguishable from the government and administration. Under 23 years of Basu and 11 of Bhattacharya, the entire professional landscape of West Bengal—bureaucrats, the police, teachers, doctors and even artists and writers—was retrofitted from the party machinery. To have a chance to run a taxi or a rickshaw, or teach in a school or practise in a hospital, you had to have 'party' affiliations. The flip side to this arrangement was that if you did have party affiliations, you didn't really have to do your job for a living.
With the Left Front government grinding down all social and economic indicators simply to feed the beast of the party, the state that had been near the top of all-India rankings in the early 1960s slid toward the bottom. It was in this atmosphere of gloom and doom—and with Mamata Banerjee, by then a fully-fledged opposition leader, stirring up dissent in the state—that Basu executed a masterstroke. Instead of allowing Banerjee to position herself as the only alternative to the dead weight of his administration, Basu stepped down in 2000 and brought in Bhattacharya as an alternative to both himself and Banerjee. The wily old communist had pre-empted Banerjee's insurgency—and ushered in Bengal's first 'poriborton' some 11 years before Mamata pulled off her more dramatic coup. The task facing Bhattacharya, who had translated the Russian poet Mayakovsky and the Colombian novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez, was to save the sinking ship of the Left Front. His job was to re-industrialise Bengal.
"DADA, ARE YOU FROM THE MEDIA?"
This was the voice of Tarak, an (over)friendly Trinamool worker who, for the next 45 minutes, did his bit to convince me that there was hidden CPI(M) terror lurking behind every corner in Jadavpur. The small tent from which Tarak emerged was a makeshift Trinamool poll-day office. Until Tarak's arrival, the sight of CPI(M) workers sitting at an arm's length away from Trinamool workers—with both groups reading the day's newspapers and, from time to time, running their fingers down the voter list—hadn't quite given the impression of an epic battle in progress.
It was Tarak who snapped me out of the surrounding banality. When asked by a colleague what food he would have for lunch, our man, who ensured that I was listening, replied, "Food? When I sit in a booth on election day, I don't eat."
Tarak steered me toward Birnagar Bastuhara Primary School, aka Polling Station 158. "See those guys in the white kurtas?" Tarak said, pointing at a circle of middle-aged men standing opposite the polling station. "They are all harmad."
Three hundred years ago, a Bengali using the word 'harmad'—a corruption of the Spanish 'armada'—would have been referring to Portuguese pirates, widely noted for their brutality. But this gaggle of men in white kurtas didn't seem like a latter-day version of Jack Sparrow and his crew. Ever since Mamata popularised the term, 'harmad' has become synonymous with loutish CPI(M) cadres. But on election day, with men from the Border Security Force (BSF) and other security personnel standing outside and inside every polling station, even the most fearsome harmad is likely to look like a mild-mannered citizen lined up to vote.
Within a few minutes of our arrival at Polling Station 158, Tarak had already started to argue with a BSF officer on booth duty."That man going in is a CPI(M) man!" he said, in ghastly Hindi. The rulebook was being flouted, Tarak continued—no member of a political party is allowed to be within 100 metres of a polling booth.
"How the hell do you know he's a CPI(M) man?" the BSF man told Tarak, before giving him a nudge that was trained to be firm and gentle at the same time.
Rebuffed, Tarak returned his attention to me. "That man is Palas Nag. He conducts 'terrorism' in this area. Jangal Mahal and Jadavpur Mahal, it's the same," he said, comparing the scene in front of us—ladies patiently lined up to vote under their sun-blocking umbrellas—with tribal districts in western Bengal wracked with Maoist violence. Before I managed to scoff at the comparison, he added, deadly serious, "The women are the most dangerous lot. The CPI(M) use women in various ways. They intimidate people in ways that the men can't."
A few minutes down the road, I met Manish Gupta, the Trinamool candidate who played David to Buddhadeb Bhattacharya's Goliath. The former bureaucrat, who retired in 2001 after a career as one of Jyoti Basu's most loyal officers, shook my hand in a dark room crowded with Trinamool workers. Like his old boss Jyoti-babu, Gupta seemed more comfortable talking in English than in Bengali. Sitting under a poster of Mamata Banerjee, he proceeded to tell me that unlike what many people may think, his party is not anti-industry.
"Industrialisation has to be tied to a cogent employment generating policy. This is something that the Left Front rejected," he said.
He was wearing a pair of sneakers and looked as if he was just back from a morning walk.
"I came into politics because I believe that with my experience I know how things function from the inside," he said, with a stern smugness that I associate with bureaucrats rather than politicians. The Trinamool, he told me, has to show signs of progress in Bengal within the first two years it's in government. After decades of decay, I asked him, was that realistically possible? He replied by telling me it would be necessary to reach out to people and to get them involved in the governance process, before proceeding to namedrop Joseph Stiglitz and Amartya Sen.
I couldn't help but think that the 67-year-old Buddha-babu would have gotten along famously with Gupta, a 69-year-old former army major who served as Bhattacharya's chief secretary for a year before retiring in 2001, even though they were now on opposite teams.
It turns out, in fact, that the two did get along well: in 1993, when Mamata Banerjee was still in the Congress, she had stormed into Writers' Building to protest outside Jyoti Basu's office, demanding action against a CPI(M) man alleged of raping a young woman. Mamata was dragged out of the building by force and arrested—and vowed never to enter Writers' Building while the CPI(M) was still in power. The man who supervised the police action that led to her arrest was Manish Gupta. Things change.
A FEW HOURS AFTER LEAVING Gupta's campaign office, I headed to the Trinamool headquarters, on Harish Chatterjee Street in the Kalighat area of south Kolkata. This is where Mamata Banerjee stays, but I was told that the 56-year-old leader was resting after a series of meetings and then setting off to cast her vote later in the afternoon.
You can't miss the place. It's a two-storey house with a pair of kitschy Thermocol cutouts of dancing Shivas pasted on either side of the main door. This is the house from which Mamata has been plotting to overthrow Bengal's communist regime for at least the last 30 years. Until what seems like just the other day, the Trinamool Congress was a ragtag lot; a breakaway faction from the Congress led by a loudmouthed brigand. Mamata, back then, was a rabblerouser in search of a mob that would vote her into power, but by election day she had already undergone a dramatic personal makeover, which turned a firebrand insurgent into an establishment figure. The fate of that transformation—whether it holds up over time—could well decide the fate of Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee, the Great Deliverer of 2011, when the voters of West Bengal next return to the polls.
But on the muggy, sweltering April day that I visited, two weeks before the results were announced, the signs in the small ground-floor office next to Mamata's house still pointed to a radical spirit that clamoured for respectability without betraying her anti-elitist roots. The first floor walls of the CPI(M) headquarters on Alimuddin Street are adorned with the framed portraits of past comrades, all serious-looking gents who could have easily passed off as university vice chancellors or deracinated zamindars. The wall of the Trinamool office room, by contrast, bears the genuine marks of a person bearing no traces of bourgeois taste. Here on display: a photograph of the Kaaba in Mecca; portraits of two of the three heroes that adorn the walls of every Bengali household, Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose and Rabindranath Tagore (I am told by reliable sources that a portrait of Swami Vivekananda, a perennial favourite youth leader among Bengalis, was added a few days before the poll results were announced); the 'revolutionary' poet Nazrul Islam (as an antipodal figure perhaps to the other 'revolutionary' poet, Sukanta Bhattacharya, who happened to be Buddhadeb's father's cousin); and a photo of Mamata herself in a white hijab offering namaaz. The only non-Bengali adorning the wall is Mahatma Gandhi.
And lest any visitor conclude that the Trinamool leader fails to match up to Buddha-babu when it comes to intellectual sophistication, a rack full of books does its part to correct that perception: Jonmaini ("Unborn"), Gonothonthrer Lajja ("Democracy's Shame"), Lungol ("The Plough"), Jago Bangla ("Awake Bengal"). Not exactly Brechtian poetry, but these are books written by Mamata-di, trying her hand at being an ideologue, though perhaps ending up as a more competent pamphleteer. (All of her books have been bestsellers, and have earned her a pile of royalties, her publisher told a newspaper after the election victory.)
A posse of journalists is waiting outside, in case Didi—the 'sister' who's almost 'mother' in the spirit of the folk-religious Trinamool slogan, 'Ma-Mati-Manush' (mother-soil-people)—makes an appearance. Standing there in the
compound, so close to the temple of Kali and with the solid grey sludge of the Ganga flowing alongside, the feeling wasn't unlike waiting for a darshan of a spunky urban mother goddess. Some young reporters were chatting with Derek O'Brien, the suave English-speaking media manager of the Trinamool Congress. I still saw him in his earlier avatar, as a very successful quiz master and the youngest son of Neil O'Brien, a former parliamentarian. "My family is like a tennis score," Derek told me while fielding messages on his mobile phone. "It's 6-1. Everyone else is a CPI(M) supporter. At least my father has reasons to be grateful to them"—they nominated him to Parliament.
I thought of my own family in the CPI(M) stronghold of Beliaghata in eastern Kolkata. Voting for the CPI(M) was a reflex action. In spite of the occasional anti-establishment stirrings prompted by rants from the communists about 'American imperialism', 'bourgeois decadence' and 'cultural pollution', their dissatisfaction with the ruling party was never sufficiently strong to take a chance with the Congress or the Trinamool when elections came around. Why not?
I posed this question to two friends whom I met one evening in Salt Lake in eastern Kolkata, not far from the late communist patriarch Jyoti Basu's house. Nilotpal, an advertising man whom I've been friends with since I was six years old, has been a lifelong anti-communist. Vinayak is a doctor and believes that for all its ills, the Left Front is still the only option. "Mamata is—" Vinayak said, after bottoming his third whisky and lowering his voice, "—she's a domestic servant".
Nilotpal and I were stunned and howled in protest. It wasn't that I didn't understand what Vinayak had just said; as far as stereotypes of the Trinamool leader go, he wasn't far off the mark. He wasn't alone, for that matter, in thinking that Mamata was seriously lacking in middle-class respectability. The Bengali word he used, 'jhee', is dripping with prejudice and class scorn. But it was precisely this quality—Mamata's lower-middle-class crassness, her demotically charged I-wear-crumpled-saris-and-speak-the-street reputation—that made her the alternative to the Left Front leaders, who were actually, despite the communist brand identity, seen as snobbish elitists.
In a way, Mamata Banerjee was always the poster girl of the unwashed masses, the ungentrified Left. But it wasn't until most of Bengal came to regard the CPI(M) as elitists in prole's clothing that Mamata could be recognised as what she'd always been: the shabby, unpretentious, unwashed underclass leader of a shabby, unpretentious, unwashed underclass people left to fend for themselves by the communists.
The CPI(M) had long since lost the support of the urban voters of Kolkata. But they would remain in power until the rest of Bengal—lower-middle-class, demotically charged, I-wear-crumpled-saris-and- speak-the-street Bengal—switched their loyalties to someone they could regard as the leader of the Real Left, the champion of the forlorn masses who had been tossed aside by the dhoti-wearing welcomer of corporate fat cats. The rise of Didi meant that you could look for protection and security from "one of our own"—and that may have been what, in the end, convinced the loyal voters of the Left Front to join the anti-Left across Bengal.
THE LAST TIME I HAD COME TO SINGUR, this collection of villages in Hooghly district was agog with raucous activity. Crowds had assembled to listen to orators threaten the government from makeshift stages; television OB vans were parked along the Durgapur Expressway while mic-wielding reporters were vox-popping anyone and everyone they could get their hands on; hawkers sold snacks to the crowds. I remember feeling distinctly like I was attending a mela.
At the time, Mamata Banerjee had lent her weight to an ongoing protest against the government's land-acquisition programme. Buddhadeb Bhattacharya was keen to have Tata, a respectable pan-India business house, set up their factory to build 100,000-rupee cars in Bengal; this, he calculated, would send a positive message to all the other big business houses, which would in turn help the state move into its brave new era of re-industrialisation. The CPI(M) would also benefit, because the peasantry would quickly shift into more lucrative factory work.Well, that was the plan, anyway.
On the afternoon that I visited Singur in 2008, Banerjee was raging from a dais that had been set up adjacent to the land earmarked for the Tata Nano plant, railing against a Left Front machine that was selling farmers' livelihoods to feed corporate bosses. After years of trying, she had at last latched onto something that could—if the mood was sustained—bring the giant edifice of the CPI(M), the party of the peasantry, crashing down.
That October, after meeting with Buddhadeb Bhattacharya, Ratan Tata announced that he would pull the Nano plant out of Bengal; within 14 months, tiny cars started to roll off the assembly line in -Sanand, Gujarat—and Buddhadeb's nascent plan to bring industry back to Bengal was smothered in its cradle.
When I returned to Singur three years later, a few days after the elections in -Kolkata and a few days before Singur went to the polls, the walled compound enclosing the aborted Tata Motors factory was manned by two earnest security guards. There wasn't really anything to see inside, but the guards weren't taking any chances, and they turned me away when I asked to go in.
As I walked back towards my car on the side of the expressway, I noticed a shack covering a cycle-rickshaw; sitting inside the green box-like space, a portly man wearing an undershirt and lungi was selling tea, cigarettes and biscuits to the occasional passerby. I asked for a cup of tea, and he told me his story—a story inextricably linked to the sudden change in the fortune of Mamata Banerjee.
Golok Manna, now 35, had been a junior security guard at a local factory, and in 2007, he was one of the 700-odd locals in Singur who got an appointment letter for a job at the soon-to-be established Tata plant. "It was going to be a steady job with a considerable increase in my earnings. And then, Didi's agitation against the Tata plant stopped everything," he said, with a quiet anger that came out as resignation. When the Tata plant fled Bengal, many other small factories followed, including the one Manna had quit in order to take up the Tata job that never materialised. I asked him if he thought Mamata would bring development to Singur now. "How can I know that? All I can tell you is what didn't happen. What will happen is wishful thinking."
Manna wasn't the only person who felt hoodwinked by the agitation that brought the Trinamool Congress to centre stage and sent the Left Front scampering. In the nearby village of Joymolla, a clubhouse full of people now earning their livelihood from daily wages told me they felt like pawns used in a great political game and then tossed aside after their utility had been exhausted.
One of them, Bikash Pakira, was brimming with anger, but he bore it with a crooked smile. "There were people who sold their land, got a job and went to the Tata Nano training centre in Pune and returned to join the anti-Tata agitation," he said. "They had been told by Trinamool leaders that by joining the agitation, the compensation for the land they had sold to the government would increase." He looked at me and laughed in a strange manner. "They just got greedy and in the process drove the Tatas out altogether. Neither did they have their land nor did they get their jobs. They went to catch a horse and got a goat instead."
In the adjoining Masjidtolla village, a gaggle of farmers was resting in the shade. Madhushudhan Satra didn't sell his land, but he had a tough time trusting me. It was only when I told him that I was from Delhi, not Kolkata, that he opened up. His anger was primarily directed at the "Kolkata experts" and "leaders" who had, during the 2007 agitation against the Tata project, spoken in the media about how rich the agricultural land in Singur was and how industrialisation would drive these wealthy farmers into penury.
"I heard one of them say that in Singur, farmers have six-crop harvests. That's absolute nonsense. At best, we can grow a three-crop harvest," he said.
Another farmer, Pradyut Purhel, stood up to point out his land—a small patch where he grows potatoes and rice. "Have you heard anyone become rich by farming?"
When I came to Singur at the height of the agitations against the Tata project, I visited the very same areas. Back then, the anger was just as intense, but it was headed in the opposite direction, best summed up by the furious man who told me, "Shall we eat cars?"
After leaving Masjidtolla, I met Tushar, Pia, Saurav, Shankar and Biswajeet—five eight-year-old kids making their way home to Mohish Tikari village from school. They were regular, noisy kids, excited to see a car stumbling along the dirt track and two sweating, panting middle-aged men emerge from it. After they cracked a few silly jokes about how Biswajeet rhymes with Indrajit, I asked them all what they wanted to do when they grew up. "I want to go outside of this place," they shouted all at once.
"Where do you want to go?" I asked them.
Their unprompted answer, in loud and anarchic unison: "I want to go to Surat and work in the factory," referring to the Tata plant that was supposed to have been built next door. (The plant is actually in Sanand, outside of Ahmedabad.)
Only one, Pia, said she wanted to go to Kolkata. "That's because you just want to get married quickly," I said, and the whole group, Pia included, burst into a cloud of giggles.
As I left Singur, burning under the early afternoon sun, I sensed that the grownups were waiting for Didi to bring them something as compensation for an opportunity lost. Which could—ironically for someone who drove industry out of Singur—make it easier for Mamata to sell industrialisation back to the people of Bengal.
IF THE AGITATION IN SINGUR was essentially about farmers not being paid enough for their land—since, in hindsight, it seems they didn't really want to chase the Tata plant away—the calamity in Nandigram, one year earlier, was sparked by people who felt their land was about to be practically stolen outright. Nandigram presented an unforgettable picture of the CPI(M) government at war with its own people—and its repercussions may explain why the government appeared too timid to take on the opposition at Singur the following year.
The story of Nandigram began with an innocuous announcement in early 2007: the government had made plans to set up a chemical hub in East Midnapur, across the Haldi river from the industrial township of Haldia. The location was a sensible one, but for a government that had made itself indistinguishable from the party and its cadres, the CPI(M) leadership committed a crucial error.
As a local CPI(M) leader explained to me in Nandigram a few days before the area went to the polls on 3 May: "In the past, for industrial projects the party leaders would go to the panchayats and discuss the matter of setting up a factory with the district and village CPI(M) leaders. After the landslide assembly victory of the Left Front in 2006, the government made the mistake of taking the electoral results as an automatic mandate to set up the chemical hub in Nandigram. No one consulted the leaders. It was just announced. And that led to immediate disaffection that in turn led to paranoia about a factory wiping away people's land. "When the protests grew unmanageably large, the government sent in cadres and police who opened fire on demonstrators, killing at least 14 villagers. The Trinamool Congress seized on the CPI(M)'s brutal crackdown, and by early 2008 Nandigram had become a veritable battleground between CPI(M) cadres and Trinamool activists—with renegade CPI(M) members from Nandigram defecting to the anti-government forces. In the face of nationwide condemnation—and with the Singur agitation adding to its mounting woes—the Left Front abandoned its plans for Nandigram. The pity of it all, apart from the brutality of a people's party turning its back on its own faithful, is that the villagers of Nandigram don't seem to have any alternatives to industrialisation: in terms of development, things can't possibly get worse than they are here.
Muralimohan Patra, a reed-thin 76-year-old who has worked as an odd-jobs man at the Brojomohan Towari Shikhshaniketan school in Nandigram for 32 years, recounted the bloody scenes of 2007, when hacked bodies were carted into the local hospital from adjoining villages. "Those days were bad," he said with the understatement of a man who has seen governments come and go, even if the last one took its own sweet time to leave. Nandigram was where the CPI(M) cadres bared their fangs, terrorising the inhabitants of an area once known mostly for its education centres.
"It became a poisoned place," Patra told me. But he wasn't too sure about the future."Mamata in a pre-election rally here promised 10 lakh jobs," he said. "I'd like to see how she gets them from thin air."
Around every corner, there seemed to be a school or a tutorial centre; one teacher, Shobhon Tripathi, explained why the Trinamool would sweep Bengal this time. "Earlier the opposition was the Congress, which was a sham opposition," he said. "The Congress and CPI(M) leaders would drink together in the evenings and pretend to conduct debates in the assembly in Kolkata the next morning. Until Mamata, there was no real alternative."
Tripathi said he believed that anything would be better than the Left Front. He told me about a very poor student he used to teach. "I wanted her to get first division marks, or at least high second division. Then I realised that if she passes, that would be cause for joy. So when she scraped through, I felt a tremendous success. For Bengal, it's the same. Under Didi, even if the state manages to pass, it will be a big difference from today."
Paramananda Bharati, an ex-teacher, is a Nandigram resident who recognised me from my earlier visit here in 2008. "I remember we spoke when you came a few days after the first body arrived from Sonachura," Bharati told me as we sat in front of a medical store, referring to the first spate of violence unleashed by the CPI(M) cadres in the neighbouring villages even as locals were digging up roads to stop them from entering.
The Muslim community in the whole of southern Bengal, he said, had shifted their support from the CPI(M) to the Trinamool. "It just happened that the villages the cadres were terrorising when they were killing Trinamool workers were Muslim-populated. The community had no choice but to seek support and protection elsewhere."
Today in Nandigram, it is the CPI(M) cadres who are desperately in search of support and protection. At a deserted and damaged party office building, I met men stricken by the fear of violent death for the first time in my life. Ajad Mallik and Shaikh Nashir were the only two party workers inside the otherwise deserted building; as they spoke to me, I could see a distant glaze in their eyes, which didn't seem to bear any signs of life.
"We will have to die," Mallik told me. "After the 13th, we will be murdered. The media, the security personnel and the Election Commission won't be here any more." He went on to name local Trinamool cadres—Laltu, Zaheer, Zulfikar, Shamkaizi, and so on—who have already promised to come and kill them once the results are out and the battle has been won.
I asked them what the CPI(M) leadership had told them to do. Outside, the sun was scorching, but in the dank and dark building, sitting on a red plastic chair opposite a Lenin sticker pasted on a door, I could barely see anything. The light from outside bounced off Nashir's glassy eyes, which seemed to stare right past me. "Nothing," he replied. "They've just told us to lie low. They don't care. We don't dare to spend the nights here. We go to nearby villages where there are relatives." But if they leave Nandigram for good, they said, they fear their families will be hunted down and killed.
I didn't know what Mallik and Nashir were up to in 2007 and 2008, when their comrades were butchering villagers suspected of being Trinamool supporters. Perhaps they didn't have blood on their hands. Perhaps they did.
But as I remember them, cloaked in darkness on that boiling sunny day, frozen in fear of death, I can't help but recall the Trinamool slogan that accompanied the news of Mamata's landslide victory on 13 May: 'Badla noy, badal chai' (Not vengeance, we want change). Whether the Trinamool Congress can keep this promise—or whether it wants to keep this promise—will determine, to a great degree, how different its reign will be from the party whose 34-year rule it ended.
A few days earlier, I had been in Bardhaman, a town far away in every sense of the word from the mouldering world of Nandigram. On a dirt patch that serves as the playground of Bardhaman Banipath High School, dishevelled boys in uniform were immersed in an intense game of cricket. After refusing to budge in the face of a series of appeals that the ball had hit the stumps chalked on the wall behind him, the batsman was finally caught by a fielder. It seemed to me like a fitting metaphor for everything I'd seen in West Bengal: whatever the outcome, it had become clear that there was no room here for denial anymore.
As a new batsman took guard, I read the writing on the wall, a few feet above the chalked-in stumps.
'Long live Indo-Soviet friendship!' it said, in pale blue English letters. There was no sign of when the scrawl was made. Or whether someone would ever write something over it in the days, months, years and decades to come.