No.1084
Revisited: A Bengal Story
Govind Nihalani’s fashionably depressing 1998 film
on the Naxalite movement starred Jaya Bachchan as the benighted mother of
corpse number 1084.
It was based on Mahasweta Devi’s Jnanpith Award
winning book (1974), released soon after after Congress and Siddhartha Shankar Roy had taken over. But it was in the backdrop of Communist ascendancy from 1967. The Left Front assumed power in West
Bengal, in 1977.
Hajar
Chaurashir Ma described the murderous class-war,
compared to which above-ground Communist rule seemed moderate. Did the Left
Front redistribute the agricultural land from the much maligned zamindar to the
small farmer?
Yes, but in the interests of labour-intensive
farming, it left out the productivity of mechanization and innovative
practices. Result: continued poverty with a new set of mai-baaps. And an economy based on rural cadre-based goonda enforcers chanelling state
deficit-financed handouts for compliance, and block votes.
However, at the time, playing to the persistent
illusions of a Liberal-Left universe, the book and film endorsed the Naxalite
message of overthrowing the established order. All for the sake of justice,
equality, dignity, in a utopia to come.
And, of course, the self-same Naxalite movement
has not died. It has morphed into today’s Maoism, replete with its China
supported guerrillas. It has urban cheerleaders in Leftist universities. Writer
Arundati Roy described them gushingly as “Gandhians with Guns” in a cover essay
in The Outlook.
The Naxalite/Maoists still operate from jungle
hideouts, and conduct pitched battles of attrition with the Indian state.
The Naxalite, for all his bloodthirstiness, has to
a remarkable extent captured the Bengali imagination. Since the mid-sixties,
the intelligent Bengali brain has been fevered, like that of a 19th
century consumptive, with fitful dreams of revolution, behind glittering,
bespectacled eyes.
That this revolution has been betrayed
continuously, seems of little consequence to him. It has been sold-out, not so
much by the hated “bourgeoisie”, though the parlous Indian middle-class,
through the decades of socialist India, was hardly fit for the moniker. No, the
whole sorry business was betrayed by his own lack of betterment, his pedestrian
penury.
Nevertheless, with a stubborn loyalty, generations
of Bengalis have allowed themselves to be willingly swallowed up by resounding
ideas from Marx and Mao. These were imbibed on doorsteps and parks and the tiny
tea shops of their youth. The ideas
echoed in their heads even as nothing changed for the better, and their
physical environment decayed around them.
When these impractical, mostly unsuccessful, but
otherwise decent folk became old, the arguments wore thin. Now, they sometimes
shook their heads in doubt and anger. But it was difficult to denounce a life-long
infatuation gone wrong.
It is a grand prejudice after all. The result: if not outright poverty then something
like it. The goal never changed. Yet, like in George Orwell’s Animal Farm, there were those who were
evidently more equal than others.
There is something in the Bengali temperament,
that, in common with the Punjabis, dreams of justice. Theirs is, of course, the
other state scarred by Partition.
Both people are capable, if their blood is
aroused, of doing themselves more harm than good. Did it begin with resistance
against the Moghuls in undivided Punjab? Did it segue into terror attacks
against the British Raj in the 19th and early 20th centuries?
Certainly after Jalianwala Bagh, something definitely happened.
In undivided Bengal, it was revolutionary bomb-making
and pistol work against the Raj too. This, even as a section were accomplished,
rich, subtly debauched, collaborators.
Then the first partition came in the shape of
Curzon’s action of 1905. Next the Capital was moved away to Delhi, in 1911. And
then, both Punjab and Bengal got it in the neck in the Partition of 1947,
courtesy Mountbatten, Jinnah and Nehru.
The Bengali, given to excitability, grandiloquence
and melancholia at the best of times, gradually developed a victimhood
psychosis.
This was not helped by the national sidelining of
its heroes by Nehru- Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose and Dr. Syama Prasad Mookerjee,
amongst them.
Then, with the onslaught of the Naxalites, their
brutal suppression that killed off the flower of Calcutta youth, and prolonged
Left Rule, its industry fled.
To date, old Calcutta hands from all over the
country and some foreigners too, prefer living and thriving in Mamata Didi’s
Kolkata. But, some of them, originally
Marwari trader-industrialist Bengalis,
relocated their factories to Gujarat at the first signs of trade union trouble.
Others, grand Raj names like Metalbox, just died.
British owned tea majors sold out to the Marwaris. Only cigarette major ITC stayed on, refusing
to shift its HQ, even in 2019.
Its grand white building on Chowringhee, its posh
flats, the annual general meetings announcing fat profits, its denizens
hobnobbing at Tollygunge Club, still impart a whiff of the old imperial
Calcutta.
Just when it seemed nothing could ever change, the
Left Front was thrown out of power after 34 years, lock stock and barrel.
Curiously, its replacement, the Trinamool Congress,
seemed, if anything, to be a more extreme version, despite professing reasonably
vanilla Centre-Left credentials.
It was extreme in all except name, and its
preference for the colour blue- in a cerulean shade. It was granted an election
symbol of three nursery book flowers, (Jora Ghas Phul). This replaced the Left’s
hammer and sickle, often accompanied by Mao’s profile and translations out of
his Red Book, on all the wall campaigns in West Bengal.
Almost another decade has gone by since 2011, when
Trinamool first came to power. It won 184 seats out of the 294 seat legislature
at the head of a 227 seat alliance with others, including Congress.
But, like the BJP is about to now, Trinamool, that
originally broke away from Congress, won 19 Lok Sabha seats in 2009 for the
first time.
As the
political climate changes, what can we expect in future?
It has been a long if unfulfilling partnership
with the Communists by any name, lasting nearly half a century. The people were
reluctant to dissolve such a long partnership, but when Mamata Banerjee put the
rights of the Moharram Processions ahead of the Durga Puja Bisarjan, it was the first of the last straws.
Today, people are remembering, prompted by a Jai
Shri Ram shouting and Ram Navavi procession organizing BJP, that it was Bengal
that was the original home of the Hindu Mahasabha.
And that Dr. Syama Prasad Mookerjee was its
leading light. That Mookerjee went on to establish the Jan Sangh that became
today’s BJP, before dying early, at the age of just 53 in Kashmir, gives the
forward march of the BJP in West Bengal
a special fervor.
It is likely, after it wins about half of the Lok
Sabha seats in 2019, that the BJP will win the next Assembly election too. It
has its strategic heart set on not only capturing the state, but securing most
of its 42 seats to parliament as well in due course.
For the people, it may well usher in a renaissance
the likes of which have not been since the British Raj centred itself in
Calcutta with Job Charnock.
West Bengal will receive massive investment under
BJP rule as the metropolis and entrepot for the East and North East of India.
The net effect is going to be like the lifting of an ancient curse, a Sleeping
Beauty come to life,liberty, and prosperity, after a lost fifty years. The BJP
will move to never be parted from this hard won, spiritually inspiring, key
state again.
The Communist excesses, and dangerously subversive
Islamic ways of the past will be checked. Transformations will be wrought just
as in Tripura and Assam. The National Register of Citizens will be strictly
applied.
West Bengal will become the hub of India’s Act
East Strategy, and its linkages with Bangladesh, Myanmar, Thailand and who knows,
even China.
This is a new dawn that promises to lead to a long
season of glorious days.
(1,295
words)
For:
Sirfnews
May
20th, 2019
Gautam
Mukherjee
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