Bengal’s Descent into Darkness

What Bengal thinks today, India thinks tomorrow. If this old saying retains some relevance today, it’s as a way to place the tragedy of the state’s slide in perspective.

What Bengal thinks today, India thinks tomorrow. If this old saying retains some relevance today, it’s as a way to place the tragedy of the state’s slide in perspective.

No dream could have gone so sour, so fast. It was a little over three years ago that Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee, flush with a landslide win for the Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPM) in West Bengal’s Assembly, trumpeted the state’s industrial resurgence. With thinly concealed glee, the new Chief Minister announced that the state had bagged Tata Motors’ Nano project and a slew of other investments. In the euphoria, he even coined a slogan that sounded straight out of a sports shoe ad—‘Do It Now’.

Could Bengal, laid low by three decades of communist rule, finally be returning to its former form as an industrial powerhouse? Hope had certainly sprung anew. The musty corridors of Writers’ Building, the state secretariat, were once again streaming with industrialists and investors. Business proposals were back. Talk of billions of dollars filled the air. And the media whipped up a frenzy around ‘Brand Buddha’, leading a new Land of Opportunity.

All that seems like rushes from a film you only faintly recall seeing. The hopes, promises and declarations are now a lost jumble amidst a desolate landscape of an increasingly fractious Bengal, a state that seems to have become as ungovernable as its rulers’ inability and unwillingness to govern. None of the mega projects announced with so much fanfare has materialised. Tata Motors’ pullout was the first in a series of desertions by investors. Singed by Singur and Nandigram, the state government has been nervous about acquiring land for industry; ideological ambivalence towards ‘private ownership’ over the years, it would seem, has led to authoritarian attitudes at the top and confusion elsewhere about the right to land—and a popular erosion in the legitimacy of the state’s role in directing its use.

Vast swathes of the state—the Adivasi-dominated Jangalmahal in the western districts and Gorkha-inhabited Darjeeling and parts of Dooars in north Bengal—have spun out of the state machinery’s orbit. Why, the state’s writ doesn’t even run on the streets of Kolkata where 50,000 autos have been plying all these years without permits. There has been an exodus of competent IAS officers from Bengal in recent months, and many ministers have stopped attending office (some of them ill, others unwilling). After a string of electoral setbacks, Bhattacharjee has seen his authority fall. The governance limbo suggests that the CPM-led Left Front has reconciled itself to a rout in the next Assembly polls. These are slated for 2011, but the Trinamool’s Mamata Banerjee wants them held earlier; it would be a favour to the CM, some reckon—it would put him out of his misery.

Bengal finds no mention as an investment destination today. Living conditions even in Kolkata have worsened, and the state has descended into chaos that could turn into anarchy. ‘Brand Bengal’ has metamorphosed into ‘Bland Bengal’.

So, what went wrong? Some say Nandigram was the turning point. The March 2007 police firing on peasants, followed by the political clashes culminating in the bloody recapture of the area by CPM goons in December that year, took all the shine off Buddhadeb’s Bengal. “Investors suddenly realised that Bengal isn’t a happy place to put money in. With the CPM losing its grip, industrialists felt their investments in Bengal wouldn’t be secure, more so since the Trinamool had appeared to take an anti-industry stance,” says a senior member of the Bengal Chamber of Commerce.

Some feel that the causes run deeper. “After the initial hype wore off, investors saw for themselves the poor work culture in Bengal and how difficult it was for them to get clearances and get work done on the ground,” says economist Abhirup Sarkar, “They also realised that for all the tall talk, Bengal’s infrastructure was in shambles. And most of all, they became aware that the masses were angry with the Left Front government due to decades of apathy, lack of development and neglect. The socio-political situation in Bengal wasn’t conducive to doing business.”

Many extend their assessment over a longer time span, arguing that Bengal’s decline was inevitable, given the decades of misgovernance. “The bureaucracy has been totally politicised by the Left Front which has never tolerated upright and non-partisan officers,” says former additional chief secretary Dipak Rudra, “The so-called ‘democratic decentralisation’ has made heads of local bodies more powerful than bureaucrats, leading to demoralisation. The District Magistrate in Bengal is subservient to the Zila Parishad chairman. Since the administration has never been allowed to act on its own, with even a BDO or police station OC looking up to CPM functionaries for directives, governance has collapsed.”

But the CPM is not solely to blame, contend others. “The genesis of the problems we’re facing now is the huge influx of migrants from erstwhile East Bengal,” according to veteran communist Ashoke Mitra, “Bengal was one of the richest provinces in the country till even the early 60s. The waves of migration by the destitute imposed a crushing burden on Bengal. With no help from New Delhi with relief and rehabilitation of migrants, Bengal was left to do whatever little it could. The state could never recover from this.” Plus, he adds, the Centre’s policies crippled industry in Bengal; freight equalisation, for example, robbed the state of its port advantage by subsidising factories located much farther inland.

Not entirely true, argue others. “The Left promoted militant trade unionism and neglected industry. It drove away capital from Bengal,” asserts Sarkar, who teaches at the Indian Statistical Institute (ISI). Hostility towards industry, seen as moneybags out to exploit the toiling masses, has been a cultural reflex in the state. The imperative of helping the poor, the immorality of an acquisitive life, and the crassness of pursuing wealth are all themes that have animated Bengali literature, films, theatre and songs for long. This sensibility has survived economic liberalisation. Even now, every political plank in Bengal draws on it. “Mamata has effectively usurped the Left agenda by giving a voice to the anti-capital psyche of the people of Bengal at a time when the Left was seen courting capital,” says a prominent industrialist.

None of Bengal’s cultural conditioning explains or excuses the state’s errors of governance. Thirty years ago, West Bengal was India’s sixth most prosperous state; today, it is close to the bottom, only marginally better off than Bihar. In 2006, the Left Front gained re-election with the slogan, ‘Agriculture is our base, and industry our future’, hinting at a pragmatism that would deploy whatever it took—capital as a tool if need be—to achieve broad welfare and development goals.

But in the end, it’s left with neither the base nor the future. Agriculture has suffered. “Land reforms, introduction of the boro (second) crop, and decentralisation of rural power through panchayats did boost agriculture in the late 1970s till the early 1990s,” says Sarkar, “But land holdings got fragmented, affecting productivity. The state didn’t undertake massive irrigation projects, and with farmers being forced to depend on groundwater, the plunging groundwater table added to their woes.” Adds Ajitava Raychaudhuri, an economics professor at Jadavpur University, “Healthcare, primary, secondary and higher education and roads etcetera, have not found place on the government’s agenda.”

The failure to lure business is equally clear. “‘Do it now’ has remained a mere slogan, and apart from the CM, everyone down the line from his ministers to clerks don’t want to work, and when they do, it is to put up hurdles,” says a top Reliance Group honcho. The lack of progress, whether on flagship projects like the deep-sea port or chemical hub, or any other infrastructure project, has been widely noticed. Nor has anything moved in the CM’s favourite sector, infotech. No big tech firm yet has set up office in Salt Lake’s Sector V, once touted by Bhattacharjee as India’s ‘hottest infotech destination’, but now just a civic disaster.

At Rajarhat New Town, the state government’s misplanning is in stark evidence. Again, touted by Bhattacharjee as the country’s ‘best place to live in’, it’s now a nightmare of resource misallocation and bad urbanisation. Sudhanshu Ghosh bought a flat in one of the high-rises here after retiring as principal from a Kendriya Vidyalaya at Dehradun two years ago. “I was taken in by the promises, but now regret my shift to this place. There is no drinking water, public transport, market or even a medicine shop here. The sewage system is a total mess and we suffer days of waterlogging even after light rains,” he complains. Hidco, the state government agency backing the project, says it can’t supply drinking water until the entire township, with its projected population of 1.5 million, is completed in 2015. Acting now for a few thousand would be a waste, it says!

If there’s one thing the country would heartily endorse as ‘excellent’ in the state, it’s Bengal’s arts and theatre scene, which has been a guiding light for the rest. But sadly, Bengal’s malaise has begun to cramp even this space for creativity. “The state, as patron of the arts, needs to be pro-active,” says Arijit Dutta, former president of Eastern India Motion Pictures Association, “The movie industry here is facing a crisis and 350 halls have closed down in the state over the last four years.” For people with a sensibility underlaid by a public conscience of refined significance, this decline is nothing short of disaster.

It’s all interlinked, in a tragic sort of way. Among the big reasons for Bengal’s relative loss of intellectual vibrancy is its decrepit education sector—a direct fallout of the politicisation of educational institutions since 1977. Explains Sunando Sanyal, an eminent educationist, “A series of disastrous steps were taken, starting with the abolition of English from primary levels by the Left Front immediately after it came to power, followed by the systematic infiltration of all colleges and universities by party loyalists. Anil Biswas, the former CPM state secretary, perfected the system of interference; not a single college or university teacher could be appointed without his approval. Vice-chancellors were appointed not on merit, but on how loyal they were to the party. Teaching standards thus declined, as teachers were more taken up with party matters.”

It led to a brain drain. Presidency College, which once prided itself as one of the best institutions in India, didn’t find enough candidates for its seats in many courses this year. No research worth the mention is done in any university in the state. Sarkar says it is impossible to get good faculty from Bengal at ISI. “Earlier, students from Calcutta would get into the ISI in huge numbers through the all-India admission test. Today, barely a handful of students from Bengal manage to scrape through. Earlier, scores of students from Calcutta used to make it to the Delhi School of Economics, and now barely eight to ten can get through,” he points out.

The good students leave, often never to return. This has caused an acute manpower crisis in Bengal, something investors are well aware of. “There is a ready pool of lower to mid-lower level manpower in Bengal,” confides a top headhunter, “But well-qualified people for middle and senior levels are very difficult to find. It is also difficult to recruit them from other states since most don’t want to come, work and live in Kolkata.”

The image of Bengal has also got battered lately because of the Maoist insurgency—and the state’s failure to contain it. Of the Rs 50 crore allocated for development works in the Maoist areas of western Bengal last year, only Rs 3 crore has been used. Maoists are running riot in many of these no-go areas. In the much vaunted battle against them that began in mid-June, some 19 CPM workers have lost their lives, even as the security forces cower behind sandbags instead of entering the jungles to take them on.

Says Congress leader Pradip Bhattacharyya, “The state is degenerating into chaos. The state government’s impotence is on display in Jangalmahal and North Bengal. Some groups and organisations are feeling emboldened enough to take the law into their hands due to the state’s strange reluctance to enforce the law.” Others second this view. Former Bengal Chamber chief Abhijit Sen cites the mishandling of various issues ranging from Singur to implementing the High Court’s orders on vehicular pollution. “The state government has always started off with using excessive force and then retreated,” he says, “A mindset is developing that government decisions can be taken lightly because an outcry from even a small section can make the government backtrack. This is a dangerous trend.”

The police, meanwhile, seem to be sitting on their hands, if not whistling in indifference. Their morale has suffered a breakdown, say insiders, but the government is not terribly bothered. Maybe Bhattacharjee is actually waiting for Mamata Banerjee to relieve him of the headache of governing a state his party has brought to this sorry pass. Little of it is of his own making. But if history is to repeat neither as tragedy nor farce, it is for him to display the nerve and leadership needed to effect Bengal’s revival.

About The Author

Jaideep Mazumdar