Bloody Bengal

The politics of annihilation and obstructionism that is becoming endemic in the state portents very badly for its immediate future, whatever be the nature of change, writes Sayandeb Chowdhury

Something is rotten in the state of Bengal. The current cycle of proactive and retroactive violence and the overall collapse of services is so overwhelming that one cannot but feel delirious at the vulgarity of the current deportment of its political class. On the political side, the distinguishing line between victims and victors, as much as both categories exist in many, have effectively been blurred by a blissful quartet— the trigger-happy Party in the throe of vulgar self-gratification, an opposition that is equally at ease with the motto of annihilation and destructionism, the unsubstantiated vocality of a deeply divided civil society and a media which is overtly pushing its stranglehold in the public imagination.

CPI(M)’s governing history is full of local excesses and murderous intent but in public it was able to create a mask of a government that in major political crisis is remarkably agile. It has never allowed its notorious race for political one-upmanship in the economic backwaters of the state to seep into urban consciousness in a big way. Nandigram changed all that. Nandigram is not unprecedented in the history of the pusillanimity of the Indian state in confronting homicidal mass violence. But the extent of violence and its character had put Nandigram in the legacy of the most shameful acts of state inaction. To make it worse, the centripetal forces that unfrocked the CPI(M) from within found echo in the desperation of the mass media, which was reproducing alarmingly and played its sensationalising mission with utmost seriousness.

Then, one and a half years year into operation, the Lalgarh counter-offensive of the State has now given rise to a palpable sense of unease both within Bengal and outside. Rarely has a state government in recent memory been seen struggling to manage its territory and battling its people than what the pompous Communist Party of India (Marxist) and the beleaguered Bengal government of CM Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee has been doing in the last three years.

When he took over from the ageing and visibly disinterested Jyoti Basu the reigns of the Left government in 2001, Buddhadeb came to enjoy, through his smart turn of phrases and his do-it-now jingoism, easy popularity with the urban and semi-urban middle classes. It is a different question if Buddhadeb was right or wrong in his pursuit of quick capital. But what his misadventures with crony capital revealed to the world was the entrenchment of the local CPM leaders in keeping the disturbing nexus of poverty, power and Party in motion, whereby political loyalty and privilege was extracted and distributed with the help of ordnance and cheap money, rather than sustained deliverance, governance and development. The land issue acted as a spark in a parched forest and it was only natural that the bonfire caught and had spread out. Resultantly, late into his second term, Buddhadeb is fighting not one but many fronts of imagined and real resistance against an assortment of factions who have their own, sometimes undeniably localised narratives of alienation and disenfranchisement. Among them, except the Trinamool Congress (TMC), the shape-shifting, identity-altering, niggling little factions have been spewing disreputable but populist mass base theories and creating a dent in CPI(M)’s huge rural base. But what they have succeeded is in stitching together an overarching canopy of a confrontational fabric that is haunting and hurting the indigenous communists at every level: local, civil, intellectual, political and statist.

Whatever be the dubious genealogies of these busybodies, they are the product of CPI(M)’s 34-year old rule of the state, more often by force and political chicanery than by principles of democratic practice. The livid, suffering and desperate lumpenproletariat factions have one single source — the deeply fascistic tendency of ‘rule’ that CPI(M) has made its staple over the last two decades. And they have one single target — the political and in some cases physical dismemberment of the communists.

At one level it’s the old clichéd argument about the corruptive tendencies of monolithic power and the various mutations of micro-resistance that it inevitably breeds. At another level, it’s a gory and horrific cycle of violence, vindication and chaos that seem to be the attendant story of Bengal’s crippling narrative of change.

CPI(M) and Buddhadeb are losing the plot quickly. But merely blaming Buddhadeb for Bengal’s assorted ills is an act of historical short-sightedness, a blunder that Trinamool chief Mamata Banerjee is not merely a victim herself but is propagating across Bengal’s political spectrum. To begin with, Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee is the face of the government, not the party, though the distinctions, now unfortunately for the CPI(M), are hardly visible. The real culprits, the communist Mafiosi, who in the last three decades have manoeuvred a progressive Left political movement into a plutocratic, reactionary apparatus of nepotism and corruption, into a pervert political cycle of rewards and punishment, remain largely under-identified. And it is exactly that faction within the CPI(M), that dangerous dominion of the lumpenproletariat, who have, smelling blood and money, shifted allegiance to the TMC and other factions, thereby only managing to heighten the cycle of violence that’s claiming life every day.

All this means that as we start the year, we look bleakly into the future of Bengal. At least in the short term, till the all-pervasive state elections in April-May, the violence is expected to hit a record pitch. Change, if at all, is going to be excruciating.

But as citizens do we look at it from a position of cold indifference? Do we sigh and go back to sleep? Do we take refuge in the daily dose of fraudulent breaking news? Or do we wake up in horror and act? That only we can decide.

Cannot we pause to think if there can be an alternative to the cycle of despotism, despondency, delirium and destruction? Are we to see in our generation Bengal degenerate into mindless mediocrity, pious poverty and phlegmatic politics? By not reacting, are we not relegating a historical opportunity to come together? Should not the civil society declare freedom from all forms of rotational violence: be it radical or reactionary?

It is time. It is time.