So, Who Will Budget For Mamata?

Don't be shocked that Mamata Banerjee’s intervention turned the rail budget into a political tamasha. She is the product of a political culture that holds party far above government and will do anything to defend that order.

The Economic Times on Sunday, 18 March, 2012

Olympia aka Oly pub is a great Kolkata institution. Till the late 90s, this Park Street joint was much more than a cheap watering hole; it was where pseudo-intellectuals sparred and impoverished students like me could expect a few shots on credit from discerning waiters who would, on the odd occasion, tell us we had had a few too many.

Today, Olympia is a rundown den crowded by small-time builders, who shout for waiters in second-person offensive for panic refills. To be fair, the pub still serves a sumptuous chateaubriand and the mustard tastes as tangy on cocktail sausage. Fresh crops of students and pseudo-intellectuals have turned up. Some old patrons are still regulars. Renegades like me who have deserted the city also pay customary penance whenever in Kolkata.

Only a few months ago, I was there to meet a friend who was sharing a table with a bunch of acquaintances. A couple of them, my friend let out, were CPIM card-holders. Initially reluctant to be drawn into a discussion on the body blow Mamata Banerjee had dealt them in the Assembly elections, one of them soon worked up some fervour.

If there was a lesson in the defeat, I was told, it was that the party should never have loosened its grip on the government. But did not the government’s failure to rein in the party result in the poll debacle? Nonsense, the party was always above all else but some in the Writer’s Building (the secretariat) forgot what happened to Somnath Chatterjee.


I remembered Chatterjee soon after Dinesh Trivedi finished reading out his budget this Wednesday. A political giant known for his integrity, Chatterjee belongs to a league very different from that of Trivedi who joined the Trinamool after spending roughly a decade each in the Congress and the Janata Dal. In 2008, the CPIM stalwart upheld the non-partisan status of the Speaker’s office in the Lok Sabha. This week, the entrepreneur-turned-politician presented a hesitantly reformist budget.

Chatterjee was promptly expelled from the party because, to quote CPIM politburo member Biman Bose, “he might have acted according to the Indian Constitution but the party constitution was supreme”. Nobody familiar with the tradition of party raj was under the illusion that Trivedi’s protestations of a fare hike being in the interest of the Railways, would remotely move his one-woman leadership.

Back in Oly pub, sullen comrades stared me down as I wondered aloud if Bengal had much hope if ‘party-is-supreme’ was the message the Left deciphered from the landmark verdict that voters took 34 years to deliver. Then, glasses hit the table with loud thuds. “You are an outsider,” I was told, fingers wagging, “You don’t need to bother about Bengal. We have looked after ourselves all these years.”

Dismissed, I asked for the bill. I remembered all those years.

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We did not even notice when it happened. That summer of 1990, students of our age in Calcutta were an impatient lot whose scrutiny was not restricted to Amitabh Bachchan’s morphed voice in Agneepath. We had strong opinions on the lack of sex in Steven Soderbergh’s Sex, Lies and Videotape, the overdose of spirituality in Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being, and the perils of Soviet glasnost.

Yet, we did not notice that three women – a UNICEF officer and two government employees -- travelling in a state car were brutally raped by local office bearers of the CPIM on the outskirts of Kolkata on May 30 because no newspaper reported it the morning after. But by mid-June, the truth was out.

The response of then chief minister Jyoti Basu – these things happen – did not help. So, in a letter to Mainstream, then information and culture minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee slammed the critics for not having confidence in the Leftist struggles and respect for the tradition of the Bengali intelligentsia.

All this while, Calcutta cheered the Roger Milla show in Italy. In theatres across the state, Dil and Ghayal became the year’s big grossers. Then the focus shifted to cricket. But before the new boy wonder could score his maiden test ton at Old Trafford, three Bangladeshi refugees were raped on 17 July in a Calcutta suburb.

The party did not blink. Its women’s wing head Shyamali Gupta issued a statement in CPIM mouthpiece People’s Democracy on 29 July, arguing that the rape victims lived in “unauthorised hutments along the railway tracks” and were “involved in foul professions” as “mistresses of notorious anti-socials”.

Calcutta moved on, prompting historian Tanika Sarkar to note how “there was no spontaneous and vast demonstration in this city of processions”, indicating “a somewhat unusually high threshold of tolerance in a Calcutta celebrated for its concern for women”.

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The only time I was forbidden to read newspapers at home was in 1982. I was in class five and my father would not have me traumatized with the details of how 16 Anandmargi monks and one nun were beaten and burnt alive in broad daylight on a south Calcutta flyover.

Roughly between the Marichjhanpi massacre in 1979 and the Suchpur butchery in 2000, the Left rule witnessed 28,000 political murders or four killings a day. Political violence escalated in the new millennium, culminating in the flashpoints of Singur and Nandigram. The latest in this series were the murders of two CPIM leaders, clobbered to death allegedly by Trinamool supporters on 22 February in Burdwan.

It is hardly surprising that Trinamool supporters consider violence a legitimate political tool or that the new chief minister matches up to her immediate predecessors in insensitivity when women get raped or infants die in hospitals. The political culture in Bengal has long developed consolidated traits and standard currencies of power.

When the Left defeated the Congress in 1977, it marked the emergence of a new politics in the state. The feudal, anachronistic Congress leadership was replaced by a new order that was subaltern and contemporary. A welcome, if bloody, land reform drive fortified the Left base in rural Bengal. The communists, however, employed an ideologically much less respectable strategy to garner urban support.

Lakhs were lured to join the party with the promise of jobs. Thousands of cadres employed in mills and offices across the state soon ensured that the party had a stranglehold on the system that would keep it in power for three decades and reduce governance to a joke. The rot also spread to villages once the benefits of land reform wore off and successive generations demanded fresh incentives for backing the party.

This political culture has struck such deep roots in Bengal that Mamata’s support base comprises mostly those who resented this party raj only as long as their own party was not in power. Therefore, unlike 1977, the Trinamool victory in 2011 was no triumph of an alternative politics. It was merely a realignment of forces within a political equilibrium that both draws from and feeds a larger social decadence.

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I watched the Calcutta book fair erupt into a fireball from a window high up Chatterjee International, the city’s tallest building, across the road from maidan that housed the largest gatherings. That January afternoon in 1997, flames escaped one of the numerous stalls serving food, a commodity Bengalis certainly rate over books, and rode the late afternoon breeze drifting away to the river.

Criminally unprepared, Calcutta lost that battle in its early minutes. At that moment, it was difficult to imagine a bigger villain than the callous fire department. But, finding my way through smoke and cinders to Montmartre, the very aspirationally named arena for little magazines where most of my friends camped, I saw what the city had come to.

For each book burnt, one was stolen. People of all ages, hooligans and bhadrolok, carried away as many books as they could. Many ransacked the stalls that escaped fire. The unfeeling brazenness of that loot could have put even last summer’s London hoodies to shame.

In 2010, when a fire killed 43 people on the two top floors of a150-year-old city landmark, Stephen Court, there was not a sky-lift in sight. In the only state that has a fire service minister, it surely took more than inefficiency to conduct business as usual with the full knowledge that not a single highrise in the city’s business district could be secured in the event of a fire.

Last December, when a fire broke out in the basement of AMRI, one of Kolkata’s most expensive hospitals, the hospital staff locked the gate on local volunteers and doctors abandoned their patients to a slow, stewing death behind glass facades. Mamata cancelled the hospital’s licence, observing, rather ominously, that such a disaster would be understandable in government hospitals because they were cash strapped.

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Cash strapped. That has been Mamata’s defence against every criticism of her government. Without any fiscal strategy, she continues to pressure the Centre for handing out doles, while outshouting even the Left on securing a free ride for the poor. But many in Bengal learnt to appreciate this free-dom even before Mamata started fighting for it.

In the early 90s, few of my friends bought train tickets because they were not supposed to. Usually, students flashed their identity cards and moved on. As per railways data, 90 per cent of ticketless passengers caught in and around Kolkata pay the penalties on the spot. Clearly, it is not just the poor who do not pay their way.

While a joyride is par for the course across the country, in few other places would ticketless passengers with a sense of entitlement team up with ruffians to thrash officials and vandalise railway property. Equally commonplace is political encroachment on railways real estate. After Trinamool came to power, its trade union wing INTTUC followed in the footsteps of its Left counterpart and set up offices in railway stations.

No surprise, then, that the Left echoed Mamata’s demand for a fare rollback. Not too long ago, the CPIM sealed its case due political obstinacy over the nuclear deal. Today, if Mamata and her Trinamool bandwagon appear far more unreasonable, it is because they are still testing the limits of their new found power.

Soon after the Oly pub showdown, I met a political activist purportedly close to the chief minister, at Moulin Rouge, another Park Street institution. My latest article on paribartan had failed to impress him. Over a few drinks, his guarded critique turned belligerent. It was not possible to understand the change without living it, he said, adding that the masses behind didi could just walk all over sceptics in the media. Next, he lit up.

The manager came rushing. A few tense minutes later, our friend stubbed out the cigarette on his plate with a flourish. Then, ignoring my presence altogether, he looked the manager in the eye, sat back and hissed: “I’ll be watching you.”

Power corrupts everywhere. In Kolkata, even the illusion of power does.