Same & different - Agitator in 1966; The Authority in 2007

Arindam Ghosh-Dastidar
The Statesman, 15 October

"Enough has already happened to make both Authority and agitators think again ... Violence leads quicker to death than to food." (From the editorial, Food and Firing, in The Sunday Statesman dated 20 February 1966.)

From the twilight of the Congress regime to the high noon of the Left Front, the reality of the food riots is the same and different. Yesterday’s “agitators”, who belonged predominantly to the Communist Party of India (Marxist), are today’s “Authority”. Today’s “agitators” are the hungry who flaunt no political label for hunger knows no party barrier. Thus far the nemesis has been starkly similar; as in 1966 people have been driven quicker to death ~ by suicides and police firing ~ than to food. And as both are accidental, we have been spared a fatuously uninformed distinction between malnutrition and starvation.

And yet we are assured by the Centre’s Food Corporation of India and West Bengal’s food minister that the granaries are full to the brim for the next two months. Which ipso facto rules out a failed crop as in 1966. Nor for that matter can the present government be blamed for administrative bungling and faultlines in the supply network.

Cruel irony

Yet the crisis is more forbidding than what it was 41 years ago. The irony is as cruel as it is unparalleled. Food riots have erupted in West Bengal 2007 without a food shortage. If Singur and Nandigram are to an extent instances of socio-economic blunders, rationing and Rizwanur are manifestations of state-sponsored crime. The common strand, whether in 1966 or 2007, is the dead hand of government.

The scale is decidedly more extensive than in 1966 when the riots were confined in the main to the northern parts of undivided 24-Parganas, then one of the largest districts of the country. This time it has ignited a vast swathe of South Bengal. And the withers of a government, out of its depth with issues no less destructive, remain unwrung. In 1966, ration shops went dry on account of a failed crop and the administrative goof-ups blighted the scenario still further. The Modified Rationing system had collapsed; the levy order was not uniformly enforced; smuggling of rice was rampant within the district which itself was a testament to the failure of cordoning; and stocks had dried up in the open market following police action and a strict price control order. If food was scarce, so was the fuel with an almost crippling shortage of kerosene. It was a Congress government’s recipe for disaster to which the Left responded almost literally with fire and brimstone. Notably, the result was the siege of Baduria police station (February 1966), the burning of buses and trains from Barasat to Konnagar and frequent police firing. The Leftist action was geared to pay dividend at the hustings; a year later the Congress met its eclipse in the assembly election and the CPI-M was in “Authority” as part of the first United Front government (1967).

In 2007, the party remains in “Authority” with almost a conscious reversal of roles. It now presides over an engineered scarcity that has affected the rural populace both Above and Below Poverty Line. Seldom in the past 40 years, never since the Left Front assumed power in 1977 has rural Bengal ~ the party’s all-important support base ~ flared up so violently. The virus has spread from Bankura to Murshidabad and it would be no exaggeration to suggest that South Bengal is falling apart. The movement has been largely spontaneous and inertia alone explains the rather muted response of the opposition and its Alpha politician who normally shrills for the government’s dismissal at every turn.

Muted no less has been the response of the establishment. There has been much too much on the nuclear deal, far too little on the rationing crisis and the hunger that is embedded in crime. Save perhaps in Mushidabad, where food rakes haven’t reached on time, there is no report of irregular, far less shortage of supplies. Central to the scam is the diversion of wheat, rice and kerosene to the open market by the ration dealers, many of whom are CPI-M functionaries presiding over a decrepit panchayati raj. What this newspaper in 1966 called the “Authority” has in 2007 very nearly abdicated its control over the Public Distribution System that has now degenerated to an object of loot to be sold at a premium.

Not that the government is unaware of the party-sponsored crime that plagues the rationing network. Yet its response has been as insensitive as it has been cruel, an assertion that has to be made even at the risk of a contradiction in terms. The Chief Minister, who has been fumbling in trying to come to grips with other urgent matters, has been incredibly insensitive to the escalating violence and arson over the collapse of rationing and the resultant food crisis. Yet whether it is land acquisition or a criminalised PDS, pulling the trigger to silence protest has become the standard response of a beleaguered administration.

No inquiry yet

At least three weeks after the first stirrings of the mayhem in the midst of the mumbo-jumbo on the nuclear deal at an anti-imperialism rally in Bankura, a proper monitoring system is yet to be in place in the districts. A truly functioning government would by now have adopted measures to despatch essential supplies. And given the Chief Minister’s contrived proclivity to order inquiries, there is no semblance of an effort to examine the flaws in the Public Distribution System. Neither a CID, nor judicial nor for that matter a CBI inquiry is being chewed over to ascertain how stocks of rice, wheat and kerosene are being siphoned off to the open markets by the panchayat cadres. And the spin-off is up for grabs.

It is a pretty kettle of fish that deserves to be opened with urgent despatch. The rationing system, the principal social security measure for a Marxist regime, has virtually met its eclipse. The state has failed the people and the evasion of responsibility is total and collective. In 1966, the Authority had adopted certain corrective measures, though not uniformly effective. The Authority in 2007 matches its Panglossian agenda in certain spheres with masterly inactivity in others. The scenario is grimly unfunny as brinkmanship has entered a potentially dangerous phase. Administrative civility has been kicked into the long grass. There is hope yet for civil society in Raj Bhavan and the High Court.