Schizophrenic polity - Half-Marxist, Half-Capitalist

Amulya Ganguli
The Staesman, 12 October

Where do good communists go when they fall ill ? To private nursing homes. As the preferences of Anil Biswas and Chittabrata Mazumdar showed, government hospitals were not their chosen destinations at a time of personal medical crisis. It was probably not the calibre of doctors which dissuaded them, but the by now well known work ethic of the Bengal proletariat, viz. the Class IV staff patronized by the MK Pandhes and Gurudas Dasguptas of CITU and AITUC. As a recent example of their conduct in a Kolkata hospital showed, they chose not to intervene when they discovered that ants had invaded the eyes of a comatose patient since it wasn’t a part of their job profile. So, the commissars can hardly be blamed if they prefer to draw their last breath in private nursing homes, notwithstanding all their familiar diatribes against the profit-hungry private sector.

However, this is not the only example of the schizophrenia which characterizes the Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee government. The most notable instance was to resort to Stalinist methods to push capitalist projects in Singur and Nandigram.

Police & cadres

When the government acquiesced in the demand of the Tatas for a plot of land for their car factory in the fertile soil of Singur because, as Nilotpal Basu has explained, it couldn’t say ‘no’ in the present liberalized atmosphere, it apparently never thought that there could be any difficulty in acquiring the land. The reason was that even if not all the tillers could be bought off with the payment of compensation, the unwilling could be persuaded ~ perhaps not so gently ~ by the police and the Marxist cadres to submit to the government’s demand.

This is the rough-and-ready method which the Leftists have pursued to impose their will ever since they consolidated their position in the state in the late seventies.

In mohalla after mohalla, whether urban or rural, the average residents knew that it was wise for them to listen to what the cadres were saying since the latter, and not the uninvolved citizens, had the backing of the administration, which acted through the coercive arm of the police. The same was true of all institutions ~ colleges, universities, hospitals. All promotions and demotions depended on the whim of the cadres with the police not far behind. Political protests, too, were tackled by this patently unholy combination, as also civil disturbances, such as the attempts of the East Bengali refugees to acquire land in Marichjhanpi in the Sunderbans even if they were only acting in accordance with the advice given by the communists before they came to power to the effect that the Sunderbans were an ideal location for the refugees, and not Dandakaranya.

It is this long cohabitation between the police and the cadres, many of them with an anti-social background, which has eroded the credibility of the once-vaunted Kolkata Police. But the problem with these manifestations of a virtual one-party rule is that it can generate social tension with an explosive potential. And this isn’t a situation which capitalists prefer since no business can thrive in an atmosphere of latent, and occasionally overt, confrontation. Even Narendra Modi understood this quickly enough to try to turn attention away from communal conflict in Gujarat to development. So, when the Bhattacharjee government embarked on its capitalist adventure, it should have realized that the party’s old methods of driving away the unwanted, as in Marichjhanpi, or browbeating them to submission, as it tried to do in Nandigram, wouldn’t work.

It is possible to argue that, for once, the government was right in trying to reverse the earlier flight of capital. It also knew that such a process could not be undertaken without acquiring arable land. But the point is not whether the government should have adopted its new industrial line, but its manner of implementing it, which was unabashedly Stalinist. A communist party functioning in a ‘bourgeois’ democracy has to tread a lot more cautiously, as the slow progress of the policy on SEZ elsewhere shows.

A similar contradiction has marked the Left’s attitude towards America. While the communist unhappiness over the growing proximity between India and the US can be understood in ideological terms, this ‘blind anti-Americanism’, as described even by the chief minister, doesn’t go with the latter’s wooing of American multinationals, along with other capitalists. Here, again, we can see an instance of a split personality ~ a psychological (ideological) disorder brought about the failure to match dogma with reality. Just as the bloodshed in Nandigram was the result of the bosses in Writers’ Buildings and Alimuddin Street living in their illusory world, where the police and the cadres could smooth out the rough passages, the doctrinaires of the AK Gopalan Bhavan in New Delhi also presumed that they could relive the days of amar nam, tomar nam, Vietnam, Vietnam when Vietnam itself was courting American investment. Perhaps the apparatchiki in Alimuddin Street were vaguely aware of the contradiction in this attitude, but they do not seem to have had the courage to point this out to their hawkish comrades from Delhi.

The reason is not only that they have also been reared on the same stale textbook prescriptions which the Delhi comrades mouth, but they also seemingly lack the intellectual calibre and daring to embark on a distinctive path of their own.

Neo-liberal line

The chief minister may speak against ‘blind anti-Americanism’ or say that economists like Prabhat Patnaik and others are wrong when they express their disapproval of the new industrial policy in West Bengal. But he is obviously not willing to pursue this neo-liberal line to its logical conclusion if only to avoid a serious breach within the party. The result of this diffidence is that the Bengal communists are virtually sleep-walking towards an electoral setback.

It isn’t only the Left in West Bengal which is heading towards a precipice, but the entire communist front comprising Big Brother and the little brothers is set to squander their gains of the last general election. Only the most optimistic among them will expect to secure more seats in the Lok Sabha than the 61 which the Left won on the last occasion. Nor can the commissars hope to improve on their percentages, low as they are. In fact, it is quite possible that the CPI, which won a measly 1.4 per cent of votes in 2004, will be in serious danger of losing its status as a national party. But a bigger loser may well be the Bengal comrades since it will not be easy to push ahead with their pro-capitalist line after an electoral setback. It is a price which all those who try to ride two horses at the same time have to pay.

(The writer is a former Assistant Editor, The Statesman)