At certain points in modern Indian history, obscure villages and locations, whose names invoke millennia of stasis, become incandescent with some debate that’s central to the nation’s consciousness. This happens without the nation necessarily having been aware of that issue’s centrality—until the flashpoint, when the unknown place becomes a battleground. After that moment, the location may well enter the history books, while remaining, in every other sense, unimportant.
Sometimes the battle is a real one. For instance, who’d heard of Palashi, or Plassey, in Bengal, before Siraj-ud-daula capitulated to Clive’s troops in 1757, opening the door to Empire? For that matter, who’s heard of it since?
During the freedom struggle, an outpost called Chauri Chaura became briefly famous when a group of protesters set fire to a police station, causing Gandhi to suspend his satyagraha movement until it returned to non-violent ways.
The peasant uprising in a region called Telengana in the late forties was the first anti-landlord movement in independent India. Its successor, which emerged from the equally little-known Naxalbari in North Bengal, led to the first formal, and violent, articulation of Maoism.
In 1998, the right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party government exploded five nuclear devices at a test range in Rajasthan called Pokaran. The following year, the Pakistani army, directed in the background by General Musharraf, initiated an invasion into the Kashmiri border, in a mountainous and unheard-of district called Kargil, specifically shelling Dras, a town no one had heard of.
What do these names, otherwise seldom uttered, tell us? Firstly, they resist the banality of the contemporary. We can’t imagine mentioning them in the same breath as shopping malls and the new Apple product. We also can’t imagine, or foresee, how a place like Dras might one day converge with the known world of malls and Apple products; though it well might. These locations and towns and villages represent a remoteness and inert changelessness; then, briefly, we realise that—beyond the bounded environment of the metropolis—this is precisely the India that is, and historically has been, in a state of siege.
To this roster of obscure names, whose effect on the consciousness is both undeniable and difficult to pin down, must be added Singur and Nandigram.
Nandigram is a village in Purba Medinipur district, its inhabitants mainly farmers and mainly Muslim. Like most other villages in the Bengal of the last four decades, it was, traditionally, a communist outpost. The land reforms brought about by the Left Front government—redistributing land controlled by landlords among peasants, ending centuries of oppression—is its single greatest achievement, and one that’s not to be belittled.
That trouble began in Nandigram, one of the many villages that had benefited from land reform, was ironical; it also pointed to the compulsions of the Left Front under Buddhadeb Bhattacharya. The state was probably near bankrupt; agriculture was no longer productive; the world had globalised, the Berlin Wall long fallen, a new sort of economic game was being played worldwide, and you needed to participate to be able to generate money. The advent of Indonesia’s Salim Group was announced celebratorily in Bengal. Special economic zones were being created throughout India since the early 2000s; land purchased, or even wrested, from peasants to make space for focussed development and industry. Nandigram was the first village to resist being transformed into a special economic zone, in the process becoming not only a distinct entity within the state, fortressed, oppositional, neither of Bengal nor not of it, but scuppering both Bhattacharya’s and the Salim Group’s plans. It was a classic David and Goliath story—with a twist to the confrontation since, here, Goliath, formerly the progenitor and nurturer of David, had sneakily turned upon him.
Nandigram mobilised sections of the Bengali middle class and its media, and it introduced a new, inebriating celebrity activism into Bengal. Among the famous personalities who condemned the government for its approach to this whole matter of special economic zones was the highly regarded poet Joy Goswami; the filmmaker and actress Aparna Sen; and a number of artists, playwrights, theatre people, some of whom were household names in the neighbourhoods of Calcutta because they worked in television serials and soap operas. This was probably the first time in a very long while that public figures had gone public in their criticism of the government. Adding her weight—negligible in literal terms, considerable in symbolic ones—to this outcry was the frail but predominant Mahasweta Devi, seen by many to be Bengal’s foremost living writer, a novelist and short-story writer who’d spent her life working with the tribals, and also making their lives and world her subject matter. From a strange but opportune marriage of genuine passion and outrage, sentimentality and self-promotion, individual conscience and an amoral but hyperactive media, was born a constellation of what the latter named “buddhijibi,” or “intellectuals,” though not everyone in that group was an intellectual, and not by any stretch was every intellectual or writer or artist of stature in that group. Nevertheless, the buddhijibi were here, a posse of recognisable faces, and Mamata Banerjee probably sensed that their emergence had a bearing on her political future. No doubt some of the buddhijibi—that is, those who had embryonic political ambitions—realised that Mamata’s re-emergence would be significant to their plans. Who made the first overture to whom is difficult to tell—but, suddenly, the buddhijibi and the Trinamool Congress were speaking from one platform.
This is not to say that the buddhijibi became paid-up members of the Trinamool Congress; though one or two of them did. But the affiliation was a powerful one. Until that moment, no self-respecting Bengali artist or intellectual had come out openly against the Left. The Left was identified with “the people”; and no artist—anyway in a vulnerable position in this regard, open to accusations of elitism and irrelevance—would want to distance themselves from that large, imprecise constituency: the common man. With Nandigram, and then Singur, the Left demonstrated it had turned decisively upon “the people”; and Mamata Banerjee, who had for years fought the Left not on right-wing, but on populist terms, attempting to poach “the people” from a Marxist agenda and make it hers, now found a successful formula for making that populism work for her. The Left Front government had behaved with its usual high-handedness, with a conviction about its own immunity to opposition, in Nandigram; but Nandigram fought back. A handful of buddhijibi cheered them on. The Left was misled by its own hubris, and humbled by the treachery of development.
Nandigram was an unexpected setback; but the critical blow was struck at another obscure village, Singur. Its largely agricultural land was appropriated for the factory that would build the world’s cheapest small car, Tata’s Nano, worth only $1,500. This toy-like ill-fated vehicle, whose destiny it was to look as if it had been prematurely brought into the world, more foetus than car, and whose birth was near abortive and then indefinitely delayed, this car, when it finally took to the road, turned out to have an engine that at times exploded mysteriously. Until 2009, it was seen to be Bengal’s quirky but irreplaceable mascot for development. But the acquisition of Singur’s land had also been thoughtlessly, violently executed: the thoughtlessness of a cadre-based, “grass-roots” party now inured to the democratic process. The small fortress of Singur—a reminder of how many potential principalities there are in India, of how many conflicting and legitimate desires qualify “development”—was shored up by the Trinamool Congress, by the media, by the buddhijibi. Just how much Ratan Tata—an ingenuous-looking man, who at certain moments appears deceptively vacant—played the puppet-master to the government is hard to tell. But it’s clear that little Singur had taken on not just the CPI(M) or Tata but what the middle class with swelling fondness and pride refers to as “India Inc.” For the first time I can recall, Ratan Tata sulked and threatened; then he withdrew the operation. By now, Buddhadeb Bhattacharya’s government—always eagerly self-questioning, always openly humane and fallible, the last democratically elected communist outpost in the world—had become adept at embracing defeat. This unique capacity
for martyrdom—the martyrdom of both the party and the state of West Bengal—had become its single most striking feature. Singur was decolonised; where did that leave Singur, or, for that matter, Bengal?
I had all this in mind when I decided to meet Nirupam Sen a second time. A few weeks remained until the election; and it seemed like a good idea to gauge his mood and to continue our last conversation. The events I’ve described have a direct bearing upon two of the portfolios held by this (his detractors would say, deliberately) self-effacing man, portfolios that made him, in effect, the second most important person in the government: commerce and industry; and industrial reconstruction. Although the spotlight hardly ever fell on him, he’d have seen those events as a rebuttal of his tenure: neither he nor Bhattacharya had achieved what they’d set out to do. As a consequence of Singur, the Left had done poorly in the general elections in 2009. Then there was another setback. The Left, at least from the outside, looks like a family, its cohesiveness augmented by its private language. Its intensity derives from the fact that it’s a family largely composed of, in a manner of speaking, orphans of bhadralok history (for we hardly hear of the mothers and fathers of party members), brought together not by accident but by idealism and its cousin, ideology. Bonds of orphanhood and kinship are particularly charged (as Kipling showed us in The Jungle Book) when they are self-created, and each party member is probably a bit of everything—mother, father, sibling, friend—to every other member. This emotional undercurrent was revealed whenever older party members—like, say, Subhash Chakrabarty—died, and Biman Bose, the party secretary and spokesperson, burst into tears when making the announcement. When close kinship is forged in this way, the sense of betrayal is probably more acute as well; one always had a feeling that the Left’s suspicion of the Right had a slightly different, more blithe, tone in comparison to the Left’s suspicion of its own ranks. The days of party purges are gone, and they possibly never arrived in Calcutta; nevertheless, the expulsion in 2009 of Somnath Chatterjee—Speaker in the lower house of the Indian Parliament (the Lok Sabha), senior CPI(M) member and protégé of Jyoti Basu—from the Party led many to puzzle over whether all was well in the family. Chatterjee, among the CPI(M)’s most urbane parliamentarians, had had a conflict of interest during a Lok Sabha vote; disobeying a party directive in his incarnation as Speaker, he found himself flung out by the politburo in 2008. This couldn’t have happened, many felt, if Jyoti Basu had been in power. And then came another moment of transition in a time of continual, unpredictable transition and change—this most predictable of occurrences in 2010, the death of a frail, ailing ninety-five-year-old man, Jyoti Basu.
Jyoti Basu, under whom the communists came to power in West Bengal in 1977, and who retired from the chief ministership in 2000, remained astonishingly perky and active—and occasionally abrasive—into his late eighties. He was about eight years older than my father, and my mother would look up from the newspaper whenever Basu’s age was mentioned in a report, and talk (with my father in mind) about how the process of ageing was obviously slowing down these days. When, by his mid-eighties, my father’s steps began to falter and he began to confess, uncharacteristically, even ruminatively, to feeling old, she would reprimand him, reminding him that Jyoti Basu was still ostentatiously ambulant. In no other sense did she much care about the former chief minister. Comprehension had dawned on her when Basu had proclaimed, with his usual unexcitable hauteur, “Ei rokom to kotoi hoi”—“Such things happen all the time”—upon the death of an officer of the state healthcare services, Anita Dewan, who, beaten up along with three others by CPI(M) goons, succumbed to her injuries. Nevertheless, Basu’s continuing capacity to move on his feet provoked in her a grudging admiration.
Basu points to the equivocal bhadralok origins of the Bengali left. Just as many Indians discovered India’s civilisation and heritage abroad, often directed to it by some British Indophile, Basu was converted to communism in London, where, studying in the thirties to be a barrister at the Middle Temple, he fell under the spell of the Marxist Rajani Palme Dutt.
He seldom smiled; when he disagreed with someone, or when he encountered any disapproval of his regime, the nostrils of his thin nose flared slightly. His seriousness wasn’t inscrutability or aggression; it was partly, I think, a pose, the wishful intensity of a romantic. This unadmitted- to romanticism, besides genetic predisposition, might well have been what kept him youthful. But towards interviewers and journalists, he could be patrician, as if they needed to be held in check with steely displeasure. More than ideology, it was Bengali puritanism, which was engendered in the early nineteenth century through Brahmo unitarianism and Hindu reform, and which abhorred, at once, religious profusion and bad taste, which made that face, with its gaunt lines, its air of intellect, its deep gaze behind the glasses, both charismatic and forbidding. No wonder he made my mother, who is torn between puritanism and abandon herself, uncomfortable. By the late 1990s, a few years before Basu resigned from the chief ministership, and as he became frail, the skull emerged more clearly, and the face, now a thin, stubborn covering of skin, still unsmiling, and with less and less reason to smile, became a mask—an attenuated, immutable outline of the earlier face.
Under this man, agrarian, rural Bengal finally, and astonishingly, received justice in the late seventies and early eighties, as peasants and sharecroppers were empowered and accorded the rights long due to them, and landlords curtailed; under him, Calcutta became an abandoned and unimportant city. A democratising neglect, a suspicion of elite institutions, like Presidency College, and an inexorable winding down, is what Calcutta got after the trauma of the Naxal uprising and Congress dishonesty and mismanagement, and in exchange for unshakable Left Front stability. It was a confusing time. It would take much more than a decade for people in Calcutta to understand that this period—the eighties and early nineties—was one in which they lost face, lost, too, the easy access to intellectual prestige they took to be a law of nature, and that it was then that Calcutta gave up its pre-eminence as India’s most interesting, pulsating metropolis. I didn’t live here then; from my visits, I recall disorder, extraordinary abeyances in the twenty-four hours that comprise a day when there was no electricity; and I recall the rise of a busy new saint-at-large called Mother Teresa.
Dourly, Basu presided over this era—which also saw the collapse of the Berlin Wall, the anomalous rise of state capitalism in China, the dissolution of the Soviet Union, and the liberalisation of India’s economic policy. Everything he—and, for that matter, any middle-class person from anywhere—took to be eternal and changeless was being dismantled. Basu couldn’t have liked that. Momentarily, I remember, he even took refuge in the persona of the bhadralok, when he said of Rajiv Gandhi, “We understand each other, because we are both gentlemen.” Nor could he have liked the unending power cuts at home, when people began to call him Andhakar Basu. For his name, like the names of many Bengalis carrying the legacy of the so-called nineteenth-century enlightenment in Bengal, means “light.” That light—of reason, rationality, advancement—always carried with it, as we see from today’s Calcutta, its own darkness.
It was Basu’s successors—the next chief minister, Buddhadeb Bhattacharya; Nirupam Sen, whom I was about to meet—who had to speak, for the first time, the language of self-criticism in public: “We have made mistakes; we have to change.” Basu never had to adopt this tone; it wouldn’t have suited a Marxist of his generation. The only time he complained about the Party was when the politburo kept him from accepting the offer of becoming the prime minister of India, at the helm of the victorious United Front government in 1996: he called it a “historic blunder,” surprising everyone that a politburo member (such as he was) could actually voice a personal opinion. People had almost forgotten that he was an individual, a human being with desires; yet, on the whole, he was respected for his aloofness. It was better, I suppose, to have a man like him oversee, and in some way facilitate, the decline of Calcutta, rather than a m
an who was not a bhadralok: a semi-literate Bengali, say, with a hustler’s background, like some of the politicians today, or a suburban communist in a hat, like Subhash Chakrabarty. Or was it?
I was surprised at the bitterness and anger voiced about Basu after his death. None of it had found expression in his lifetime, perhaps because people were nervous of his glare. Or perhaps, by January 2010, when Basu died, people realised what had happened to Bengal. And they were harsh on the man: but the harsh words came only when he was properly out of earshot.
Manoj, less like a friend than a man on a stealth mission, picked me up in his car and took me to a building on Camac Street which I’ve often gone past and fleetingly wondered about. It’s relatively new, about ten years old, but it’s neither a shopping mall nor a nursing home. The minister for commerce and industry had his office here on the seventh floor.
Nirupam Sen sat behind a large desk in a hushed air-conditioned room, his chair swathed, as the chairs of bureaucrats and ministers often are, in a white towel. This measure is probably taken to protect the chair from its occupant’s unwitting markings: middle-class Indians can have a touching reverence for furniture, and will conceal certain presumably treasured objects with a small piece of cloth from the dust and the environment. Or was it a kind of official symbolism, the spotlessness of the towel a kind of moral statement? For the towel to look clean, it itself must be invisibly tended to.
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