by Mark Tully
Even in the field of public health the Marxists have had to turn to the private sector. The chief minister himself told a conference of doctors that the state government was encouraging the establishment of private nursing homes on condition that 30 per cent of the beds were free.
The Marxists have not touched distribution either. Stallholders have captured almost every inch of pavement in Calcutta. Perhaps as a result, I saw no queues and no shortages, the usual by-products of communism. One evening I visited the area around the university, in search of the publisher of a book on the Naxalites. Oranges, apples, grapes, bananas, cauliflowers, long white radishes and bitter spiky gourds spilt over the pavements. Carcasses of goats hung in butchers’ shops. Behind the butchers there were black statues of the goddess Kali, with her grisly garland of human skulls. A cockroach was crawling over a pile of ginger in a provision merchant's shop. The merchant had sacks of five different sorts of dal, including the pink ‘masoor ki’ dal. For those who didn't want the bother of cooking, there were kebabs bubbling in a big, black pan. Another stallholder fried vegetables in batter to make pakoras. Fried fish seemed to be popular too. Bengalis are great sweet-eaters, and there were several shops to cater for that weakness. They sold two types of syrup-soaked Bengali sweets – white, creamy rasagallas and brown, sticky gulabjamuns – and many different sorts of sandesh, something a little like fudge. Stalls selling pan, or betel-leaf, seemed to be crammed into every spare space.
I couldn't find the publisher so I browsed in the bookstalls which line College Street. There I was not surprised to learn that cribs of the examinations for jobs as government clerks, or babus, were the best sellers. Bengal has long been famous for its babus, and a safe job in government service is the height of ambition for all but the most successful or privileged graduates. I bought the crib of the exams for recruitment into the clerical grade of the railways. I am not at all sure I would have passed the general knowledge; as for the maths, I could not understand some of the questions even after I had cheated by looking up the answers. I was most surprised by a sample essay that the editors of the crib, Messrs Khanna and Khanna, had provided. The examinee was asked to describe a railway journey in 250 words. Messrs Khanna and Khanna suggested the first paragraph of the essay should read Railway journeys, these days are fraught with disasters. Accidents and robberies are all too commonly associated with railway journeys and not without justification too. Overcrowding, delays filthiness, and other general inconveniences have of course come to be regarded as normal features of a railway journey. And the Indian railways is the biggerly [sic] public sector undertaking in the country and one of the biggest business undertakings in the world. While railway journey today is a nightmare and no body would undertake it unless forced to do so. It may be of interest to know how different things were not so long ago.
Ignoring the eccentricities of vocabulary and punctuation which might, one would think, lead to some ‘marking down’, the sentiments of that first paragraph hardly seem the way to the heart of a railway examiner.
The clerical skills of the Bengali babu make him a difficult subordinate to handle. He knows the rule book much better than his boss and can always find a reason why something should not be done. In that article on perestroika, the editor of the Marxist had admitted that bureaucratism in the Soviet Union had been one of the main causes of economic stagnation. In spite of that awareness, the Indian Marxists have not tackled the problem of the Bengali babu. Civil servants told me the government had become the prisoner of the Coordinating Committee, a trade union which in the name of Marx controls the government clerks. One civil servant described the start of a clerk's day. ‘He will arrive at eleven thirty. He then puts down his briefcase, polishes his spectacles and drinks a glass of water. Next he will call for a cup of tea while he reads his newspaper. He will then be ready to discuss the news with his colleagues. By four o'clock he will be ready to go home.’ The headquarters of the government of West Bengal is still called Writer's Building, after the writers of the East India Company. The piles of dusty files tied up with red tape, to be seen in the outer offices of every senior official and minister, indicate that the administration has not moved much beyond the days of ‘John Company’. The courts are even worse: I met one litigant who had taken two years to get a copy of a court order.
Religion is also flourishing in Marxist Calcutta. I took the number 32 tram from Esplanade to Kalighat, the temple of the goddess Kali from whom many believe Calcutta takes its name. It took us almost an hour to reach the street leading to the temple. I was soon approached by a sleek, dhoti-clad Brahmin who came up to me and asked, ‘Which country are you from?’ I replied with pride that I was born in Calcutta, but the Brahmin was not put off. ‘You will still need my help to go into the temple.’ Realizing that I could hardly pass for a Hindu, in spite of the accident of my birth, I agreed and accepted the Brahmin as my guide.
As we entered, I saw the carcass of a decapitated goat being removed from what looked like an executioner's block. As if sensing disappointment, the Brahmin said, ‘Don't worry, there will be plenty more sacrifices. You are bound to see one.’ The Brahmin told me he was a member of one of the three original families which owned the temple. Unfortunately for him, there are now apparently about 700 Brahmins serving – if that's the right word – there. He explained that this was one of the places where the fifty-one parts of Kali had fallen after she had been cut up by Vishnu when he destroyed evil. Kali, or the black, is one of the names of the wife of Shiva: among her others are Durga, the inaccessible; Chandi, the fierce; and Bhairavi, the terrible. All bear witness to the terror she inspires and hence to the need to placate her by sacrifice.
The Abbé Dubois, the great French scholar who fled the executioner during the revolution in his own country and came to live in India as an Indian, found old men who told him that human sacrifice to placate the gods was still being practised when they were young. In Hindu Manners, Customs and Ceremonies, the Abbé described the theology of sacrifice thus: ‘Man, overwhelmed with infirmities and misfortunes, and fully convinced that they were the punishment of his sins, imagined that he would appease and propitiate the Gods by offering them the most perfect sacrifice that he would find.’ My Brahmin friend was not so lucid: he told me, ‘People believe that, if they sacrifice a goat, Kali will stop bad things happening to them. The goat is the symbol of evil. It must be black or, if not entirely black, as black as possible.’
As he was speaking, a drummer started beating a fevered tattoo in one corner of the open sacrificial pen. A black kid goat, its horns coloured orange and garlands round its neck, was carried into the pen. The kid's neck was placed on the bottom of a U-shaped block and a pin was rammed home above it, to keep it in place. Without any further formality – not even apparently a prayer – the executioner, a sturdy man in a vest and loincloth, silenced the bleating kid with a scimitar, decapitating the sacrificial victim with one stroke. The penitent came forward and the executioner marked his forehead with a tilak of the goat's blood. The Brahmin turned to me and said, ‘Of course not everyone comes here to offer a sacrifice like that. Most come to pray.’
We then climbed up into a pillared prayer hall, from where we could with difficulty see into the sanctum sanctorum over the heads of the eager stream of devotees filing past the image of Kali. Only the goddess's large, black, stone head was visible above the level of the floor. Her three eyes – she has a third eye in the middle of her forehead – were bright orange. Much of her face was covered with flowers. Above her head was suspended a colourful canopy embroidered with appliqué elephants. An elderly woman in a deep-pink sari came and stood next to me, bowing her head in reverence before the deity. Her husband stood behind, muttering, ‘Give money here, give money there, feed this one, feed that one – these Brahmins are looting me.’ My escort hurriedly drew me out of earshot and explained how the goddess was cared for. ‘The head of the goddess’, he said, ‘is anointed with one kilo of vermilion every da
y, and that is used by the priests to put tikas on the foreheads of the devotees. The goddess is washed once a year by a priest with closed eyes, and the cloth that is used is distributed.’
The Brahmin was most anxious to show me the kitchen where food was prepared to be given to the poor. ‘This is a highly expensive matter,’ he said. ‘Each day, one of the Brahmins has to provide the rice for this. It is highly critical to maintain this.’ I was soon to learn how critical. As I left the temple, the Brahmin said to me, ‘Give me 400 rupees. It is my turn to provide the rice tomorrow and I need the money for that.’ Much bargaining ensued and we eventually settled for 100 rupees, which I was fairly sure would go into the well-rounded belly of the Brahmin, not to the poor and needy.
Although communism has not made much impact on the day-to-day life of Calcutta, discipline within the Marxist party is strict. A certain measure of self-criticism is allowed, however. Ashok Mitra, an academic economist who was for many years finance minister of West Bengal, admitted to me that his party had not provided a very radical government. ‘When we came to power, we said we could not hope for any radical changes under the existing social and constitutional arrangements. We did say we would provide relief for the poor and set an example to other governments and states. We have provided plenty of relief, but we have done nothing to show the way to other governments. We could certainly have improved the working of the government, but we have not done so. For instance, not a single senior officer has been suspended.’
‘Why have you not been able to improve the performance of the government?’ I asked.
‘Well, I am afraid we have not tackled our own clerical associations. It is strange that we have disciplined industrial labour but not the clerks. We haven't even got much out of disciplining labour. The chief minister has lobbied the multinationals and Indian industrialists pointing out that we now have one of the best climates for investment because of our labour relations, but the problem is that it's the central government, not us, which gives the licences. Also, much of the money which is invested in private ventures in fact comes from the financial institutions the central government controls.’
Ashok Mitra is an excitable, outspoken man who has spent many years in Western universities. He is not liked by the rank and file of the party, who do not feel he is really one of them. He could have returned to a comfortable place in a university after leaving the government, but he had chosen to live a comparatively spartan life in his small Calcutta flat. He hoped to resume his political career, in spite of the disappointments he suffered as finance minister – disappointments which led to his resignation officially on the grounds of poor health. One of his greatest disappointments was that the recommendations of the committee he chaired on administrative reforms were not implemented.
Mitra believed that the Marxists would have to become radical if they were to survive. ‘When we came to power again in 1977, the chief minister said, “We tried to rush things in the sixties and I am not prepared to take risks again.” But personally I don't feel that we can go on with this type of small-time relief. Either we must become more radical or we will become very unpopular. If when we came to power in the sixties the party had readopted the line we took at independence, we might have achieved effective radicalization. Instead we split, with the Naxalites going their own way. The trouble is that the Britain-returned barristocracy among the leadership thought the revolutionary line was foreign. It did not tally with Westminster, which was always their reference point.’
There are two strands in the leadership of the Marxists: the lawyers who learnt their communism in London in the thirties and the revolutionaries who learnt their communism in the jails of British India. The native communists have dominated the party machinery, but the ‘barristocracy’ has dominated the political wing. Ashok Mitra said, ‘The lower orders have been overawed by the barristocracy: that's why there has been no effective radicalization.’
Jyoti Basu, the chief minister of West Bengal, is very much a barristocrat. He was educated by Jesuits in Calcutta and then went to London to train as a lawyer. He returned to India a convinced communist – just in time to be arrested by the British, the sine qua non of a political career at that time. I had approached the chief minister in true Indian style, through two friends known to be close to him. At first they were optimistic about the prospects of an interview, but I soon started to get indications that Jyoti Basu did not want to see any journalists because he was in the middle of delicate negotiations with other members of the politburo over strategy for the next general election. He feared that anything he said in public might be misunderstood. I had met him on earlier occasions and had always found him polite but firm – not a man to suffer fools gladly. He is a charismatic figure much loved in Bengal, but it's very difficult to explain his charisma. It certainly doesn't lie in his oratory, which has neither fire nor sparkle. He is short and bespectacled, looking not unlike one of those clerks he has failed to control. Nevertheless, Jyoti Babu, as he's known, has come to epitomize Bengal, not just the Marxists. One journalist said to me, ‘Jyoti is more of an institution than a Marxist.’ He has not shed all the habits of his British past. He speaks English within his family, and while I was in Calcutta he took time off to take them to a play by Stephen Spender staged under the auspices of the British Council. He is careful to live a simple life, but that does not preclude him from having an occasional drink in one of Calcutta's clubs.
Instead of seeing Jyoti Basu, I was sent to see one of the party's young ideologues, Anil Biswas, the editor of the party paper. Party headquarters is a modern building – much more modern in equipment, layout and atmosphere than the government's head offices. Biswas must have been in his early forties – a small, intense, but by no means humourless man. He felt that the Marxist government had achieved its goal ‘to a small extent’, but said that it was just beginning its task. He admitted that the realities of power had led to changes of emphasis in its thinking. ‘In 1967, our slogan was “The government is the instrument of struggle.” We gave the slogan and we haven't abandoned it, but we can't say the government is in the vanguard. Now the government is with the struggle but not of the struggle.’
I was not quite sure that I had followed his Marxist dialectics, and so I asked what the purpose of the struggles was. The editor of the party paper was quite clear on that: ‘Our ultimate aim’, he explained, ‘is to destroy the Congress, to have a people's democratic revolution. We have to overcome many hurdles and go through many experiences. This government is one part of that experience. You must not forget that the state power in India is still in the hands of the landlord bourgeois class.’
I asked Biswas why the Marxists had not nationalized more industries. He replied, ‘We are trying, but the rules and regulations of the central government are there.’ The editor maintained that 180,000 factories had closed down in India because of what he called the ‘crisis of the capitalist system’, but went on to defend the party's invitation to capitalists to invest in West Bengal, saying, ‘We are inviting capital, not capitalists. The state structure is not really suited to run industries, so the central government has to do it. If they will not, we have to invite capital from outside.’
Biswas claimed that the government's major successes had been achieved among the peasants, not the workers. The Marxists had introduced three important reforms in the countryside. They had registered sharecroppers – that is, tenant farmers who divided the crop with their landlords. That gave the farmers much greater security. They had made a determined effort to implement laws which restricted the amount of land anyone could own and to redistribute the surplus to the landless. They had entrusted the planning and implementation of development schemes to the panchayats or village councils.
These were measures that the Congress Party had put on the statute book but had not implemented. Suspecting that the same might be true of the Marxists, I went into the countryside to see for myself. I was fortunate in finding a dedicated block
development officer – the civil servant who is responsible for a group of villages. He had left a comfortable job in one of the government services based in the capital because he wanted ‘to do work which really mattered, not just file work’.
The block development officer said there had been real improvements since the Marxists came to power. Not only were the tenants secure, they also got a larger share of the crops. He did not agree that the Marxists had ignored the landless. ‘Previously,’ he told me, ‘the landless had great difficulty in getting enough work. Now, because the government employment schemes are well administered, they get work for ten months a year. Of course there is some corruption in distributing the work and paying the workers, but I would say it only amounts to 20 per cent. In some states it is as high as 60. The landless have also benefited from the surplus land. I have just completed the redistribution of 350 acres taken from big owners.’
‘But does that really do any good for the landless?’ I asked.
‘The trouble is that the land is given away in very small parcels, and that leads to inefficient farming. The best answer would be cooperative farming, but that has failed miserably in India. In China, Mao found the same problem of small plots, lack of unity among the peasantry, helpless people, wasted land. He used the party's dictat to make the people swallow cooperative farming. In India there have been no leaders whose voices could rise above petty interests.’
