The Peoples' Speak

I was born in a year which saw the US Marine launch the infamous 'Operation Deckhouse Five' in the Mekong River delta in Vietnam. It was also the year in which Joseph Stalin's daughter Svetlana Alliluyeva defected to US via the US Embassy in New Delhi. Martin Luther King Jr. denounced the Vietnam war in a religious service in New York and the Beatles sang the "Summer of love". As race riots spread across Washington D.C., a violent peasant uprising erupted in Naxalbari in Bengal. That year the British Parliament decriminalised homosexuality and Pink Floyd released their debut album,"The Piper at the Gates of Dawn" in U.K. While Walt Disney released his last full length feature "The Jungle Book", Zulfikar Ali Bhutto founded the Pakistan Peoples Party, nearer home. It was a year that saw Gabriel Garcia Marquez publish One Hundred Years Of Solitude and President Charles de Gaulle veto British entry in EEC. The year was 1967. 

1967 was also a watershed year in the political history of West Bengal. For the first time in the history of independent India, the Congress Government was dislodged by an United Front Government headed by Ajoy Mukherjee. This Government saw the coming together of some Congressmen, the Leftist parties, the Gorkha League, the right wing Lok Sevak Sangh and some independents. This is significant in the sense that all non Congress political forces joined hands together to dislodge the Congress but could not keep their own flock together for long. Another watershed incident happened as President's rule was imposed in West Bengal for the first time, following the break up of the United Front due to inner fissures and contradictions. When elections were held in 1969, UF came back to power with a thumping majority, but only for a year. The front broke up again and the state went back to President's rule till Congress came back to power again in 1972 for a full five year term. Then came the horrendous emergency. With the brain behind the emergency, Sidhartha Shankar Ray heading the Government, Congress lost the elections, and this time for good.

When the Left Front came to power in 1977, I was just ten years old and knew little about who the new Chief Minister Jyoti Basu was or what Left politics was all about. For the next 34 years, I experienced the Left rule in person, growing up in an era of strange societal contradictions and strong political divisions. As capital took flight away, persecuted by militant trade unionism, we were relentlessly fed with glorious tales of reversal of undemocratic practices of the emergency era, establishing Panchayeti Raj, redistribution of land to the landless labourers, the stepmotherly treatment meted out by the Federal Government, building of a power plant by raising blood donations from the public, etc. However, we could not help but get deeply distressed about the Marichjhapi massacre, the killing of saffron clad Anandamargis, the indifference of the administration to the Bantala rape victim, the near fatal attack on a youth Congress leader named Mamata Banerjee and so on, right upto the recent police brutality in Nandigram and the killing fields of Netai. We hated the imposition of complete control of the Party over all spheres of the Bengali life. The ugly face of CPI(M) was on a perpetual roadshow.The leaders became increasingly aloof, the followers increasingly arrogant and the Party increasingly immune to people's feelings over these long years of unchallenged rule until the Bengali on the street got fed up. We wanted change, 'Poriborton', as was coined in Bangla.

Last May saw a change in the seat of power. Mamata Banerjee, after hobnobbing with the Congress, then the BJP, then the Congress, then with neither, then back again with the Congress, finally became the Chief Minister, winning decisively in the elections and heading a Congress-TMC coalition Government. She started with a bang and we were floored by a refreshing change in attitude and approach in governance! A few months passed quickly, in hope of a new sunrise. The honeymoon did not last for too long though. A new set of power brokers started to spring up everywhere, floating in the hot air of being in Governance and the administration started to act in a partisan manner, just as was the wont during the Left rule. One started to question the very ethos of  change and how this new Government was any different from the past one. There seemed no answer. The change makers have, in the meanwhile, turned into changed masters. TMC has started to emote the ugliness of CPI(M), more often than naught. 

One after another the present Government is failing in its prime duty; to be a Government of the people and not of a political Party. How can the CM vilify a rape victim and not apologise ? How can she pull up two honest and upright police officers for doing their job well ? Why is she in denial about not being able to stop hapless farmers from committing suicide as her administration is unable to buy their produce ? How can she call a ghastly attack on the media by her party men concocted by the media itself to up their TRP rating ?  How can she attack her partners in Government as a B-Team of the Left while she herself is siding with the Left in opposing SEZ, draft land acquisition act, FDI in retail, privatisation of banking and insurance sector, model lokayukta bill, Teesta water treaty and proposed nuclear power plant in Haripur, all of which are in agenda of Left's opposition to the Central Government ? And the General Strike of today ? Who made sure that the strike is successful in Bengal ? Who else but Mamata herself, by announcing that her party will actively oppose the strike on the streets of Bengal. A consequence was the killing of two CPI(M) leaders in Burdwan just a few days back in the hands of goons supported by TMC, which the CM maliciously termed as a result of infighting within the opposition party. She has vitiated the relation with the Federal Government so much that the purse strings that should have been loosened specially for Bengal, has been tightened even further, plunging the state into deeper financial crisis. She has neither been able to evolve as an able administrator, nor a leader of the whole of Bengal. Neither has she been able to condone impartial governance, nor condemn violence across all societal levels. Indeed, nothing has changed, absolutely nothing. And despair is setting in among people who voted for her. 

Let me go back to my year of birth. Bengal is no Vietnam and we can very well do without the race riots of Washington D.C. or the eruption of armed conflict at Naxalbari now. Many fair weather friends have joined the ruling dispensation and they would not take long to defect, like Svetlana did, when the tide starts turning. What we do need is someone like Martin Luther King Jr. to denounce and break this terrible circle of hate and violence, of denial, insensitivity and in-humaneness.  We need our bands to sing a new Summer of Love and our writers to write a new Solitude. May be a Disney of today will make a new Jungle Book, a new Floyd will sing a new Gates of Dawn and a new tolerant society shall emerge, open to even radical out-of-the-box ideas. We certainly need a headstrong De Gaulle to veto the continuance of Bengal's killer political practices. And if no one takes cognisance of our concerns, we would have to look for a new option, just as Bhutto provided one, when Pakistan was desperately looking out to fill in the vacant space of democracy in their body polity. It is, after all, about us, the people. For the people, of the people, by the people.