End of a long road

Tue, Oct 27 05:36 AM

WEST BENGAL'S latest contribution to Left-wing political praxis — a mainstream Left government agreeing to get blackmailed by an extreme Left violent movement — has rightly raised questions about governability. Needless to add here that it is unlikely Maoist leaders are quaking in their sandals after Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee's rediscovery of the state's basic duties.

But we have to look beyond Bhattacharjee. He is the man in charge at a time Bengal's prime political experiment is going horribly wrong. A large section of Bengal's political/ intellectual/ cultural elite gloried in the exceptionalism that the experiment was supposed to have engendered. Bengal was different. Yes it was. But just how difficultly different, from the point of view of sane political economy, is becoming apparent only now. This, as it were, is the proper historical materialist context in which to understand the surrender of people who put up Stalin's photograph to people who put up Mao's.

The political experiment was that the CPM in Bengal could construct a viable progressive model that would both take away the attractions of radical violent communism and be an exception to mainstream Indian politics.

The CPM tried to answer radical, violent communists, whose original leadership was in the CPM, through land reform. It sought to create a progressive exception to mainstream Indian politics by creating a political base on the back of labour intensive/ small plot cultivation and funneling the political support through the reinvigorated panchayat system. Both parts of the experiment appeared to be politically successful initially. But both suffered from a fatal political flaw: the assumption that cold-blooded hypocrisy will never be called to account. What is the big deal about hypocrisy in politics, it is legitimate to ask. The big deal is the CPM's kind of hypocrisy. Here's what makes it special.

The hypocrisy was that the CPM in Bengal never, ever extended its grand thesis of empowerment of the exploited beyond reallocating land and encouraging labour-intensive cultivation; the limitations of the second process as a transformative agent are well-known and the inevitable happened in Bengal's case as well.

We are inured to the fact that Bengal's social indicators are terrible. But let us ask why this should be the case when a state is ruled for more than 30 years by a party that swore by the aam aadmi long before the Congress discovered him. The CPM's blatant hypocrisy about its progressive agenda showed up brutally clearly in its lack of interest in building social infrastructure. Bengal should have been bursting at the seams with reasonable quality social infrastructure. It is not because the CPM in the state did not actually give a toss about real empowerment. Travels through Bengal's villages produce a kind of despair that you will never feel while driving through many other states that have always been host to very unprogressive politics.

Much mindspace is occupied by the CPM's late and horrendously unsuccessful attempts to give private industrial capital a more prominent space in the state. But think about the problem in a different way: When the CPM realised the economic limitations of the small plot-based agricultural model, it turned to industrial capital, it did not simultaneously attempt a late rectification of the inadequate social infrastructure problem. Of course, bringing in big industrial capital was a good idea; it's always a good idea. But the significant thing in this context is that it was the CPM's only idea. CPM still didn't think it was worth its while to invest political energy behind not just industry but also better primary education, better schools, tolerable rural roads.

When Bhattacharjee went big on private industry was therefore also when the CPM's special hypocrisy about its progressive agenda became absolutely clear.

That hypocrisy is now under political interrogation in the state and Bhattacharjee can do nothing at this stage to convince Bengal that the CPM is capable of changing. That's why the Maoists' violence in Bengal is much more potent than in other states. In Bengal, hte Maoists have the advantage of taking on a political party that has bluffed its way through for more than 30 years in the name of helping the poor and the exploited. The CPM in Bengal now lacks credibility in a specially horrific way that doesn't apply to established political parties in other Maoist-affected states. Bengal's government looks hapless, ineffectual in the face of Maoists fundamentally because politically the CPM is hollowed out.

It is funny, in this context, that the multinational intellectuals' letter to Manmohan Singh on the Maoists should make such a to-do about neoliberal economic policies. The Maoists' biggest tactical advantage is not the imagined depredation caused by market-friendly economic policies. It is in Bengal, where progressive policies have caused real deepening of deprivation.

More thoughtful interventions than that intellectuals' letter in the debate about the Maoists make the point that state failure to provide social infrastructure cannot be written out of the solution to the problem. This of course requires the caveat that Maoist leaders are not going to stop murdering

constables and poor villagers once schools and primary clinics are more plentiful and better equipped. The Maoist leadership is in violent, unlawful, murderous confrontation with the state and the state must respond accordingly. But better social infrastructure will certainly make the Maoists' job more difficult in terms of building a barefoot army.

The same rule applies to Bengal. Except that people who do not have access to halfway decent social infrastructure in Bengal have been fed a tall story for decades about their very own government looking out for them. There's nothing more the CPM can say that will make any real difference.

Bhattacharjee may not directly barter with the Maoists again any time soon. But his not giving anything to the Maoists matters much less than the CPM not having

anything left to give to Bengal.

saubhik.chakrabarti@expressindia.com

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