Say hello to CPI(Mamata)

It’s difficult to believe that Mamata Banerjee’s demolition of the world’s longest-serving democratically-elected Communist government also means the end of history for West Bengal. I don’t mean the Communist Party of India-Marxist’s (CPI-M) structure and strategy which are being discussed threadbare over endless cups of tea in its Alimuddin Street office, as it was at Monday’s politburo meeting in New Delhi.

I mean Communism as an idea to which millions of young Bengalis responded.
Having spent my adolescent years abroad, I was spared the temptation. But there were Communists in the family and I remember childish excitement and mystification when a fugitive Indrajit Gupta, “Sonnymama”, went to live with my grandmother because he was “underground”. How could her airy first-floor flat be underground, I wondered. Like former West Bengal chief minister Jyoti Basu, Sonnymama came to the Communist Party of India (CPI) via the Communist Party of Great Britain — revolutionary equivalents of the corporate world’s “covenanted hands”, meaning Indians recruited in Britain and entitled to British pay and perks. But whereas Basu took full advantage of the privilege and sailed in at the top, Sonnymama chose to work his way up from the bottom. He found his stint as the Union home minister a burden while Basu never ceased to regret the prime ministership that never was.
Basu and Sonnymama were the elite. The home-grown cadres attracted Nirad C. Chaudhuri’s derision. He dismissed a Communist as a “young Bengali in a Red shirt and khaki trousers, trying to speak Hindi” (why Hindi, I can’t imagine, unless early recruits wanted to be cosmopolitan and Hindi was the only other language they knew), but others recognised the frustration underlying their commitment to a brave new world. Ideology symbolised escape and opportunity.
That faith was incompatible with the tortuous manipulations of parliamentary governance. Institutionalising it because the leaders craved power led to the arrogance and abuses that accounted for West Bengal’s debacle.
The CPI(M) is blamed for doing very little to meet the revolution of rising expectations that its own actions generated. Operation Barga gave the peasantry land. Panchayati Raj gave it a voice. But where were the jobs that would entitle them to rise above the station in which they were born?
The sons of Britain’s Labour peers vote Tory. The sons of our peasantry aspire to white-collar respectability. Not Bengalis alone. Visiting the Punjab Agricultural University at Ludhiana, set up to impart new skills to farmers’ sons so that they could go back to the land with improved agricultural practices, I found that the students hoped university education would lead to clerical jobs.
Secure in their own middle-class identity, Left Front leaders paid scant attention to the seething social ambitions of those they had empowered. Gautam Deb, one of the 26 defeated ministers, fatuously argued that a Bengali’s “heightened political consciousness prevents him from being distracted by material discomforts”. He and his colleagues would do well to read George Orwell’s Animal Farm to understand that the struggle between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie ends only when the former becomes the latter.
Marx’s theory that class shapes thinking and outlook is one reason why this reality is ignored. Apart from Basu and one or two others, the original Left Front worthies came from society’s lower echelons. It was hilarious watching them in 1977 being sworn in by polished Indian Civil Service governor Anthony Lancelot Dias. Dias spoke only English, most ministers spoke only Bengali. But many of them are now said to be millionaires with no time for the hoi polloi. They wouldn’t otherwise have failed to note the god was failing.
The courtiers — academics, artists, writers and actors — who surrounded them kept up the illusion of a radical Elysium even while angling for American visas or “green cards”. The joke at one time was that a prominent Kolkata editor with Leftist pretensions (but not averse to accepting American invitations) had proved that the road to Washington lay through Beijing. This was a play on the fond but uncorroborated Bengali belief that Lenin had predicted that the road to world revolution lay through Kolkata. Many other Bengali Marxist intellectuals (tautology?) were disposed to take that editor’s route.
Now, Bengali voters have come out of the closet en masse and rejected the tired prophets of a make-believe revolution for a relatively young woman whose cyclonic sweep through the state greatly impressed US consul-general Beth A. Payne. According to WikiLeaks, she cabled her bosses about the need to “cultivate” Ms Banerjee who could not only save West Bengal but was “pro-American”. Once that would have been the kiss of death for any Bengali politician. Not any longer. Today’s Bengalis are pragmatists. Riches matter more than romance or revolution.
That’s why Didi, who led the fiery opposition to Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee’s plans for Nandigram and Singur, cannot afford to forget how savagely voters dealt with the Left Front for not creating prosperity. They will give her short shrift if she, too, can’t attract investors. Agriculture and industry are not mutually exclusive. But, first, she must slay the vicious anti-industry genie she released, and convince peasants that factories don’t float in thin air. They need land. A 107-year-old Land Acquisition Act just won’t do.
Otherwise, we can expect more ructions. “We are a special people, a mix of Aryans, Muslims, Mongols and Huns”, a Bengali once told Trevor Fishlock of the Times, London. “When the Aryan blood comes to the top you see our intellectual side. But when the Mongol blood gets to the top we might assassinate and demonstrate violently.” The Mongol blood must be kept in check.
Didi’s supporters call her a true Leftist. Perhaps she is. Perhaps a CPI(M) does remain in power, though with the Communist Party of India (Mamata) replacing the Communist Party of India (Marwari), as the old ruling party was dubbed. But the Communism that inspired generations of Bengalis is dead. Didi only exposed the corpse.
That doesn’t mean Communists won’t always be with us. They will, like Nirad Chaudhuri’s “passionate” Communist friend who, when asked to prove his revolutionary credentials, replied, “My wife says that I growl in my sleep”.

Sunanda K. Datta-Ray is a senior journalist who contributes to several top international publications