Immersion of governance?

On 6 November 2011 in Kolkata, a noisy procession is on its way to immerse a Jagaddhatri idol late in the evening. It has a disc jockey playing loud music, contravening anti-sound-pollution laws. After the group burst firecrackers in front of Chittaranjan National Cancer Research Institute, the biggest government-run cancer hospital in Bengal with hundreds of critical in-patients, police intervene. The people in the procession attack the policemen and chase them into the nearby Bhawanipore police station. They also pelt stones and bottles, damaging vehicles.

The Act 2 of the drama has been telecast, though not live. The policemen, most of them in mufti, but wearing helmets, were trying to close the collapsible gate of the police station from within, but the mob was trying to open it and get in. There were several women in the group that attacked the station, proving, if proof was necessary, that women of Bengal have arrived. The rabble kept throwing things at the cops within, but the latter were strangely subdued.

After some time, some policemen rushed out, wielding lathis. The TV footage didn’t show them seriously hitting anyone, but the mob was scattered all the same. Then the chief minister of the state walked into the police station, shouting and gesticulating, her face glistening in sweat. She could not be heard in the commotion.

Two days later, The Indian Express reported: “Bhawanipore police station in Kolkata had an unusual visitor. It was Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee, who came storming in, blasted the police and reportedly got two youths, who had been picked up for rioting during an immersion procession earlier, released. … the youths … were Trinamool Congress activists.”

It was also reported that the puja was managed by a veteran offender with several criminal cases against him, who is also a crony of one of Mamata’s brothers.

The news was virtually blacked out by most of the vernacular media, who are in an extended honeymoon with the new state government that came to power in May 2012. The spin followed soon in the shape of a police report. According to the same newspaper, an inquiry report prepared by a senior police officer “is learnt to have indicted officers of the Bhawanipore station for the violence and their failure to control the mob, and criticised them for being rash with those leading the procession. … An officer of the police station has also been booked for misbehaving with the mob …”

The CPI M that ruled Bengal for 34 years was guilty of many misdeeds, the principal one being they replaced the rule of law with a rule of the party. The inevitable question that arises is: What then is the difference between the old government and the new?

Well, even the worst communist chief minister won’t be so unwise – to use a parliamentary word – to personally storm a police station to rescue arrested party workers. They would find malleable police officers and silently work behind the scenes to achieve the same result without making headlines. Communists actually managed to keep things under wraps for a long time in Bengal, until overconfidence led to their misadventures in Singur and Nandigram, besides botching up the Rijwanur Rehman case.

The fact that the new ruling party acted so stupidly perhaps offers Bengal a tiny window of hope. They won’t be able to “manage” the bureaucracy or police with much finesse, and might make fools of themselves repeatedly in similar situations. And it should take the electorate much less than the 34 years they needed to show the door to the Left Front government.

The last period of Congress rule in the state, 1972-77, is etched in the collective memory of Bengal as the hoodlum years, when Youth Congress leaders called the shots in public affairs. Muscle power was their only strength and a rather thin line would set many of them apart from professional thugs. I remember a public meeting where a so-called leader was delivering a speech wearing a short kurta. As he spoke, he raised his arms repeatedly to lift his khadi kurta and show two pistols strapped to his waist.

Later, their descendants, the Trinamool Congress (TC) organised numerous bandhs and countless road- and rail-blockades to disrupt public life in the name of political action. Throwing stones at trams and buses was a regular feature of TC bandhs. At least on one occasion, they even threw a petrol bomb at a bus in Tollygunge in Kolkata. Once, a leading light of the party – presently a minister – personally beat up an ordinary citizen whose only sin was to board a public bus during one of these bandhs. Let us not forget that Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee too earned her spurs as a firebrand student leader of the Congress in the 1970s.

The second question that arises is: Does the Bhawanipore incident foretell a return to the hoodlum years?

We do not know the answer yet. But it has been proved beyond doubt that in a democracy, even in a flawed one like ours, a determined electorate can check political dadagiri. It is therefore imperative that people register their protest against the CM and her party for what happened on 6/11.

Although I voted for Mamata in the last election, there were several question marks about her, given her political baggage and methods. She hasn’t really disappointed me. But people like me did have faith in the leaders of the amorphous collective called the “civil society”, who exhorted us to bring about a change in Bengal. Their eloquence helped us make up our mind in the heady summer of 2011. Now that the winter is around, there hasn’t been a murmur of protest from them even after the person elected to uphold the rule of law subverted it with such disgraceful disdain for governmental propriety.

The West Bengal chief minister is no longer a student leader. She led the people’s struggle to excise a malignant government from her state. Her personal integrity has never been questioned and it does seem her heart beats for the poor. But she is also the inheritor of the hoodlum politics of the seventies. If she cannot decide herself on which side of the law she should be, her electorate must force her to.

Niyamgiri in West Bengal?

The dispute between dismally poor Adivasis of the Niyamgiri hills in Orissa and the powerful multinational Vedanta Resources is a hugely asymmetric conflict, particularly in view of the central and state governments’ eagerness to bend over backwards to help industrialists. Scrapping of the Vedanta aluminium mine has been a rare victory for the marginalised poor. Another David has tamed for now, though certainly not killed, a Goliath.

The reasons given by the Ministry of Environment and Forests in support of their decision to scrap the project has put an official stamp of approval on the concerns of the people who oppose such projects, namely, destruction of forest dwellers and irretrievable damage to ecology. The ministry and its head, Mr. Jairam Ramesh, and a section of the Congress party including Mr. Rahul Gandhi deserve to be congratulated for this.

But the question that comes to the mind is: does this one swallow make a spring? Does this mean some day in the future, our policy makers will believe development means water, food and shelter for all, instead of more highways, glitzier malls and bigger airports in a country where half the children go to bed hungry? Does this mean industries that pollute and slow-poison people will be scrapped in other parts of the country too? Let’s discuss another case.

In West Midnapore, Burdwan, and Bankura districts of West Bengal, many sponge iron factories that have sprung up during the Left rule have been causing massive damage to the environment.

My senior friend and a retired teacher of economics of Calcutta University, Subhendu Dasgupta has given some startling information in an article published in a Bangla newspaper today: production of 100 tonnes of sponge iron requires 1.6 lakh tonnes of water, (an equivalent amount is consumed by 80 thousand humans per day). 100 tonnes of sponge iron also produces 180 to 200 tonnes of carbon-di-oxide, 26 to 30 tonnes of waste, and 100 tonnes of dust. The fields and grazing tracts around the sponge iron plants have turned black and water in tanks has been contaminated. Agricultural productivity has reduced: from 36 to 45 sackfuls of paddy per acre to 21 to 24 sackfuls. There is also black stain on the rice and the rice mill owners refuse to buy such paddy; Mangoes fall off before ripening, saal leaves are turning black, and even fish have developed black stains, and cannot be sold. Domestic animals too are harmed; cows give birth to stillborn calves. [Ekdin, 3 September, 2010, article by Shubhendu Dasgupta on edit page]

I checked with another friend, a chemical engineer by training, who currently works on industrial pollution. My friend confirms this is actually happening and one can see buildings and roads covered with black soot in wide areas around Durgapur and Asansol where there are about forty sponge iron factories.

The government of West Bengal has reacted to the crisis by arresting the people who have been protesting against this wanton destruction of Nature and her children. Members of Jhargram Block Environmental Pollution Resistance Committee, Hemanta Mahato and Upangshu Mahato were arrested and charged with waging war against the state. Naba Datta, of Citizens’ Forum, who has been studying the effects of industrial pollution by sponge iron factories, too was arrested. Twenty cases, including waging war against the state, have been slapped against him. [Ibid.] Perhaps even the worst criminal in the state would not have received such attention and honour from the government.

Will anything be done to protect the poor villagers affected by sponge iron plants in West Bengal and elsewhere?

An imaginary dialogue

Rabindra Kumar Dasgupta

Engels: The party devoured the society [in Russia].
Marx:  In the end, the society devoured the party.

Engels: But it will never happen in Bengal. For almost two hundred years, Bengalis accepted the British rule. In Bengal today, the party has replaced the British. Everyone seems to be begging for its favours. I can see that in this city [of Kolkata], a new breed of Rai Bahadurs and Rai Sahibs have been created.

Marx: It saddens me that all this has been happening in my name. I died in Russia; I have been buried here.

…

Engels: Our theory talked about class struggle. It didn’t talk about uniting the human society. We understood economics, but couldn’t fathom the human mind.

Marx: Now I see that the world, having forgotten everything else I said, remember only my last speech. On 4th September, 1872, I said in Amsterdam: “I do not deny that there exists countries like America, England, and if I know your institutions better, I would add Holland, where the workers may be able to attain their ends by peaceful means.”

Engels: Even then, I’d say that our philosophy will remain at a special place in the history of human thoughts.

Marx: But I didn’t want to become history, I wanted to create history.              

Translated from Aleek Sanglap (Absurd dialogues) by Rabindra Kumar Dasgupta [Gangcheel, Kolkata (2008), pp 57-58]

Those who read books

Bhabatosh Dutta, eminent economist and teacher, wrote  about an unlikely scholar, Nirmal Chandra Maitra. Maitra was a sub-deputy collector in Chattagram when Dutta began his teaching career two years after the raid on the armoury there. Forty to fifty years later, Dutta wrote, “I have not come across another person with such immeasurable knowledge: he went to the very depth of literature, history, philosophy and political science.” After retirement, Maitra wanted to teach at a college. Bhabatosh Dutta dissuaded him because he felt such an erudite person wouldn’t be able to endure the ignorance of college teachers of the time.

Another economist, Ashoke Mitra writes in his autobiography  that shortly after completing school, he made friends with an older man, Suranjan Sarkar, who lived elsewhere. He worked with the Customs and shared Ashoke Mitra’s passion for literature. Suranjan wrote brilliant letters about the fiction and the biographies he had just read and quoted extensively from poems.

Sunanda Sikdar’s Dayamayeer Katha is a beautiful memoir about her early childhood in a remote East Bengal village in the 1950s. Sunanda writes  that an illiterate farmhand, Majom Sheikh, used to walk long distances on empty stomach to listen to books being read aloud. Once, little Sunanda asked Majom, what he had told Allah during a prayer. Majom replied, “I said, ‘Lord! Please give rain and rice to those you have sent to the world. Keep their children in good health. Make all men, animals, insects, plants and trees happy.’”

The thread that connects the two government officials and the wise unlettered farmer is their love for written words. They read without expecting material benefit and didn’t gain anything by reading except, to paraphrase Russell’s words, becoming better human beings. Such people have become almost extinct, but in olden days, we met them at times. Here are a few more true stories.

A colleague of my mother was trapped in an unhappy marriage. Her husband was cruel, but she suffered him as divorce was unthinkable for middleclass Indian women then. But one day, her patience ran out and she went to a nearby police station in Kolkata to lodge a complaint. The sub-inspector on duty asked her if she had a child. She had a son. What subjects did she teach at school? English. The policeman then said, “Madam, I can start a case against your husband. But will that solve your problems?”

As she pondered in silence, the sub-inspector said, “Madam, please recall Tennyson’s Home they brought their warrior dead: ‘Rose a nurse of ninety years, / Set his child upon her knee-- / Like summer tempest came her tears-- / “Sweet my child, I live for thee.’ I would advise you to live for your child.”

After my daughter was born, it was a big task to locate the office that would issue a birth certificate. After visits to several municipality offices, I discovered the right place: a dimly lit room in a medical college building. A lone clerk in a shabby shirt sat behind a desk, reading a Bangla newspaper and smoking a bidi. There was stubble on his face, and arrogance. After waiting for some time, I pulled a chair and sat down across the table, but still, the man did not notice me. As I had nothing else to do, I too started reading. After a long time, he looked up and noticed the book in my hand. Then suddenly, his face lit up. Putting down the paper, he said, “For whom the bell tolls? I love Hemingway. Do you know who Robert Jordan was? People say Hemmingway modelled him on Christopher Caudwell, the British essayist who died in the early days of the Spanish Civil War.”

I said I had once tried to read Caudwell but gave up because he went over my head. The man continued, “Caudwell was badly hurt. He lay down with a machine gun as his Republican comrades retreated, just like Robert Jordan. He was not even thirty. All his books came out after his death. His first book, Illusion and reality is a masterpiece. Please read it.”

My work was done immediately while I wondered about the difference between illusion and reality.

Postscript: Robert Jordan may not have been Christopher Caudwell in real life. Wikipedia says he was possibly an American academic, Robert Merriman.

A downhill journey

[This article has been published by The Statesman today under a different heading. The photograph is from Wikipedia]

In the recent past, violent protests were reported from places where students were not allowed to copy during the Madhyamik exam in West Bengal. These incidents were spread over five districts: Murshidabad, Birbhum, South 24 Parganas, Hoogly, and Malda. Significantly, parents too joined examinees in the protests. After the last day’s exam, there were demonstrations at six places in Murshidabad, during which the protesters broke furniture and injured a headmaster. The most bizarre incident took place at Lashkarpur High School in Lalgola where irate parents went in to beat up teachers as punishment for “strict” invigilation. The teachers were not lesser men. They overpowered one of the parents, thrashed him, and handed him over to police.

From cheating in exams to parents actively helping their offspring to cheat is a precipitous downhill journey that illustrates massive erosion in values. And such anomie does not exist only in the rural backwaters, where India doesn’t shine that brightly.

At Visva-Bharati, the university set up by Rabindranath Tagore, a different kind of incident revealed a similar decline. On the night of 27th February, some students of the Arts Faculty entered a hostel for girls and used filthy language to harass and intimidate them. As if this was not bad enough, the perpetrators of this shameful act also beat up the boys who protested, injuring seventeen fellow students. They also vandalised some priceless works of art .

The students who sexually harass their own classmates are despicable. The incident is more disturbing because it happened in Santiniketan where one of the tallest Indians tried to recreate a traditional Indian school, an ashram. Instead of holding a beacon to the rest of the world and show what India can offer, Visva-Bharati has become academically insignificant and a home for the undeserving.

Education these days means acquiring saleable knowledge; it has nothing to do with building character. In olden days, parents from many corners of the country sent their children to the school set up by Rabindranath not because it would assure them of good jobs, but because they were expected to become better human beings. That the education that produced better humans also produced brilliant creative artists and professionals is another story. Countless among the alumni of Visva-Bharati have excelled in their chosen fields. Syed Mujtaba Ali, Pramatha Nath Bishi, Ramkinkar Beij, Kanika Bandopadhyay, Satyajit Ray, Mahashweta Devi, Suchitra Mitra, KG Subramanian, and Amartya Sen are not exceptions, but dazzling motifs on a general pattern.

Visva-Bharati stopped producing people of such calibre long ago. And it no longer attracts talented students from far and wide. These days, mostly ordinary and substandard students from the nearby areas – not even from the rest of the state – join the university because it has become so bad that hardly anyone from outside enrol there. Consequently, Visva-Bharati has become a cesspool of mediocrity, with the exception of one or two faculties.

But the reign of mediocrity is one aspect. What make the students ignore the norms of civilised behaviour so completely, just like the parents who fight for their children’s “right” to copy in exams?

There are two main reasons. Firstly, most parents have fuzzy ideas about education, and do not have a roadmap for their children’s holistic growth. Many of them do not inculcate values in their offspring; on the contrary, they offer poor role models for their children to follow.

It is common knowledge that many parents cut corners to admit their children to good schools. Many would not even hesitate to pay bribes to secure admission. Seats in private medical and technical colleges are auctioned to the highest bidders. Such children begin their education through deceit or money power. But who cares?

About thirty years ago, a father-son duo, who ran a flourishing high school for mainly middleclass Bengalis in Kolkata, were under a cloud after the unnatural death of the son’s wife. While the case lingered on for years, the school continued to produce state toppers. Although a shadow of doubt hung over the principal, particularly during the progress of the criminal case, no parent withdrew their children from the school. And many more were eager to get their offspring admitted to a school run by someone they thought could have been a murderer.

It was not a question of someone being treated as innocent until proved guilty. The question simply was whether one was prepared to put one’s child in the hands of people of questionable morals. The parents, among whom were my friends, thought that if a school improved the chances of academic success, nothing else mattered. In other words, for many educated Bengalis, education had little to do with values. Should anyone be surprised that thirty years down the road, parents demand their offspring be allowed to cheat?

The second reason that emboldens people to do what they like is the absence of the rule of law in West Bengal; every transgressor today knows there is a fair chance that they would get away with murder. After the vandalism by the examinees and their parents, the police super of Murshidabad district said, “Police will take action if written complaints are lodged.” He also added, rather thoughtfully, “It is also important to identify the parents who indulged in violence.”

Who will identify them? One thought it was the policemen’s duty, which they perform shabbily in Bengal. The decline began with the unionisation of the policemen after the present government came to power in 1977. The process was accelerated by unbridled political interference in running the force.

On 22nd January 2002, five men of Calcutta Armed Police died on the spot in front of the American Center when four terrorists sprayed bullets on them. Fifty-four shots were fired by the attackers, but the 34 policemen present there didn’t shoot back one round . Many of them took bullets in their back, while fleeing. The incident ripped open the abysmal state of the training, preparedness, and morale of the police force in the state. Yet, not one senior police officer was taken to task; neither did the home minister resign in shame. In many other organisations, functionaries would lose their jobs for much less, because there is something called accountability. Should we be surprised about what happened in Silda in 2010?

The police alone don’t suffer from lack of accountability. There has been a metastasis that covers many organs now. The first organised act of violence happened in Santiniketan during the hoodlum years of 1970s. Some students belonging a mainstream political party attacked the students of a different political dispensation. It is no one’s case that the victims were angels, but they were unarmed. Armed to the teeth, the attackers launched a pincer attack from two sides of a boys’ hostel. Several boys were seriously injured. The offensive had been planned at the house of a professor. After the assault, the attackers took shelter in the same house. Everyone knew who the perpetrators were and who backed them. The university took no action against the guilty.

Thereafter, there were many instances of violence in Santiniketan, but the guilty were never punished. Things naturally went from bad to worse. The time has come for people to demand that the university authorities throw out the latest bunch of ruffians from the premises of the central university run with tax payers’ money.

We have come to the present sorry state because of general corrosion in people’s attitude and a decline in the quality of governance. Attitudes won’t change anytime soon, but something can be and must be done to enforce the rule of law. People must be made to believe that a high price tag is attached to breaking law.