Dear CM, Why I hate your party Part I

Motorbike-borne CPI(M) cadres sweep into Nandigram on Monday to celebrate the “victory”. Picture by Pradip Sanyal; image source: The Telegraph, Nov 12

Respected Chief Minister of West Bengal,
Sir,
Do you read personal blogs? Probably you don’t, obviously you don’t have the time. Well, in blogs, we – certain lonely fellows – rave and rant and then happen to meet other raving and ranting lonely fellows. In the context like which your party and police (that is not to absolve you) have precipitated in this peculiar part of the country for the last few months a poetic/melancholic creature like me is raving and ranting. Obviously, we are toothless and we have our nails pared…we are not dangerous however insidious we try to be, so, even your intelligence department won’t bother scanning blogs.

This is how I responded to another post in another blog why – being a leftist irreparably – I hate your party; let me repeat myself with expansions and qualifications:

…The only experience of participating in student-politics that I have is about 11 years in the Students Federation of India, the largest student-body in the country and the student-wing of your party, and that too not in a ‘political sanctuary’ like Kolkata. Here, in Kolkata, political oppositions are simply allowed, the way I have witnessed them being allowed to ‘play’ in the prestigious university of which I was a student not so long ago and where – for the past 3 years and more – teaching. I call this city a ‘political sanctuary’ because I have seen closely how political oppositions, specially those Marxists who differ from you, are handled and silenced in the suburbs. I know how dissidents are treated there, in a way I was acquainted to Stalinism before Marxism, thus.

So, I had my political initiation within the CPI(M) bastion and I also learned how not to be political within it. Now I have turned almost virulently anti-CPI(M) though I remain a Leftist. I don’t call myself a communist, not because it is a hated and anachronistic epithet in the entire world, but because I revere the epithet. It was a beautiful dream of a world “without religion…no possessions…no need for greed or hunger, a brotherhood of man…all the people sharing all the world…” as Lennon imagined. I have a personal reason, being a communist means not only a certain ideology to adhere to, but also presupposes a certain life-style, certain sacrifices, certain high ideals. Your party has made the epithet so easy to assume, even voters describe themselves as communists. I don’t, because I have not achieved those conditions, I know I am just another brick in the wall of global capital…only eager to misbehave.

But I also learned how to be a communist in another way. Strange experience, learning and unlearning simultaneously. Thankfully, though the communist in my mind is a rare species but the communists like your men are more palpably real, I still have belief and certainty in those rarities, because I know they existed and I have faith that they will exist, whatever the Bush decrees.

To just rapidly recall, it is the ambiance of the erstwhile East European within Bengal evenings (I was a party-insider you see, however peripheral). It is the Milan Kundera novels which my leaders described as decadent. It is their high-handedness, the way they functioned. Next, the priority of maintaining being in power, however you can, so I observed how the politics always was short-termed, it is the next election you keep in mind (with always the consolation that we will take care of our ‘higher ideals’ after the elections) and you know the communists leaders like them always had a powerful grasp over a hackneyed language to silence arguments. And relishing being in power…the party has turned out to be a peculiar hybrid between the feudal brahminical hierarchy and the urban intelligence. The way the means always were justified by the ends, which – though always fair – were never achieved totally, were never meant to be achieved totally because ours is a party operating in a bourgeois-democratic system and you people bloody hoodwinked us! At the end of the night we were only left with some instances of unfair means and all conscientious party-workers will be left with hidden pains of a certain guilt…

I can recall many things: how, after we were promoted we were taught to ‘manufacture democratic consent’. How decisions were already taken in closed quarters and placed in front of the General Body meetings just to be agreed: the consensus would follow the debates rather than the other way round and the debate was cursorily necessary to identify the dissenters and mark them to be watched. Why? Even we fell in the traps! I recall how your younger comrades (now holding important offices, at least few of them) dealt with us senior dissenters those evenings. The sudden call I awaited that I am summoned. The long unnecessary walks in the dusk which was eerie; the most inappropriate place to have a meeting where even moonlight could not enter; the long silence before a senior comrade tells a sub-ordinate: “okay, so you speak first (shuru koro)”, the indignation in his voice that he won’t spare a beginning for a small-fish like me and that the sub-ordinate is being trained how to deliver a sophisticated threat. I knew that my other friends were getting the same treatment but elsewhere and singularly and I knew all of them were sighing relief because days’ waiting ends now, however ominously. And finally I was said that since I am a senior comrade I won’t be treated the way someone lesser would have been, so what do I choose? I knew the answer, that in the next General Body meeting it will be me who will make an addendum that I want to be ‘relieved’ (abhyahoti deyoa hok) of my bloody-somethings and it will be a relief! No one will question ’cause no one has any questions, they were already informed. What my leaders never knew that in spite of slanders we were immediately catapulted to the level of heroes to many something we were too bitter to exploit.

I know how they maintained rural politics. I had a strange experience of teaching Communicative English in a rural college where one reached after four hours of train-travel, half-an-hour of bus-journey and another half-an-hour of walking in between paddy-fields. The experience was strange because in the first class itself I did something suicidal: I proved to my students – systematically – that they don’t need to learn English. They agreed willy-nilly, but they persisted that they need to learn: they need to come to the city for jobs and proficiency in this language is necessary for a job in the city…I should have understood, that the pastoral is no more similar to what I imagined, the agrarian economy is changing not because of economic reasons, but because of cultural reasons. That villages are crumbling and moving towards the city, thanks to 30 years of your party’s rule. I should have understood, that this will be your justification for ‘development’ which you will put forward in the beginning of this year when you will meet the protests against governmental land-acquisitions, that the rural is ‘developing’.

One day I was returning to the bus-stand after another day of purposeless language-imposition with a student. We were walking in the middle of the paddy-fields: the blue firmament above, the splotches of deep-green in the horizon, the dark and cool inviting pond at the distance, no visible human beings anywhere but pristine nature for an urban eye like mine. I casually asked the boy, who like others was friendly with me ’cause I was much closer to his age: “so, tell me something about local politics.”

He shivered a bit, looked all the sides, and whispered as if winds have ears: “sir, one never can tell what it is like, here…you know…they are everything and everywhere…” His ominous whisper mutated the entire landscape into something else, I didn’t ask further. In the forthcoming elections, your party had a mammoth whopping victory in that locality.

It was so in Nandigram too I can assume. The terror and the sense of inevitable which prevailed before. A distorted backlash was inevitable like that which happened there and which your partymen have curbed so successfully last week. Distorted, because it is not politically guided; but inevitable, because your party authored this predicament (that is a word I am so fond of) for thirty years.

The land reform after 1977, when your party along with other leftist parties came to power, obviously yielded lots of goods; it was successful, but symptomatically so. A new ‘class’ of farmers was created who was moneyed, but no rise of political consciousness was achieved, was not possible within the parliamentary democratic structure. So one had a section of people who were ardent supporters but suddenly relishing power via money; the party had to be dependent upon them, these new spheres of power. A new ‘middle-class’ without the education, if you permit. Now they are not farmers anymore, they owned cold-storages, ran small businesses and earned loose, unaccountable pots of money. One talks about erosion of values in the cities, but an account of erosion of values in the rural also needs to be pondered upon.This was a ‘class’ you gave birth to, how can you disown them? Their communist fathers struggled against oppression before the ’70s, and the sons never struggled…the only political activity they were accustomed/trained/skillful of was how to remain in power, how to maintain remaining in power. These people and their followers were ousted from Nandigram after the resistance started. Everyone knew this would happen someday, everyone knew that the imbecilic opposition will try to hijack that burst of anger, everyone knew it will fail because it was not meant to be successful. But bitterly yes, it should have happened to manifest what you have authored in West Bengal, to reveal why they can backlash and how you can lash back. Nandigram makes it clear that it is not you but the likes of Lakhman Seths who are the more effective and functional faces of the CPI(M) in the rural sphere. A cultural revolution within the party is needed, but unfortunately no one is there to call it, since its always the next election which gets priority. Ironically, CPI(M) is still the most intelligent party around (apart from the BJP) with immense survival instinct and it is the presence of political imbeciles like Mamata and the irrationals like the Maoists who resist a possibility of revision of this party’s ills.

What aches me, and I refrain from being overtly political in my blog, is that the resistance which is growing is only sporadic and issue-based, too loose for you to contain after the initial nervousness, and your party also authored this indispensability of yours as the sole ‘mature’ party in Bengal. Yes we are not able to sustain ourselves, persist politically…one Rizwanur, one March 14, one week in November ‘07 and we heat up…Tomorrow, in the 14th, a big rally will be organized against the atrocities in Nandigram and mishandling of citizens in a peaceful protest following it; but the likes of Mamata and the BJP will join it. This leads to nowhere; its just a momentary ego-trip and I am very doubtful of Bengal’s cream-intelligentsia, I have witnessed them basking in their glory for long. They are not those people who will expose themselves to danger for long too. That certain intellectuals are not bothered to disaffect the ruling party means that they don’t need your patronization – which they have enjoyed for 30 years (and therefore art is destroyed in this state, more about it later) – any more, there are other sectors of patronization in a changed market-scenario. But I will walk in tomorrow’s rally, this is not a time to remain isolated and rant only in a blog, because I know that in unison, something more than petty strategies are sounded and that something is to be sounded loud.

Renowned and revered poet Shankha Ghosh and actor-filmmaker Aparna Sen waiting anxiously for arrested intellectuals and other citizens to be released on Nov 12; image source: The Telegraph, Nov 12

Excerpts from Bhaswati Chakravorty’s article in The Telegraph, Nov 12

Sing along, or else: The CPI(M) knows when and how to use the police

Does duplicity have a face? There is no need to guess three times. To match the face, the chief minister of West Bengal has a double role besides his chieftainship: he is police minister and culture minister. He uses the police to protect his brand of culture. The sanctity of the international film festival in Calcutta has to be protected from the artists, poets, actors and film directors of Bengal, singing in pain, awareness and protest against the CPI(M)’s second devastation of Nandigram. Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee’s lathi-wielding policemen went for artists and students because they had got too close to Nandan, where the festival is being held, beat up whomsoever their lathis found, be it a woman actor or student, loaded them in vans and shoved them into the lock-up at Lalbazar.
…
acts are good enough story-tellers. They show that policemen in the city cannot wait to get their hands on poets and artists because they might disrupt the chief minister’s festivities with their singing, while forces waiting to implement law and order in Nandigram are turned back to sit and twiddle their thumbs as CPI(M) cadre make their fortress safe. Apparently, the administration has curled up and died there, just where it suits the chief minister’s party. He, being a man of more parts than can be named, knows exactly when to give his fief the look and feel of a police state, and when to ask the police to look the other way.
…
But there is another. The face of a gentle-spoken poet, teacher and scholar, small in build and towering in stature, gazing in through the closed gates of Lalbazar police station. Somewhere within those gates are artists and students arrested for singing. It is enough to look at his eyes.

Upon hearing that intellectuals were boycotting the film festival, the chief minister had said, “If you have the list, you can put it in a photo frame and hang it on the wall at home.” In return, he should be presented with this picture. He can look at the poet’s eyes and congratulate himself on what he has achieved.

Related news: Kolkata intellectuals storm police headquarters