Dear CM, Why I hate your party Part II

The silent rally in Nov 14 against atrocities in Nandigram (click pics for sources and more news)

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• Kolkata walks for peace in Nandigram
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• “If we can do it in Nandigram, why not here too?”

I’ve heard about it, but from this distance cannot presume to make any judgments with any confidence, though I would certainly support a call for a serious independent investigation.

Noam Chomsky Source: Sanhati.com

Dear Chief Minister of “them“,

This series of posts is turning out to be a long one…never knew it will turn out to be a series; so be it. I know you are not reading; but I know there are chances that people who would like to read with your eyes might read.

Reading my last post, a fellow-Bengali-blogger (or Blong, as I call ourselves) notices tinges of melancholy… Rightly so, after a second reading I thought that the post might have been titled: Dear CM, Why I am sad about your party. My friend is acerbic whereas I am maudlin but I must ponder why my post sounded so: sad.

Because whenever I rant against your party – unfortunately every waking hour these days – I recall, for a flash might be, my father’s face. A slightly built smallish man who had to – under dire circumstances – give up a cushy public sector job at the age of 52 almost 10 years before I managed to get one. In the years which flowed between, he turned bankrupt and faced calamities which ultimately – now in the fag-end of his sixties – render him a failure in life and utterly so. Whenever I see him at a distance I feel a choking affection for my little man something I never felt throughout my early years; he with his unemotional ways and a booming voice hardly was a man to be soft upon. But now, after he has lost all that authority, I have discovered a man whom I can care more and fear less. He is a sorry little man for whom I have made quite remarkable sacrifices without much regrets. Though probably I am his most vocal critic as far as family-management is concerned, if any other soul dare raise a voice pitying him I have shown instances of being persistently disregardful to them, to put it mildly. I had this habit of engaging in altercations with him which brought all roofs down; while neighbors presumed that we were having the final bout on property or something (which we have none) if they listened carefully they might have understood that we are having a ‘political’ tiff.

Is my hatred against your party, then, largely Oedipal? Hardly something I can answer, can’t peek into my unconscious and to negate that, I told you I gave your party 11 goddamn years. But let me explain further. Yes, my father is one of your die-hard (in our lingo, dead-head, well…) supporter of your party. Whenever he encounters criticism of your party – particularly from me, most of the times in all sorts of media – he starts shouting, abusing (under the limits he is able to), shivering, scowling, throwing hands etc. Now I understand that this man, who is a failure in every aspects of life and is constantly reminded of being so by circumstances or exasperated family-members has only one certainty to cling to for the rest of his life: the Left-Front Government of West Bengal which your party spearheads.

The Left-Front Govt. Not the CPI(M). He does not claim to be a communist, he is absolutely clear about politics and cricket (yes, football too); he is a loyal supporter and voter in the parliamentary-democratic system, not someone who is an ideological believer. He, for instance, does not spare thoughts on revolutions. He is a rabid anti-communal Bengali, me being a perfect successor without disputes; hates right-wingers of all sorts, but I have never heard him abusing capitalists, though I have heard a lot of his raucous voice condemning the US of A.

When I hear your party’s deeds and ills…I become angry because you are hurting this man’s faith knowing that people like him will never lose faith on your party even if you materialize that hurt to them. They read the newspapers they like to read, they watch the channels which agree to their views; the print and the screen are their only windows to the world. When he shouts back to me that I have not seen the ‘real world’ I understand – though it took time to – that his seeing the world was frozen in 1977 and he really saw the world before that. Yes, that world was more palpably real to him than mine: he saw state-repression, deaths in lock-up, killings, rampant corruption, one-of-the-most-evil-CMs-ever…the reference to the ‘real’ to him is still the world before ‘77. Worse, he never experienced that world in first-hand, he was that ultra-sensitive guy which I am now, hypertouched by indirect experiences. I can understand the relief he felt in 1977.

He will never know how your party’s senior comrades behave, because he has never met them. He has never faced their arrogance, their disdain, their fixing-you-in-a-formulated-phrase look. He has never witnessed the complexion of your more senior comrades (and complexion is not metaphorical here, it is utterly-butterly literal). He has never met DYFI leaders who started after ‘77, therefore who never faced oppositions, rather who specializes in maintaining being in power, in other words, who, never in their worst nightmares dream of going underground (and he has seen communists going underground while being hounded). He has never seen such a leader beating the shit (literally) off a wide-eyed ultra; I have seen it. I have seen in a night-time suburban college an ultra, shaking in fear because a couple of us spotting him from a distance, pasting a poster in reverse and running away and both of us having a good laugh discovering his inverted revolutionary zeal, all sticky and dripping in home-made gum. He has never heard a comrade’s ridiculous and rank ignorance voiced loud.

He is deaf-and-blind to your ills – my father – but an extremely reasonable and responsible citizen. He dwells in a plane of ideas which are more sharply co-ordinated than mine; but I have seen some and I hear a lot. But I have stopped convincing him, after so many bouts of quarrels (the Kanoria episode, can recall), that when you, dear CM, talk in terms of “us-and-them”…you are not addressing us but them, your cadres with blood in their hands, to whom you are bloody accountable, who are irritated of the CM’s ‘civil-sophisticated’ ways and wants you to ‘perform’ the hard-liner for once…that you are taking a test to them examiners.

Sometimes I do feel that I am jealous of my dad and more I feel it, the more angry I become. Why? Because my poor little man has faith, and I have none. He has belief and I have none. He can denounce reports on Nandigram as slanders, he has easy equations ready in hand but I cannot. The way suspicion about you people has seeped in cannot be undone easily and I don’t feel the motivation to undo anymore. I only know that if your government falls he might suffer a cardiac arrest after going through bouts of depressions because the world will again become palpably real to him, the clock will turn 30 years back for him. I also know that his fears are hardly wrong because your government’s fall means the rise of the right. I also feel that a leftist government can only be replaced by a better leftist one. We always felt that your party has to be revolutionized internally because an alternative to such a large, organized and functional structure cannot be created overnight. But me being a masochist had a hunch that then will be the moment of your party’s cleansing, either way round, if you lose an election and the right rises in Bengal. There will be betrayers, deserters and killings which will leave you poorer but purer. Here is a communist party which has forgot to suffer for long. But my father can never afford that experience, the clock turning back.

After I returned from a really satisfying large rally today – satisfying because such a multitude can easily be achieved by a seasoned political platform but here was really an unorganized, spontaneous gathering (though I know that it won’t make much of a difference) – and after having a satisfying big-screen treat of my favorite Jean-luc Godard’s Histoire du Cinema (I am not boycotting Godard, Fernando Solanas and Glauber Rocha) I turned on the TV to enjoy ‘interpretations as news’. Here was this anti-left channel which melodramatises Nandigram and there was this pro-govt one which is pastoralizing it. But I saw that my father arrived to watch it too. At last I have seen a real event with my naked eyes and I could have judged the lies of either heightening or undermining it. But on second thoughts, I felt that today at least I have a conviction about a day’s event though it might not match his life-long colossal faith and belief. Since he cannot argue with my witnessing eyes it would be a losing bout for my father; I am already in an experiential advantage. I left the room without a word. He switched to a cricket-replay.

I repeat, your party and your government is the only one certainty to cling to for the rest of his life, if it is gone, all is gone for him. Yes, he clings to something so impersonal for a certitude that here he is never wrong, the future of his society – if not his family – is secure in your hands…something so non-personal (Bengalis are like this). Dear CM, I hate your party for turning my father – always a doyen of critical citizenship to me in my formative years – so helplessly uncritical.