Columns: The Usual Suspects

Columns

India Today, March 15, 1999
March 15, 1999

THE USUAL SUSPECTS
Basu in Wonderland

Arrogance born out of nothing in particular

By Swapan Dasgupta

There is nothing more infuriating than a smugness born of decadence. Jyoti Basu may be the longest serving chief minister and a fit candidate for a national award next Republic Day but he is increasingly coming to resemble the arrogant zamindar in Satyajit Ray's Jalsaghar. Like the impecunious landlord who insists on rewarding the nautch girl with his last gold mohur, Basu has fallen back on the only weapon left in his Marxist armoury -- conceit. His umpteenth description of the Atal Bihari Vajpayee Government as "barbaric and uncivilised" has finally drawn sharp responses. While the BJP spokesman charged him with losing his "mental balance", Human Resources Development Minister Murli Manohar Joshi used colourful imagery to attack the blood-soaked history of Marxist regimes.

To be fair, Basu had it coming. It may seem graceless and ungentlemanly for the BJP to refer the venerable chief minister to a psychiatrist, but Basu has lost the ability to distinguish between legitimate political opposition and cussedness. In attacking the Vajpayee Government, Basu has invariably fallen back on his sense of cultural superiority. It is the superiority of a bhadralok who has seen his entire cultural and ideological edifice crumble before his eyes and yet cannot reconcile himself to change.

To the CPI(M) patriarch, the BJP is a party devoid of refinement and possibly too obsessed with vegetarianism and religiosity. In the world-view of the "progressives" in West Bengal, the BJP is a khotta party -- khotta being the pejorative Bengali description for the natives of Bihar and Uttar Pradesh who work in and around Calcutta. Basu can accept Sonia Gandhi because she is the daughter-in-law of Indira Gandhi, who also flirted with radical causes in the London of the 1930s. He is suspicious of a Vajpayee whose cultural moorings are too indigenous and he goes ballistic at the very sight of Joshi's permanent red tilak. If it hadn't been for the incongruity he would probably have echoed Sir Biren Mookerjee's abiding contempt for the dhotiwalas. To know what that means, take a candid shot of CPI veteran Indrajit Gupta observing Laloo Prasad Yadav in the Lok Sabha. The scowl and the sneer says it all.

The problem with this astounding disdain is that it is born out of nothing in particular. For the past 25 years, West Bengal has been barraged with talk of the state's revival. First it was pegged on Calcutta's metro rail, then there was day-dreaming over Haldia and finally it is futures trading from Raichak. Yet, every industrial house worth the name has walked out of the state and the only growth area is political murders -- Mamata Banerjee put the figure at 150 in the past year. Even civility, the attribute Basu found wanting in Bal Thackeray's Mumbai, was not too much in evidence when India was defeated at Eden Gardens last month. To cap it all, Basu was accused of being discourteous to his Bangladeshi guests during Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina Wajed's visit.

The onrush of cretinism doesn't come as a surprise. The Marxist impact on West Bengal isn't merely political, it is psychological. With its aggressive espousal of envy, the CPI(M) has wrung out the last driblet of graciousness from the people. In the guise of promoting rights, it has nurtured indolence and destroyed work culture. Basu has made his state very common. History will not be very kind to his legacy of devastation.

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