For Bengalis, the Left is a bad habit. Hard to give up, even after 34 years
For Bengalis, the Left is a bad habit. Hard to give up, even after 34 years
Even in the nineties, before boys started wearing hair bands and girls paid the bills on a date, it was fashionable to quote Karl Marx in Kolkata. Women fell for the regulation kurta, tattered jeans and dusty chappal types who would miss a job interview to catch a screening at the Nandan theatre where the state's chief minister Buddhababu would spend time chatting up other bhadraloks and translating plays.
We were entering college and enlisting in the Student's Federation of India (SFI), the ruling CPI(M)'s student wing. Some of us were entering college to enlist in the SFI, such was the draw of the party. There were a few, too few, who would steer clear of politics and there were those who would opt for the Chhatra Parishad, the Congress' student wing, but they were our very own class enemies. It was our Stalin meets Charu Majumder moment.
We, the comrades, were burning buses to protest the hike in the price of university admission forms, burning Bush effigies, mouthing anti-US slogans and taking out processions after the Iraq war on Kolkata streets.
Elsewhere in West Bengal, far away from the heady rhetoric of the Coffee House addas over endless cups of tea and cigarettes, farmers were getting poorer, unemployment figures were rising, the few industries still in business in the state were moving out.
And Mamata Banerjee was protesting. But she was throwing black shawls at the Speaker in the House, squatting before the Chief Minister's office, mouthing streetspeak. Surely, that was no match for the chief minister's haughty intellectual demeanour. Reality hit home, and hard, when we left home. I, and several others like me, who became economic migrants overnight, realised the folly of being frogs in Bengal's well of doom for the best part of our youth.
A generation had by then been rendered unemployable after the abolition of English at the primary school level. And while the only noteworthy industrial activity during Jyoti Basu's time was signing Memorandums of Understanding (MoUs), the Buddhadeb Bhattacharya government's mismanagement of the Singur and Nandigram agitation over land acquisition resulting in the deaths of poor peasants, the very ones they had pledged to protect, was the final straw.
Something else happened around that time. From our offices and new homes in Delhi, Mumbai and Bangalore, we, the non-resident Bengalis, were witnessing the silent transformation of Mamata Banerjee. The lady of the masses was becoming the toast of the classes as well. Bengal was getting an alternative it could live with.
The last few years are a blur. It is tomorrow that excites Bengal and Bengalis, like me, outside Bengal.u00a0 So will Bengal change for the better? No more heady rhetoric to hide the rut within? Too early to predict. But among other bad habits I have quit since leaving Bengal is my daily smoke. May be with time, and a little help from Didi, I will get over my Leftist hangover soon.
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Daipayan Halder is Resident Editor, Delhi, MiD DAY
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