India wastes freedom

“Now, you may kiss the bride,” says the Holy man, and you are free. Free to kiss the woman whom you have always wanted to kiss. That kiss, in all likelihood, is not your first. But till then you needed to find a place where nobody can see you kissing. After that announcement, you have been granted freedom to kiss in front of everybody.
When a non-Christian gets married, the licence to kiss is not handed to him/her in as many words, but the purpose of the elaborate ritual is, indeed, to grant the couple the freedom to kiss, hug etc etc. But that freedom comes at a price. In other words, it comes with a new bondage (in the language of cynics), which means:
a) You cannot, henceforth, kiss any person you want to. You can only kiss your spouse.
b) You have to look after your spouse and the child that is born out of the marriage.
c) You cannot think only about your own interests while taking a decision. You have to take your spouse’s opinion.
If you don’t obey any of the above written or unwritten rules, the joy of a marriage will be lost. First, the kissing and hugging and so on will lose their charms, and a few months or years from then, either or both of you will go to court, asking for cancellation of the freedom to kiss each other.
Cynics call it bondage, level-headed people call it responsibility. The fact remains, to have some kind of freedom, you have to give up some other kind of freedom. So when we, the Indians, drove the Queen’s men out of our country, we took up a huge responsibility. That, it seems, did not dawn on our leaders. Somehow they were under the impression that everything will fall into place, no effort is needed. Given our history of propagating fatalist philosophies, you can hardly fault them.
So even before the country was free, our leaders started fighting over who will get how much share of the power. When they could not find a clear winner or come to a consensus, they decided to cut the country into halves and distribute it among themselves. The father of the nation, who was famous for going on a hunger strike whenever the country didn’t listen to him, had perhaps lost his appetite by then and thought: “No point going on a hunger strike, I’m not eating much anyway!” Rest is shameful history.
We were given partitioned freedom. What a freedom! One fine morning, some Bengalis (and Punjabis) were told: “You are free but this land you are standing on is not your country. So pack up fast and go over to that side of the border. That’s your country.”
There they were, men who had a home and enough to maintain their families when they were not free, and penniless with no place to live after becoming free. They crossed the border on foot with families in tow. The 10-year-old sons died on the way because a doctor could not be found when the fever went out of control, the teen-aged daughters were snatched away, and then, on the platforms of Sealdah station and other refugee camps, they had to stay up all night so that the same doesn’t happen to their wives. This is real freedom, isn’t it? Everybody is free to do whatever he likes!
Hail the human spirit! People changed the times, people found homes, rebuilt their lives. Sixty-three years passed but the leaders have not changed. They are still concerned about power. The corrupt ones use it to become richer and the honest ones are not competent enough to do anything good.
And nobody accepts responsibility.
Case I: A multi-national company comes to the country, makes an unsafe plant, gas leaks, thousands are dead. The chief comes to the country, and is escorted out instead of being arrested. Decades later, the then chief minister of the state, after being found out, takes the easiest way out, saying the then union home minister, who is now dead, had pressurised him. “The then Prime Minister was innocent,” he adds. Of course. In that case the home minister was working on his own. That means the PM was an incompetent fool, couldn’t even control his own cabinet.
Case II: The country is organising a big sporting event. The organising committee’s corruption is exposed and the government avoids the responsibility of organisation. The head of the committee is a leader of the ruling party but neither the top leader of his party nor the PM, who is supposed to be a top-to-bottom honest man, asks that crook to resign. Moreover, the sports minister tells MPs they should file RTI applications if they want to know the truth about the scam.
Case III: Maoists are killing innocent people by damaging rail tracks. The railway minister says they have not done it. She even says military operations against them should stop. Not only that, she says the Maoist leader who has been killed by the joint forces was “murdered”, as if those who died in the train accident were not murdered. All this she does without being even verbally reprimanded by the PM. How can he do that? After all, she is an important ally.
It’s a free country, free-for-all. Nobody has any responsibility. We, the people of India, only have vulnerability.

Left Front government: In Memoriam

The Left Front government in West Bengal, by all means, is on its way out. The body language of the opposition leader, the ministers, the officials, most importantly, the voters suggests so. I am trying to look back on the Left rule, not in anger but with my fulfilled and unfulfilled desires.
On June 21, 1977, when Left Front came to power, I was a just a beautiful dream, in the hearts of my then unmarried parents. In fact, my father’s bigger dream at that point of time was of making a new Bengal. During the previous government’s rule, he had to go through a lot of torture for being a member of Communist Party of India (Marxist). He, like many of his comrades, didn’t bow under that pressure and continued the movement. Therefore, when Jyoti Basu and his cabinet were sworn in, it was not just the party’s victory, it was also a personal victory for party members like him.
The thing about that generation of Communists was, they had an even bigger dream – of revolution. Those were the days of Soviet Union, East Germany, Czechoslovakia et al. The Left Front government, therefore, had the task of not only providing better governance than the previous Congress government but also governing so well that people in other parts of India would think Communists should be in power all over the country.
Having declared long ago that they believe revolution can be achieved through Parliamentary democracy, that was to be CPI(M)’s path to revolution. This is revolution not in the Leninist sense, but in the Gramscian sense. Besides, Left Front was not just CPI(M), it was a conglomerate of like-minded parties.
The first step towards achieving those goals was, as it should have been, revolutionising the villages of Bengal. So Basu’s government, under the leadership of land reforms minister Benoy Chowdhury, pursued the agenda of giving land to sharecroppers. ‘Operation Barga’ had a huge success in economically empowering the poor of rural Bengal. The next step was giving political power to them. To do that, the government set up a three-tier panchayat system.
In 1982, when I was born, the panchayat movement was taking shape. My father was at the forefront. He won the election and was given charge of a panchayat samity (the middle tier). Back then, CPI(M) was not a pack of just middle-aged and old men. My father became the sabhapati at the age of 33. Today, when the fashion is to say: “Left Front has done nothing for Bengal,” I would beg to differ.
What surely remained neglected under the Left rule is Kolkata. But my country lives in villages. And I don’t want development like Hyderabad, where the city is plush but is filled with beggars who come from the outskirts and villages, for they have no choice. The areas that didn’t get the benefits of Operation Barga and panchayati raj are the tribal areas, hence the Maoists. But let the biggest political analyst, the most knowledgible economist and the most brilliant statistician come and tell me this government has done nothing for even rural Bengal. I’ll show them how the housemaid has become administrator, how the rickshaw puller has started talking on even terms with the rich and middle class rider.
Why then, one might ask, has this government lost its popularity even among the rural voters?
First, people have lost faith in comrades. Nowadays, when a party member tells a farmer: “Give up your land for the factory, you’ll get good compensation and your son will get a job there. You’re not getting enough out of that small piece of land anyway,” the farmer instantly believes the man is lying even if he is not. That is because this farmer knows how that crook uses his affiliation to the ruling party to run all kinds of murky business. Corruption, in a word, has detached the party from the poor.
Second, the heady smell of power has made dictators out of comrades. This is true at all levels. The panchayat member at Shashan and the chief minister share the same sentiments. They forgot long time ago that they are in power by the grace of the people. The secretary of the local committee thinks he can say whatever he likes, can do whatever he thinks should be done, and people will not say anything. His top boss Biman Bose, sitting in Kolkata, thinks he can abuse even a High Court judge and yet people will support his party. People don’t say anything, they just vote, against the Left.
Third, a result of the first two - bad governance. When the ruling party is corrupt and conceited, how can it provide good governance? Even the panchayat system has turned into a machinery of oppression.
Talking about my fulfilled desires, there aren’t any. I had two ambitions. First, and this I have always kept a secret, I wanted to become a full-time party worker. I wanted to become a journalist in case I could not become worthy of the Communist party. I could not, it seems. I had joined the Students Federation of India to learn politics but I pulled out. Why? I realised my leaders knew less than me. Most of them have never read the Communist Manifesto. Some of them don’t even know the spelling of Marx, and they would take any Tom, Dick and Harry under their wings, even if they are pathologically anti-Left.
Unfulfilled desires? Many. Revolution in India, at least a Communist-led government at the centre, Bakreswar Thermal Power Project, rendering Mamata Banerjee meaningless etc. Let those be unfulfilled. As a Communist at heart, I wish this Left Front government is removed. Without tragedy there can be no catharsis.

P.S. My father gave up his administrative post in the late ’90s to concentrate on party organisation. Little did he realise that nobody around him was interested in the party, because money is where power is, not where organisation is. With such comrades around, who needs bourgeois?