What now my love?

What now my love?

What now my love,
Now that you’ve left me,
How can I live, through another day
Watching my dreams, turn into ashes
And all my hopes, into bits of clay
Once I could see, once I could feel,
Now I'm numb-
I’ve become unreal.

Gilbert Becaud- Carl Sigman

The much “covered” song, “What now my love,” was first written in French by Gilbert Becaud in 1961, not long before the Naxalites first appeared in rural Bengal, and was given its English lyrics by Carl Sigman. It mirrors, I think rather well, what the vanquished Left Front must be feeling today.

And this, despite the fig-leaf of having garnered 41% of the popular vote in the recent West Bengal Assembly elections. But since The Left have had an innings lasting 34 years, everyone, except possibly some of the more committed amongst that 41%, is quite dry-eyed to see the backs of their nice white bhadralok dhoties sitting in the Opposition.

The question, more importantly, now that Ms. Mamata Banerjee and her 44 strong team of ministers has just been sworn in; significantly featuring members manning the oars from both the TMC and Congress; is where does West Bengal go from here?

The loaded question is reminiscent of one posed by a very rich, very shallow, young lady in literary fiction. One can almost imagine the memsahib, in summer dress and straw hat, ice tinkling in her drink, segued onto a New Alipur verandah in May 2011; but asking the question that first appeared in F Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby in 1925.

“What’ll we do with ourselves this afternoon?” cried Daisy Buchanan, in her priceless little rich girl voice; “and the day after that, and the next thirty years.”

The fact is, now that the citadel (Writer’s Building) is won, Ms. Banerjee is faced with the riddles and enigmas of governance; likely to be very different from the emotive and very successful poll cry of Ma, Mati, Manush that spearheaded her landslide victory.

“Didi” is saddled with empty, actually shockingly overdrawn, coffers; and a populace deluded and rendered toxic by their sense of entitlement nurtured over three decades of Communist propaganda. The people of West Bengal have become expert at the “cholbe na” brand of agitational politics, ruinous state sanctioned Bandhs, and blaming anyone but themselves for all their ills. They have entrapped themselves into a stagnant time warp, but are paradoxically consumed by a corrosive envy, thinly disguised under the revolutionary clap-trap of “class struggle”.

So much so, that it has been, in the run up to Ms. Banerjee’s spectacular victory, hard to distinguish between the Communist cadres going on their Stalinist pogroms in the rural hinterland, and the Maoist “struggle” in many of the very same places. But now, where will all this adrenaline go to ground?

Of course, Ms. Banerjee will be vastly aided, unlike the Left Front, post Mr. Prakash Karat’s divorce from the Congress Party during UPA I; by the fact that the Congress are her allies, and UPA II will, she must calculate, rule at the Centre till at least 2014.

But Didi is going to face a vast cultural problem. In fact, the mature contours of her own Ma Mati Manush philosophy is yet to unfold, and will be watched with great interest by all. It is likely to retain a number of populist features of course, but usually it is difficult to be both populist and successful at development.

On the plus side, much business and industry, the few in-state and those who have run away but want to come back, including MNCs, will be interested in a relatively low-cost-to-do-business state, with ample educated and intelligent manpower; given the prerequisites of peace and quiet to get on with their business.

But notwithstanding any sagacity Didi is able to manifest in this regard, the Leftist malaise that has set in over thirty plus years will not be banished overnight. Everyone in West Bengal has been made-over to a lesser or greater extent. And the unlearning could also take time, very much like our socialist politicians and bureaucrats, all over the country, post 1991, trying to adapt to the new liberal clarion call.

Didi herself may find it impossible to act for development if she senses that it may be politically inimical. It is obvious that she didn’t take 19 years to get to Writer’s Building only to vacate it in a hurry.

After all, over the last 34 years, every aspiration had to be couched in the anti-capitalist garb of essential dogma. So you find a rich Marwari or Punjabi, still the moneybags in Kolkata, as they were when it was a much fancier and glitzy Calcutta, averring most sincerely that whatever he thinks, speaks or does is with the sole objective of helping the poor.

But, in time, who knows? There is an essentially capitalist soul of “Calcutta” buried under the overlay of Stalinist Kolkata rudely stripped of its rich traditions. Perhaps it will re-emerge now and assert its joie de vivre much faster than one anticipates.

Pre-independence Bengal and its capital, till 1905, was the centre of Britain’s sub-continental empire stretching from Burma in the East to the Gulf in the West. It knew and forgot tricks that other places and people are yet to acquire!

The spirits of those storied merchants, zamindars, nawabs, maharajahs, courtesans, femme fatales, artistes, artisans, company factotums, beribonned military men et al still sigh in the decaying gullies of an evocative city that is over three centuries old; backed to the hilt, no doubt, by its knowing, slumbering, sensuous, countryside.

That once-upon-a-time Bengal, alive still in literature and film, divided ruthlessly by Curzon, did not give up either; not even through the two World Wars and Partition. And Calcutta was the city you had to call a city right up to the fifties.

And then came the blight of the Naxalites ; followed by the ultimately barren land redistribution of the Left Front; the flight of capital, of industry; then the grinding poverty, the soul destroying unemployment that gave the Communist dream its most poignant lie; and now here we are.

There must be great meaning in this most impressive revolution via the ballot box - in this demonstrated yearning for change. Could this then be the beginning of a Bengal Renaissance to rival all its previous incarnations?

We will have to listen hard to the essential spirit of Bengal, very much older than the mouldering paper heroes of the now lost dispensation; to divine this for sure.

(1,096 words)

20th May 2011
Gautam Mukherjee


Published as Leader Edit on the Edit-Page of The Pioneer on Monday 23rd May 2011, in the epaper, and online at www.dailypioneer.com as "Road ahead for Bengal". Also archived under Guest Columnists at www.dailypioneer.com