Kolkata, May 17 (IANS) He set out to be a Pied Piper of modern communism with a merry band of Tata, Jindal and Salim companies following with cash and projects.
But lack of pragmatism, the morass of communism-induced underdevelopment in rural Bengal and the unruly army of party cadres that 30 years of Marxist rule has spawned saw many likening Buddhadeb Bhattacharya with Narendra Modi and George Bush.
Though a chief minister of West Bengal since November 2000, the 64-year-old Bhattacharya would complete his first year as the supremo of the seventh Left Front government in the state. However, the horrors of Nandigram are already his middle name, negating his Herculean effort to take Bengal on the path of rapid industrialisation.
His brave public front notwithstanding, the culturally-inclined art-house film loving Bengali bhadralok is a lonely man at Writers’ Buildings, deserted by the leading Bengali intellectuals whom he is trying to woo back with little success.
In what was described as a ‘historic victory’, the nine-party Left Front, which has ruled West Bengal since 1977, bagged a whopping 235 seats to come back to power a year ago for its seventh term, riding on the image of Bhattacharya and his brand of industry-wooing liberal communism.
“The chief minister is on the right track so far as his impetus on industry is concerned but the manner in which he proceeded has inherent loopholes,” said noted economist Abhirup Sarkar.
“I think he is successful in areas like Haldia (the clutch of industrial, especially petrochemical, projects, by giants like Mitsubishi) and Salt Lake (the fast growing IT hub in Sector V) but not much otherwise,” Sarkar told IANS.
“Take the example of the Tata Motors project in Singur. The huge subsidy that the government rolled out for the Tatas might not be economically beneficial even in the long run,” said Sarkar.
“How far this subsidy is justified can be questioned though it is true that all states are doing the same and the Tatas might go to Uttarakhand,” he said.
“The compensation package for farmers has also not been worked out rightly. I don’t think the compensation is adequate. I think there is a strong need for a white paper on industrialisation,” said Sarkar, who is a professor of economics in the Indian Statistical Institute (ISI), Kolkata.
Besides the Singur controversy and the Nandigram mayhem of March 14 – that left 14 dead in police firing, hundreds injured and several women raped and brutalised – the Salim project apart, the new term of Bhattacharya saw some big investments by business houses like Jindals.
“The Jindal project is one good project,” conceded Sarkar.
JSW Steel signed a pact with the West Bengal government in January to set up a 10 million tonne steel plant at Salboni in West Midnapore, making it the largest single investment in Bengal ever over a 5,000-acre plot. For once, no farmers would be displaced by the project.
The Nandigram condemnation notwithstanding, friends like eminent litterateur Sunil Gangopadhyay are all for Bhattacharya’s industrial policy.
“I am a 100 percent supporter of Buddhadeb Bhattacharya’s industrial policies. Agriculture has to be modernised and the picture of a thin bare-torsoed conventional farmer with a plough seen since the days of the Mughal period has to change,” Gangopadhyay told IANS.
“Even a farmer in Vietnam wears a shirt and a gumboot,” said the Sahitya Akademi vice-president and writer of celebrated novels like “Sei Samay”.
“But you cannot really control the people or their emotions by bullets,” he said referring to Nandigram.
Political analysts like Sabyasachi Basu Ray Chaudhuri think that for the first time the Left Front government in its 30 years of rule faced a real crisis with Bhattacharya at the helm.
“I think the Bhattacharya government greatly failed to tackle that crisis because of the arrogance of power, having won 235 seats in the 294-member West Bengal assembly and staying in power for three decades without any real political challenge. They had actually not foreseen this,” he said.
Basu Ray Chaudhuri, a professor of political science at Rabindra Bharati University, however, felt that the chief minister took a great risk to push forward his industrial policy in his new term.
“Now two things emerged out of the crisis. One is that the Left Front is important and not Front big brother the Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPI-M) from which the chief minister hails. So we will see a greater role for the Front in bailing out of the crisis. The second would be the process of explaining things to civil society, including what you call the intellectuals,” he said.
According to Basu Ray Chaudhuri, the biggest challenge for the chief minister cames from within the communists because even in Nandigram the protestors are mainly former CPI-M or Communist Party of India (CPI) supporters.
“So it would be a social and political process to ease the process of industrialisation and time will tell how the chief minister fares after the initial failures,” said Basu Ray Chaudhuri.
“Bhattacharya’s policies also made the communists face an ideological crisis. Are the communists in Bengal left anymore? Or is it the reverse where the so-called right wing forces (like Trinamool Congress) are the real left while the leftists turned rightists,” observed Basu Ray Chaudhuri.
For Bhattacharya the past year was also a time to ponder over the tenets of democracy. He began his tenure with the Cricket Association of Bengal (CAB) misadventure by taking on the astute Jagmohan Dalmiya.
His candidate lost in the CAB elections leaving Bhattacharya egg-faced as he tried to influence the cricket body “all for the sake of Sourav Ganguly”. While Dalmiya had to go out later for other reasons, the entire episode laid bare an attempt by the chief minister to subvert a democratic system by asking a democratically elected cricket administrator like Dalmiya to step aside.
Singur and Nandigram saw the blotting of the squeaky clean image of the dhoti-clad Bhattacharya.
So while the industrialisation of Bengal remained the avowed emphasis of Bhattacharya despite the swathe of criticism, it remains to be seen how he will come out stronger as the chief minister of the toiling masses of Bengal and not just the darling of industrialists and industry.