Every Thursday, Kolkata’s cultural arbiter The Telegraph ran a column in its children’s special Telekids where prominent adults would recount their childhood days. These would be short lengths of prose, transcribed from a verbal recounting. Singers, actors, politicians, statespeople, writers and businessmen would speak about formative experiences and advise young readers to stick to a moral and ambitious path.
Communist Party of India (Marxist) leader and former Bengal chief minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee ended his column with an exhortation to children to “surf the net.”
The year was probably 2001, just after he had come back as chief minister of Bengal. The net was a peculiar concept then – it had been only five years that the Videsh Sanchar Nigam Limited had launched its services and it would be four years before India would even have a broadband policy. As a 10-year-old I had only heard of the worldwide web and considered it part of a scientific realm I would never really need to access. There was also the fact that the chief minister was asking us to indulge in what appeared clearly to be a form of extra-curricular fun. Surf the net? And not study? What a strange, forward-facing thought!
I have remembered this line often and, in my mind, it has become significant of a lore that surrounds Buddhadeb – the lore that he was the last time Bengal’s youth had reason to hope. A lot has deservedly been written about the former chief minister’s politics, his policies, and his disastrous hard-headedness when it came to bringing policies to fruition. But, at a time when Bengal slips past a shocking number of cities when it comes to jobs, opportunities and ability to retain its young, it is worthwhile to acknowledge the last time it felt otherwise.
For those outside Bengal, Kolkata is placed on a pedestal for its ideologies, for an overall secular drift, and for being old. Residents, however, know full well that it has slipped from the category of old to the category of a city in ruins. Its young – and this is true for Bengal – have left in large numbers for opportunities that the city just does not have. If you want to travel abroad, chances are you need to travel to another bigger Indian city first. It has not lost its culture, but it has lost a large number of people who can patronise it and offer its artistes a taste of the success they deserve.
For many, the downward slide started with the Left Front, the state government of which Buddhadeb led for 11 years. But the government that followed and has ruled for 13 years has struggled to reverse it, pushing the city and the state into a deeper crisis, making it unlivable for newer generations.
We did not always live in a state and country where it was difficult to respect politicians. We also did not always consign ourselves to spending adulthood in cities that were not our hometown so as to be able to earn a livelihood. Buddhadeb is emblematic of that time – a time when we had hope. As my colleague Sravasti Dasgupta put it, “I remember there was this absolute promise in the air that Buddhadeb will change Bengal.”
I do not think this is a sentiment worth discarding, no matter what followed, because if we cannot enthuse our young to hope, we have failed as a society.
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Buddhadeb had plans for a young Bengal. He wanted educated youth to work jobs befitting their quality and qualifications. One day, there was talk of Wipro landing in the state, while on another day there was talk of enticing the Salim Group of Indonesia, to say nothing of Tata’s Singur project. Kolkata’s own tech park, Sector V, came up to serve its growing crop of talented IT engineers.
Looking back today, the measure of transparency in governance that marked Buddhadeb’s time in power is a bygone marvel, as are his ability to apologise and open himself up to criticism. In his uncharacteristically straightforward memoir Phirey Dekha (‘looking back’), he wrote of what he was thinking once he assumed power. In comparison to today’s mass allocations to projects, without delineation of exactly where how much money is going and why, Buddha’s plans were precise, and displayed his own intrinsic understanding of what ailed Bengal. In November 2009, for instance, he wrote to then Union minister Jairam Ramesh, highlighting exactly why cultivating the Bt variety of brinjal is not a good idea for Bengal’s farmers because it will hike output without offering a clear path of what to do with the excess brinjal. Elsewhere, in candour that finds no home in present time, he notes how a delegation of women who came to him asked him if he would have been able to subsist on Rs 2,000 a month. He also observes, sheepishly, that women’s self-help groups came up by themselves, and that his government did not need to do much about it. Because we did not know better, we took this devotion to governance and candour for granted.
We do not know what Bengal would have been had Nandigram and Singur’s industrialisation plans worked out. Perhaps the state would have suffered less from unemployment and the drain of youth. There are reports of villagers in those areas saying they regret opposing the move. This is a good time to admit that Buddhadeb’s own party was partly responsible for Bengal’s factory closures and industrial downslide – a wrong he had perhaps tried to reverse but which his successor Mamata Banerjee administration continued and deepened. Bengal has not been able to kickstart its economic revival.
Key elements of what Kolkata is and continues to be are thanks to the late chief minister’s vision – the cinema house of Nandan which hosts the Kolkata Film Festival, the refurbished colonial theatre houses Star and Minerva, a polished Jorashanko Thakur Bari where Rabindranath Tagore grew up, and so on. Buddhadeb devised a plan to plant saplings on each death anniversary of Tagore’s – it was a brand of quiet culture which Bengal deserved, got, and then, forgot.
It is difficult not to miss a time when elected representatives acted like they owed their position to the common man – with a certain gravity that reflected respect for the citizen. That former prime minister Dr Manmohan Singh and Buddhadeb got along so well is an example of this. It was a world that perhaps did not foresee the Union government withholding crores of MGNREGS funds to Bengal, which it alleges was corrupt in using it.
Buddhadeb’s passing signals the end of a Bengal which could be worth its young. As Shramik Trains and Karmabhumi Expresses carry its young away, we mourn our own hope in the promise of our home state. In Phirey Dekha, Buddhadeb writes of a time when US diplomat Henry Kissinger arrived to meet him – to the accompaniment of very little press attention. He writes: “While talking he said, ‘The world is changing, only communists aren’t’. I said that the opposite is true. ‘Communists are changing. It is America that is holding on to the power machinery that controls its administration.”
Those were the days leaders held their own.
