Where is the promised change?

Like anyone in West Bengal and elsewhere, I was glued to the TV, dumbfounded, looking at the lofty currency hill seized at an alleged accomplice of a senior minister and party functionary in West Bengal. West Bengal’s self-assumed cradle of intellectualism and secularism, rooted in agrarianism and blue-collarism (Hammer and sickle), has taken an irreversible U-turn into ghas-phoolism, embracing easy money and materialism.

As an easily identifiable touring community in Kundu Special, Bengalis were assertive, demanding, and argumentative but simple. Knowledge, education, and a fierce ego were their roots, perhaps evolving from the innumerable freedom fighters headed by Netaji. Tagore and Nazrul represented the literary genius of the State. Today, political poets have grabbed the space and have managed to push the famous names aside.

Bengalis were straightforward, never greedy for money and satisfied with tea in an earthen cup devoid of milk and sugar, for the smokers, a Charminar cigarette. Bengali Bureaucrats, judges and lawyers filled the space and were respected. The power to question and confront stale systems was inborn and genetic, which seems quietly buried.

Today, a true intellectual Bengali seems extinct. Bengal jostles in the race for the unenviable place as the most corrupt State. It is not the corruption, which is worrying, but the society’s acceptance of corruption as a way of life, which is strange and incompatible with its ethos. The absence of industries and repeated falsehoods on investments have resulted in the frustrated youths scampering for a better future elsewhere in the country. Bengali youths now can be found from Kerala to Kashmir, from Gujarat to N.E in every kind of employment, not only in the I.T. industry but including standing tables in restaurants to menial labour in the mines of Madhya Pradesh.

The eleven years of post-left rule have failed to bring about the promised change, ‘poribortan.’ Corruption is rampant, and the judiciary is strangely tolerant. The cherry-picking of political opponents for raids and harassment by the central agencies is another concern and exploited by those arrested. Justice seems to be different for the corrupt politicians, never witnessed before.

Ever since independence, constant animosity and bickering with the Central government has denied big-ticket investments and growth in the State. West Bengal has forgotten the meaning of competitiveness with its adjoining states as speedy growth is visible everywhere else. Revival of industries is largely confined to the pre-election speeches in Bengal.

If we are going to condone corruption with silly eye-for-an-eye arguments as to why corrupt the State opposition leaders are not acted against, we are dodging the root of the problems. If the State gloats in its invincibility and misconceived cooperative federalism, it limits its growth. The once leader State, Bengal, has succumbed to trailing, its GDP growth merely by default of its demography and geography.

Mere word play by crafty party spokespersons will not bailout the State for long.

Sampath Kumar

Intrépide Voix