All reporters know what a dangerous enterprise it is to write a book about your beat: if you’re dishonest, inaccurate or too gentle, you will be laughed out of court by a jury of your peers. If you’re honest, you can never please everyone and you will blow at least some, if not all, of your sources. As a reporter covering the Left in The Telegraph and other newspapers for nearly two decades, Monobina (Mono for short, Stereo to many of her friends) Gupta has written a thoughtful book about trends in Left praxis in West Bengal. Her book is also an act of bravery and valour.
That’s not all. Gupta discloses that before she became a journalist, she herself was a member of the Students’ Federation of India (SFI), the youth wing of the Communist Party of India and the body which gave to India leaders from the Communist Party of India (Marxist), or CPI (M), like Prakash Karat and Sitaram Yechury. Being a part of the Organisation (as members refer to the Party) is one thing. Writing about it is quite another.
What puzzles one about the book initially is: it isn’t quite clear what it is meant to be. Is it a book about West Bengal’s political culture? Is it about life and politics in Calcutta under the Left regime? Is it about the evolution and growth of Left politics?
Gradually it becomes clear that this is what reporters call a delayed intro. Yes, the book is about living and working in Calcutta (Gupta uses both spellings for the city), some ubiquitous features identifying the city and the class Gupta is writing about: the unfiltered Charminar and the jhola, the long spells of loadshedding in the pitiless sticky heat, the urban mess left behind by the Calcutta Metro, the strikes and hartals, the adda… But we discover, there is an order in the chaos. This is represented by the Left Front government. Gupta wraps up a chronological account of the decline of the Congress party and the rise of the CPI (M)-led Left Front government quickly and competently, and leads us to identify the reasons for the decline of the Left Front from the detritus left behind by its three-decade plus rule in the state.
We are then told the story of disappointment, disillusionment and betrayal. Gupta recounts the stories of warm bodies — workers, mobilisers and organisers — in their own words, highlighting the failures of the CPI (M), its compromises and the rise of the so-called Left adventurist CPI (ML). For the CPI (M), Bengal comprised two sorts of people: amader lok (our people) and amader lok na (not our kind of people). Every institution was stripped of its autonomy and recast brick by brick with CPI (M) support, using CPI (M) sympathisers.
Naturally, this system, sewn up tight as a drum, had little respect for deviation or dissent. Gupta recounts the story of Chandrayee Gupta, the daughter of Sadhan Gupta who was one of the six Lok Sabha MPs fielded by the undivided Communist Party in the 1953 elections, the first general election in Independent India. Not a nobody then, Chandrayee and her husband, also a middle-rung CPI (M) activist, found themselves cast out when they complained about the land mafia and its connections with the Party. One thing led to another and the couple were expelled from the Party, virtually without a hearing, banished for being “guilty by association”.
Chandrayee Gupta’s story recounts in poignant detail what it is like to be a CPI (M) outcast: children couldn’t be sent to school, people she’d grown up with refused to talk to her, it became hard for her to make ends meet because she was a lawyer and the Party stopped sending briefs to her. The couple continue to be in politics, but are finding it hard.
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As the CPI (M) grew, it had to face challenges squarely too. How do you deal with liberalisation? The Nandigram-Singur events led to a coalescence of anti-CPI (M) forces. Gupta describes the outrage, anger and fury of the Bengali intellectual at the way the West Bengal government dealt with issues relating to movements connected to land. West Bengal Chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharya considered himself Head Intellectual (When Satyajit Ray died, he told colleagues: “What a loss. Now there is no one left to talk to.”). He got for himself, a group of Deputy Intellectuals, whose job was to critique what the government was doing for art and culture. Many of these went along with the government up to a point. But they became Bhattacharya and the CPI (M)’s bitterest critics after Singur.
Gupta also describes the crisis in Opposition politics and the CPI (M)’s responses. It supported the V P Singh government that was propped up by the BJP, just to keep the Congress party out. But later it failed to take a lead in uniting the Opposition, denying Jyoti Basu the chance to become prime minister. It did all the ground work, through Harkishan Singh Surjeet, to support the Congress party to keep the BJP out. But it failed to see that partnership through, losing everything.
As West Bengal trembles on the precipice of becoming a state where the Left Front could lose power, Gupta’s book is a helpful and illuminating reminder for Left watchers on just how the Red cookie crumbles. Gupta may need to write a sequel when the party goes into the Opposition in Bengal.
LEFT POLITICS IN BENGAL
Time Travels Among Bhadralok Marxists
Monobina Gupta
Orient BlackSwan
271 pages