Barun Roy: An impossible task

ASIA FILE

Singapore's former Prime Minister Goh Chok Tong, on his recent visit to India, gave West Bengal's Leftists a piece of friendly advice: change your mindset. To this, the state's Chief Minister, Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee, is believed to have replied that his mind was changed and he'd now discuss the matter with his colleagues.

Goh also made a friendly suggestion. "Send your MPs to Singapore," he reportedly told Bhattacharjee, "and we'll show them how we changed our own mindset before we could achieve our present level of economic development."

But Goh must have noticed, as he walked to the chief minister's meeting room at the Writers' Building in Kolkata, that there were at least a dozen people of all descriptions and ranks stalking him in the name of doing him the honours. He looked like a prisoner, though he put up a brave face and kept smiling. He couldn't have failed to realise that this was the famous Indian bureaucracy at work, undiluted in character from the days of the colonists and mixed with an appropriate degree of reverence and sycophancy. Nobody seemed to mind its open display at the very citadel of Leftist power from which a new West Bengal is supposed to emerge.

Talk of mind change. One should watch Bhattacharjee make his own daily march up and down the Writers' corridor, with a full retinue of bureaucrats in attendance. His show is no different from that of his august predecessor, Jyoti Basu, the great leader of the masses.

Last January 8, Leftist diehards held the entire city of Kolkata to ransom, blocked its traffic, and commandeered more than 10,000 state- and privately-owned buses and mini-buses to ferry bonded supporters from the city and the districts to a rally on the Maidan to protest the Central government's economic and foreign policies. Imagine "" thousands of buses withdrawn just like that from public use. Nobody among the Leftist leaders, not even Bhattacharjee, thought that was wrong and would send a wrong signal to all who want to look positively at West Bengal and believe, from the chief minister's enthusiastic utterances at seminars, conferences and meetings with people like Goh, that a wind of change has indeed begun to blow.

Only a volcanic eruption can melt the Leftist mindset. These people can't even understand that they are no longer the Opposition but the ruling party themselves and would seek any excuse to take to the streets to demonstrate, go on a strike, or call a bandh. Mention disinvesting and everybody sees red. Sack a non-performing employee and risk being beaten up. Even talking of voluntary retirement makes you anti-worker. Foreign investment is considered a betrayal of national interest. Only the bravest of domestic investors can expect to survive the bureaucratic quicksand that the administration has become. Permissions and agreements come at a cost and never on time.

What minds is Bhattacharjee trying to change? Go and try to see a minister or a bureaucrat at the Writers' Building, or try lodging a complaint at the local police station, and you'll find the answer. A minister threatened the other day to call the police and oust a group of school midday meal assistants who had gone to his office to complain that they hadn't been paid for months. Visit any government hospital or rural health centre to discover how low human dignity has tumbled in Bhattacharjee's West Bengal. Just look at the pavements of Kolkata to get an idea of the quality of urban life the Leftists are capable of producing. Go to the Nonadanga campsite off Kolkata's Eastern Metropolitan Bypass, where shanty dwellers ousted from an illegally occupied railway land in Tollygunge have been housed, to understand what the Leftists mean by urban development. Months ago, Bhattacharjee had promised to banish human-pulled rickshaws from Kolkata within three months. They're still there.

Perhaps the most telling evidence of the stubbornness of the Leftist mindset, which Bhattacharjee is trying to change, can be found in and around Santiniketan. I had an occasion to visit the place recently and was left agape to find how quickly, and deftly, the Sriniketan-Santiniketan Development Authority (SSDA), of which Somnath Chatterjee, the Lok Sabha Speaker, is chairman, has been able to transform Tagore's abode of peace into a junkyard of senseless construction. What could have been easily developed as India's Santa Fe, that most artistic sylvan city in the US state of New Mexico, now looks like any rundown mofussil town "" a Sheoraphuli or an Asansol "" down to the roadside gutkha shops, and whatever open space can still be found in Santiniketan will soon be gone.

Tagore's abode is now indistinguishable in the surrounding jungle of bad taste, and, looking at SSDA's record of achievement, one wonders if there's any mind at all left for Bhattacharjee to try and change.