Kanika Datta: The Left's great eastern challenge

SWOT

So the Left Front government has decided to have another shot at selling the Great Eastern Hotel. This time, in the approving flush surrounding Chief Minister Buddhadev Bhattacharya's economic reform, the hope of success is considerably higher.

Even so, much will depend on just what the government will be able to offer prospective buyers over and above that magnificent example of Victorian architecture on the edge of Kolkata's prime business district. Will the new owners, for instance, be given a free hand to hire and fire? Can the state government guarantee help if there is union trouble?

Doubts arise because it is precisely this issue that stalled the earlier attempt to privatise Kolkata's oldest hotel (built circa 1840) in the mid-nineties. The Great Eastern Hotel was, in fact, supposed to be a test case of sorts for West Bengal's particular brand of perestroika.

At that time, there was a similar sense of breathless optimism over then Chief Minister Jyoti Basu's liberalising ways. Both he and Somnath Chatterjee, then chairman of the West Bengal Industrial Development Corporation, the point agency for investments in the state, made assiduously reported road-shows to the US and Europe hard-selling the state.

Curious (and probably intrepid) investors who enquired about the state's legendary power shortages were told that West Bengal was now a power-surplus state (true, but only because industry had moved out en masse).

As for labour trouble, well, the Left controlled the major unions didn't they, the state's spin doctors said, so there was no need to worry. Indeed, a potential buyer for the hotel even emerged in the shape of Accor, the French hospitality group.

Soon after, the hype about West Bengal reached fever pitch (not unlike what happened in Andhra Pradesh under Chandrababu Naidu).

MoUs were signed by the bushel, earning Basu the somewhat pejorative sobriquet of "Mou-da" or, loosely translated, Mr Mou. Even foreign media groups sent reporters to provide ring-side reports on how one of the last bastions of global communism was crumbling to capitalism""and so on and so forth.

So it was something of a shock when a press release sputtered in over the fax machines of local newspaper offices announcing that the Accor deal was off. The press note was terse but revealing; it squarely admitted the deal was being called off because the main union did not agree to it.

Hello? Weren't these the unions that the Left Front purported to have in its control? Well, not quite, as it turned out since the most powerful union in the Great Eastern Hotel was not the Left-controlled Citu, but Congress-controlled Intuc.

Of course, the difference between the two is hard to tell since both unions had cultivated an intransigence unique to the state, and Intuc helped bolster that reputation no end with the Great Eastern debacle. It was the same union that stalled the state government's desperate attempts to privatise the ailing Iisco.

Anyway, that brought to an ignominious end West Bengal's first major attempt at privatisation and things slipped back into their customary ennui till Buddhadev, resurrected from a stint in the political wilderness for writing plays critical of the government, took charge.

Much has been written and said since then about his and his IT minister Manabendra Mukherjee's attempts to make West Bengal India's second Silicon Valley. He has received much approbation and investment from the Wipros and Infosyses of the IT world.

But like it or not, the Great Eastern Hotel remains a test case for West Bengal. Has the Left leadership addressed the earlier issues before putting it on the block again?

It is also possible that the unions are more amenable to a change in ownership since the hotel has clearly declined beyond redemption under state government control.

The reason the Great Eastern's privatisation and (hopefully) revival have great symbolic virtue is that it was, in its heyday, the icon of the city's prosperity.

In the thirties, forties and fifties, it was, together with such places as the 300 Club, Golden Slipper and Prince's, one of the most fashionable watering holes of what is today the Page 3 crowd. It's New Year's Eve cabarets and dances always featured top performers from Europe. Maxim's was the place to be seen.

Like many businesses of that era, it too went under as the city's colonial, box-wallah pre-eminence was overtaken by the earthy mercantilism of Mumbai, and was acquired by the state government.

It is hard to reconcile that glittering, almost decadent era with today's tawdry reality of fraying carpets, seedy ambiance and standards of service that would make Manuel of Fawlty Towers appear faultlessly efficient.

The "Jewel of the East", as it was once known, is badly tarnished. Privatisation can certainly unlock its value again; but to do that the state government needs to be an expert jeweller.