Bengalis must be the only people on earth who periodically cut off the nose to spite the face. The ultimate in this bizarre act of self-destruction was in the late sixties when the ruling United Front called a bandh against itself, and Jyoti Basu marched at the head of a procession demonstrating against the government in which he was deputy chief minister. The bandhs that others organise are almost an extension of the tantrums that reflect the failure and frustration of Bengali politicians who are only nominal rulers of the state.
It's like that famous, and no doubt apocryphal, story about Tushar Kanti Ghosh, the legendary owner-editor of the sadly defunct Amrita Bazar Patrika. Some years before Independence, Ghosh was reportedly asked at a Rotary meeting why his paper's English was so atrocious. Quite unfazed, the veteran replied, "The English are our enemy. We can't hurt them in any other way. So, the Patrika is doing its best to destroy their language."
There's an element of that suicidal exercise in futility about bandhs. The bigger the loss, the more alluring the sacrifice. If the Darjeeling agitators had been in Nepal, they might have followed Prachanda and unsheathed their khukris. But not in north Bengal. Though they don't want to be in West Bengal and though they want a Gorkhaland of their own, they have lived cheek by jowl with Bengalis for so long that they know no other form of political expression save the self-defeating and counter-productive forcible closure. They can only make speeches, block traffic, stop work and kill the plantations and tourist trade that are their main source of livelihood. The strategy reminds me of a wayward child in my extended family who became notorious for vigorously rubbing his pant bottom on the floor whenever he was thwarted. "Look, I'm wearing out your clothes!" he would yell to his mother,
The CPI, CPI(M) or some organisation linked to them is usually behind hartals that crop up in other parts of India. With due respect to Kerala and Tripura, I see these pink parties as operating in an ambience that is as quintessentially Bengali as the forlorn Amra Bangali champions. It's not because Bengali is AB Bardhan's neglected mother tongue or Brinda Karat's mother was Bengali (even her Punjabi father lived and worked in Kolkata all his life) but because the peculiar mix of philosophy and pragmatism that keeps a token form of Communism going is inextricably linked with the pride with which radical Bengalis claim (without a shred of evidence) that the great Lenin himself predicted that "the road to world revolution lies through Peking, Shanghai and Calcutta." One used to hear variations on the theme, with Paris and Dhaka thrown in.
We have had two bandhs recently, back to back. One was called by the CPI(M), the other by Trinamul Congress. Now, what, one might well ask, do these two outfits have in common? They will tell you righteously they were mobilising the masses to make known their objection to the Centre's decision to increase the price of petrol, and the chain effect this is bound to have on the cost of many other commodities that the poor need. True enough, but the leaders of both parties know that shuttered schools in Midnapore or empty streets in Birbhum will make not a jot of difference to New Delhi. Central decisions are not subject to state ratification. While neither party has enough votes in the Lok Sabha to force the UPA's hand, the CPI(M) might be considered almost a part of the UPA. So, was it a stub of tail feebly trying to wag the dog? Or were Trinamul and the CPI(M) massing their forces in preparation for the Lok Sabha election to come?
A bit of both perhaps, but more than anything else, West Bengal was defying court injunctions on bandhs, sacrificing its economic interests and seriously incommoding its people in a ritual act of hara-kiri. The explanation some social psychologists give for the fad among young folk in places like Singapore to trim and tweak their hair into fantastic shapes, dye it in fancy colours and pierce their skin with rings and knobs is the urge to proclaim that the body is something
