Referendum Buddha ASHIS CHAKRABARTI What made you choose Bengal?" someone asks Anthony Salim. The Indonesian tycoon had just signed the agreement on setting up the first of a series of commercial projects in Bengal. The reply is short and swift: "The chief minister. He's Bengal's best brand ambassador." That was in a hotel suite in distant Jakarta in June last year.
The scene shifts to our very own New Township at Rajarhat. Ratan Tata lays the foundation of a cancer hospital. He is happy that the Tatas have started something new in Bengal at long last. One reason why they were happy to do so, he says, is the chief minister, whose "sincerity" has so impressed him. The Tatas' plan to set up a small car project in the state came a little later, though. It isn't unusual for businessmen to speak well of serving chief ministers. So, what's special about all these public eulogies of Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee? And, what do these really mean for the coming elections? Almost everything, one might say. For, these elections are to be a referendum on Bhattacharjee's rule in Bengal over the past five years in a manner that no previous election has been a referendum on the long reign of Jyoti Basu. It isn't as simple as saying that any election anywhere is a referendum on the incumbent in office. Bhattacharjee has given the game a completely new set of rules. For long, despair dominated the perceptions about Bengal. Suddenly, everyone was talking of a new hope, a new beginning. This hope seemed to have united the common man, the young executives in Salt Lake's high-tech zone and the likes of Sanjeev Goenka. For more than two decades, the Opposition's electoral refrain was "Ei hatasha bhangtey chai, natun bangla gartey chai (We want to break free from this despair, we want to build a new Bengal)." That hope of a new Bengal is now Bhattacharjee's signature tune. He has hijacked it from the Opposition and re-fashioned it in his own way. There is no such thing as an election wave sweeping Bengal or a so-called election issue. The only thing that is on offer is this politics of hope. It hasn't come floating on the wings of fancy. The last five years the investments and the changed perceptions have created this climate of hope of which the chief minister is the most visible and the most saleable face. It certainly is not all his doing. The changing policies of the CPM have smoothened his passage; some policy prescriptions came from Jyoti Basu's time at the helm of the state. Like Bengal's new industrial policy of 1994. Much of today's changed environs are the result of the economic liberalisation that New Delhi ushered in in 1991. But Bhattacharjee turned out to be the right man at the right time, when things had to change. Yet, there is still so much in Bengal to despair about. A pathetically malfunctional healthcare system, declining standards in education, bad roads and a bad record in rural electrification (in terms of availability in households, as distinct from the villages), continuing stagnation in manufacturing industry, even a new stagnation in agriculture and above all, an ever-expanding army of the unemployed. So, why the hope? It comes from a general perception that things are at last changing. The change may not yet be touching the lives of all sections of the people in equal measure. But the perception that nothing happens in Bengal was so pervasive for so long that even a glimmer of hope seems to be the dominant note now. And, how does Mamata Banerjee respond to this new note? Even she cannot deny that things are changing. The flyovers, malls and many other new faces of the change, at least in Calcutta, are there for everyone to see. She cannot deny that investments are coming into the state, both in IT and in the new steel mills and sponge iron plants in Burdwan and Bankura. Big names in business are seen and heard in Bengal as never before. All she can do is call all this phoney development. She has done that. She has sought to build a campaign, complaining that new projects like Salim's would rob farmers of their land. It hasn't clicked, not because this may not happen, but because this campaign is out of joint with the new climate of hope. So, she has gone back to her old campaign points such as the CPM's rigging of the polls, its terror in the villages and the failures of the Left's long rule. Flogging a dead horse is a bad strategy for elections as for anything else. True, Mamata still is Bengal's best-known face of protests. It isn't that her protests have no basis at all. But she seems to be out of step with the changing political reality. Even in Bengal, the politics of protest has become passe. The Left still goes through some of the old rituals, but it has lived up to its tradition of changing with the times. If the culture of protests prompts more ennui and scepticism than real political action, the Marxists as rulers have reaped the benefit of this protest fatigue. The result, as far as the Opposition is concerned, is despair and disarray in its ranks. The endless squabble between the Trinamul Congress and the Congress and their long, futile search for the "mahajot" symbolise their loss of direction. As far as Mamata is concerned, this sense of drift is also reflected in her decision to stick to the BJP, which has never got over its image in Bengal as the party of "banias". Why she did so in a state where Muslims comprise one-fourth of the electorate and at a time when the BJP is on a downslide in national politics may intrigue political analysts for a long time. Add all this to the trends in all the elections Lok Sabha, municipal, etc in Bengal over the past five years and you arrive at only one inference. It's advantage Left, yet again. *************************************************************************** Berdikusi dg Santun & Elegan, dg Semangat Persahabatan. Menuju Indonesia yg Lebih Baik, in Commonality & Shared Destiny. http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ppiindia *************************************************************************** __________________________________________________________________________ Mohon Perhatian: 1. Harap tdk. memposting/reply yg menyinggung SARA (kecuali sbg otokritik) 2. Pesan yg akan direply harap dihapus, kecuali yg akan dikomentari. 3. Reading only, http://dear.to/ppi 4. Satu email perhari: [EMAIL PROTECTED] 5. No-email/web only: [EMAIL PROTECTED] 6. kembali menerima email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Yahoo! Groups Links <*> To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ppiindia/ <*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
