Last week I went back to Kolkata after nearly a decade. The literary festival took me there. Like all writers with new books out I continue to make assiduous efforts to promote my most recent book ‘Durbar’. But, the problem with us political columnists is that we are never ever completely off duty or ever uninterested in the political situation of the places we travel to. So my inquiries about how Mamata Bannerjee’s government is doing began, as they usually do, with questions to the Sikh taxi driver who drove me to my hotel from the airport. He told me that he was virtually a Bengali since his family moved to Kolkata (when it was still Calcutta) almost immediately after they migrated to India after Partition. So what did he think of the new non-communist government I asked. Without hesitation he said that he thought it was much, much better than the last one. He said this was because the law and order situation had improved dramatically. ‘The CPM were constantly getting their own people out of jail even if they were thugs,’ he said ‘this is not happening now. And, there has been firm action against the Naxalites.’
As we talked I noticed that we were driving past a concrete jungle of Soviet style apartment blocks that sprouted out of an arid wasteland.
There was not a patch of greenery in sight and no sign of the hustle-bustle of human activity. When I was last in Kolkata I had noticed the beginnings of this new town but there were still tanneries and swamps that lined most of the drive from the airport. These have now disappeared under what looks like an endless construction site. There are roads being built and flyovers and a metro line that will end at the airport.
The ITC hotel in which I stayed was among the buildings that has been built in the former swamp. It is very new and beautiful in a modernistic way with an enormous central pond filled with lotuses and fat yellow fish as its main feature. The only flaw in this dramatic design are clouds of large mosquitoes who appear to think the pond is their former swamp. The hotel was chosen by the organizers of the literary festival because it was closest to the venue of the event. I merely needed to walk across the road to get to it and when I arrived I caught a session in which Amartya Sen was being interviewed by Sharmila Tagore. He identified correctly that there had to be something wrong with the Indian model of development if nearly half of the population lived without toilets and nearly half of the children were underfed. Sadly the leftist solutions he offered were, in my view, the wrong ones but this is not the subject of this piece.
So let’s get back to talking about Mamata-di. Her presence is ubiquitous in the city. She smiles out of great big hoardings and peers out of the corners of advertisements for sporting tournaments and cultural festivals and when I asked my questions about the performance of the government nearly everyone talked not about the government but about her personally. It did not take me long to discover that she is no longer as popular as she was two years ago when she put an end to more than three decades of communist rule. Everyone had hoped then that she would introduce economic policies that would bring investors back to West Bengal and that Kolkata, tragically allowed to decay by the Marxists, would return to its former days of glory. I have to sadly report that this has not happened.
When I was not at the literary festival I spent long hours wandering about the city with my Bengali publisher, Poulomi Chatterji, and wherever I went I asked people if they thought their lives had improved under Mamata-di’s rule. Some said that one good change was that the city was cleaner now but when Poulomi and I went to pay obeisance to the mighty goddess of Kalighat I nearly wept to see the filthy alleys that lead to one of India’s most famous temples. In a better country this quarter of Kolkata would have been not just cleaned up but adorned with the accouterments of the tourist trade like quaint hotels and Bengali restaurants like antique shops and artists studios that specialized in the famous Kalighat tradition of painting. But, these things come only when socialist economic policies are abandoned for the kind that create new and innovative means of employment. Of Mamata-di’s economic approach the comment I heard most often was, ‘She has proved that she is more leftist than the communists. And, more authoritarian.’ On account of these traits she has earned the disdain and angry disapproval of Kolkata’s educated middle classes, the ‘bhadralok’, and caused prospective investors to hang on to their investment plans.
On my last evening in Kolkata I was invited to talk about my book at a stylish private club called the Conclave and at this gathering ran into Derek O’Brien who is now the Trinamul party’s chief whip in the Rajya Sabha.
I told him that it seemed to me from my short visit to Kolkata that his leader was not popular any more and he said that there were municipal elections coming up soon that would prove me wrong. Then he said, with a smile and a glance around the elegant gathering, ‘Its with this lot that she is not doing very well and with businessmen. But, with ordinary people in the state she remains as popular as ever.’
Perhaps. It would have been logistically impossible for me to gauge this in two days but by the time I returned to Kolkata’s crumbling (soon to be abandoned) airport to catch my flight to Mumbai I left with a feeling of sadness. There was so much that could have been done to change West Bengal’s economic direction that appears not to have been thought of yet. And, so much that could have been done to make Kolkata once more one of India’s most glamorous and beautiful cities that has not been thought of yet. It does not surprise me at all that Mamata-di is one of the political leaders who would like a general election this year. Much more disappointment could set in by 2014.
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