By Arnab Ray
'I remember an uncle of mine saying loudly, 'Two things I will not see before I die– India winning the soccer World Cup and the Left front getting voted out. Well, dear uncle: You have just witnessed the more improbable of the two.'
It was sometime in the late 80s. The Red Baron of the Left Front Jyoti Basu ruled supreme in West Bengal. Bang in the middle of summer, Kolkata was in the grip of yet another apocalyptic spell of power cuts, so severe that even those enamored of the anti-imperial state government could not help from quipping —"I will take you from darkness to light said Jeesu. I will take you from light to darkness says Boshu," (Jeesu is Bengali for Jesus and Boshu is how Bengalis pronounce Basu).
One evening, as our entire locality plunged into darkness, I remember an uncle of mine swearing loudly, "Two things I will not see before I die– India winning the soccer World Cup and the Left front getting voted out."
Well, dear uncle: You have just witnessed the more improbable of the two.
For our generation, which grew up in the poisonous shadow of nearly three-and-a-half decades of Communist Party India (Marxist)/Left-front rule, the coming to power of the Trinamool Congress is a Berlin-wall-breaking moment. Once upon a time one of country's leading regions, under Communist rule West Bengal has lagged behind nearly every state on almost all indices of development. Yet it didn't seem to matter to the electoral fortunes of the Reds—they had dug their tentacles so deep into every institution in Bengal that it seemed impossible to wrench the state from their lifeless hands. Now, the Left's bastion has finally been breached.
On Friday the 13th, no less.
For this dramatic collapse, we can thank Mr. Basu's successor, Buddhadeb Bhattacharya's severely botched attempts to industrialize the state and his administration's continued use of violence [...]
No comments:
Post a Comment