Blaming outsiders for West Bengal’s decline is not a solution. Change its politics first

The TFR for Kolkata has gone below 1.2 and is now at around 1, top officials in the West Bengal Health Department said | Pixahive

At the outset, I must state that I do not want to sound like the typical probashi Bengali talking down to people who reside in West Bengal. However, Bengalis more than most people indeed lament the current state of our homeland. And there are just so many of us. Like many probashis, my parents too left the city. Recently, at my cousin’s wedding in Mumbai, there were a lot of us. Bengalis had come from the US, Australia, and Bengaluru but few from West Bengal.

So, when Sanjeev Sanyal, a member of the Economic Advisory Council to the Prime Minister, made his controversial comments on Kolkata, it really stirred the pot. He said that the city “didn’t die, it was murdered”. He blamed the Communists for this. Sanyal also said that there was a lack of aspiration among Bengalis. While I agree with his first statement, I disagree vehemently with his second.

Just walk around an average newsroom and you will see many of us. So many, in fact, that my Bangla improved dramatically after I took up journalism, as we are a parochial lot. You will hear Bangla on the sets of Bollywood movies and among advertising copywriters. You will even hear it in the hallowed halls of Cambridge and Oxford universities. We have done well as a people; we have grabbed the opportunities available to us and climbed to the top. 

Yet, every single one of us laments about our home, Bengal. In that sense, Sanyal is right. There is a perceptible lack of aspiration to bring the city back to its glory days. I am not talking about pre-1911 when Calcutta was the capital of British India—the only city that built a massive structure for the deceased Empress. I’m talking about post-1947; it was Calcutta, not Bombay, that was India’s commercial hub, names such as the Tata’s who built the Tata Centre, an 18-storey skyscraper in 1963 for the hub of their East India operations and much of the Birla Empire was to be found at Chowringhee in Kolkata.

Dum Dum (now Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose International Airport) was one of the largest airports served by more international airlines than any other airport in India (and saw India’s first scheduled Jet service). Howrah Station, one of the largest railway hubs in the nation, and the city and suburbs had the most extensive suburban railway network in the country. The Statesman was India’s paper of record, and Calcutta was the hub of Indian motorsport. The city was the centre of Indian culture and nightlife; it wasn’t the Gymkhana in Delhi but Calcutta Club and Tollygunge Club that mattered. The Oberoi Grand might not have towered over the Taj Mahal Palace in Mumbai but was certainly one of the finest hotels in the world.

In terms of education, La Martiniere was the best school in the country, and Presidency was the only college of significance. Delhi might have been the capital of the nation, but in all honesty, it was a forested backwater. Bengal was the richest province of the Mughals, it was the richest province of the British Raj, and its capital was the most commercially and socially important city of newly independent India. 

Fall of a city

So, what happened? How could one city, one people, squander away everything (apart from the railway network) in just over half a century? Is there any way of getting that back? There is no definite answer. You could blame the rise of communism and hate toward capitalism, essentially the Marwari community. There is no doubt that Bengal’s economy was built on the backs of the poor and marginalised communities who had suffered immensely through man-made and natural disasters, particularly the famines. Yet, the rich and the upper-caste Bengali communities prospered.

The inability to see the bigger picture, from all sides, to be honest, was bound to lead to a grassroots movement for redistribution. A movement that was weaponised by the Left Front and a deadly cocktail of Bangla nationalism and anti-capitalism combined to drive the big companies away. Protests and strikes in the name of workers’ rights led to plant after plant being shut down and drove everyone away from the state. The Birlas left, leaving their massive temple in Ballygunge unfinished. It was completed in more than two decades. ThePrint’s Sanya Dhingra has covered the politics around this in a bit more detail in her article.

If you drive north of Kolkata today, down the banks of the Hooghly River on the original Grand Trunk Road, you go past places like Serampore, Chandannagar (the former French colony), Hooghly-Chuchura and Bandel. This is where my father’s family belongs to. On both sides of the river, you can see remnants of old factories that once processed everything from cotton to jute and rubber. The massive Dunlop plant on the west bank, which supplied tyres to Hindustan Motors just down the road at Uttarpara where the Ambassador cars were made, was the largest tyre plant in India. Uttarpara had India’s first car factory. The Madras Rubber Factory (MRF) was just a minor player back then. 

West Bengal was home to Swami Vivekananda and Syama Prasad Mukherjee, illustrating that not only did the state have industrial might, but also had intellectual prowess. However, what it may have lacked was political clout; there was nobody to make Bengal’s case in New Delhi. One could argue that the Jawaharlal Nehru and Indira Gandhi administrations turned a blind eye to the state.  But I will leave that argument to someone with a better academic background than mine. Nonetheless, it is evident that there were voices representing the northern and western regions of India, but none for the east. 

Brain drain and Kolkata

Once the death spiral began, there was no stopping it. As industries moved out of the state, and Delhi and Mumbai grew, so did Bengal’s best and the brightest. My father, a gold medalist from La Martiniere, didn’t enroll in Presidency College; he joined St. Stephen’s College at the University of Delhi instead. The Naxalbari uprising was in full swing in the 1960s, student politics had set the city alight, and calls for redistribution filled the air. That’s when the state’s residents left, slowly at first, then it became a flood. If you ever want to witness what ‘brain drain’ can do to a city, look at Kolkata.

Sure, you can reminisce about, talk of the clubs, speak of the vibrant Pujo and Christmas celebrations. Among my family and friends of an older generation, only a few, if any, live in Kolkata. Even those who live there have their children elsewhere. For example, my two extremely bright cousins, both alumni of La Martiniere, are halfway across the world—one in Boston, and the other in Seattle. And no matter how much they have left behind in Kolkata, I doubt they will ever return.

Could West Bengal have been saved? Perhaps the Tata Nano plant in Singur, which was shifted to Gujarat after the anti-land acquisition protests in 2008, could have changed things. I was working with Business Today at the time and was sent to cover the agitation. As an automotive writer, I felt sad when Ratan Tata admitted defeat while West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee gleefully celebrated. Because somewhere deep down, I knew this was the ‘last chance’ saloon for West Bengal.

I still believe that West Bengal will develop and the state will nurture aspirations. As it progresses, some of the smarter kids won’t choose to go to the US, Australia, or Bengaluru, as has been the trend among aspirational Bengalis. However, the state is going to be dragged along with the rest of the country, rather than being the province that leads it. Hopefully, it will once again take the lead in cultural mores and become a sporting powerhouse. But will the probashis return to build Bengal as the Ashkenazi Jews did to build Israel? I don’t think so.

And that is why what Sanyal said hurt. While nobody likes being talked down to, his statement was particularly bizarre in election season. That said, maybe it is time for us Bengalis to introspect instead of lamenting our fate. Blaming outsiders for Bengal’s decline is not a solution, nor is attacking a lack of aspiration and talking down to Bengalis. I am sure we can come out of it, but the politics of the place has to change and we have to move beyond adda and aantelbaji.  

@kushanmitra is an automotive journalist based in New Delhi. Views are personal. 

(Edited by Ratan Priya)