Every morning, I open the newspaper, read the local news, and rue the fact that I live in Bengal. I then turn the page, learn what’s happening elsewhere, and feel thankful that I am where I am. The relief doesn’t last: I repeat the cycle every morning. I might seem hard to please, but there’s little news anywhere to please anyone.
The situation in Bengal is particularly depressing in two respects. One is the apparently bottomless sleaze in government appointments: most shockingly and reprehensibly, to schoolteachers’ jobs. The other is our sordid legacy of electoral violence. As I write, 12 people have already died in the build-up to the troubled panchayat elections. Yet Bengal is not a specially violent or crime-prone state in other respects. Calcutta has by far the lowest crime rate of any major Indian city.
Formal crime is one of many factors affecting the citizen’s well-being. I, for one, feel less troubled by a burglary in our neighbourhood than by toxic posts on our residents’ WhatsApp group. Yet many others support those posts, sometimes openly. The secure middle class offers the safest soil for the bigotry, Othering and self-interest upending the nation’s tectonic plates. Unharmed directly (or even benefited) by such upheavals, this group can most easily delude themselves that the ground is firm beneath their feet. They’re OK, everyone’s OK.
They are thereby complicit in the malice and belligerence splitting the nation apart, beyond the physical violence (though that is great) and often grotesquely masked as nationalism: lynchings for what one eats, attacks for who one marries, curbs on where one worships, houses bulldozed without due process, whole communities threatened in their homes, killings declaredly to enforce the law. There are unabashed calls to hound, assault and kill purely on grounds of identity, alongside aggressive surveillance and persecution of much other speech and thought of no apparent harm.
This entropy of governance leaves me aghast when I look beyond Bengal. Not that my home state is innocent of some of these evils. Encounter killings were in vogue with the Bengal police in Naxalite times; but Bengal seems to have forgotten what much of India is thinking today. For intolerance of dissent, in fact of harmless political banter, I need look no further than the plight of my colleague Professor Ambikesh Mahapatra.
And yet, and yet — when I visit campuses elsewhere in India, even those (as in Delhi) that were open, vibrant places till the other day, I sense a constraint, an insidious pressure to conform or else lose out (if not face active persecution), still happily absent in my home state outside certain Central institutions. It is cause for concern if academics across the country feel so vulnerable. Bengal’s teachers are demoralized too, but for reasons less mortifying to their dignity. The proximate cause is the virtual abdication of charge by the authorities, backlit by a running feud between the state government and successive chancellors/governors. Virtually no university in Bengal has a permanent vice-chancellor, and there are yawning staff shortages and budget deficits everywhere.
Beyond this, there are rumblings (as all across India) against the new education policy with its four-year graduation programme. This amorphous plan, clueless about staffing, infrastructure and funds, is being thrust on the nation in a headlong rush likely to cause chaos four years down the line. It is a classic instance of the one-sided diktats of the Union government, leaving the states to pick up the pieces and foot much of the bill. The most beleagueredare prominent Opposition states like Bengal. Not to be outdone, they add their own contribution to the mess.
Some local wrongdoings are too glaring to overlook. In Bengal, the jobs-for-cash scandal is matched by a flood of complaints over housing grants, not to mention the coal and cattle mafia. Whatever the precise degree of malfeasance, it is undeniable and unpardonable. No one should demur if Central teams come to investigate. But there was no such alacrity when government contractors were driven to suicide in Karnataka under the last regime, or when management groups of 13,000 Karnataka schools complained of extortion. Central teams dutifully arrived in Bengal after complaints about school mid-day meals. When a roti-and-salt menu in a UP school came to light, the reporting journalist was jailed.
The root problem with mid-day meals is the paltry Central allowance per student. The same is true of funds for the anganwadi scheme and for ASHA health workers. The states must supplement this from their meagre resources, and are first in the line of fire if they fail. Why, again, should Bengal halt its universal Swastha Sathi health scheme to help fund the Pradhan Mantri Jan Arogya Yojana, covering only half the population and factoring in a profit for insurance and health corporates? States pay 40% costs for virtually all ‘Central’ schemes, increasingly in the prime minister’s name. The benefit is bestowed through cooperative federalism; the publicity trashes this noble principle.
Nomenclature becomes non-trivial when funds are blocked because the state has renamed a prejudicially titled Central scheme. Clearly, the guiding factor is not the people’s benefit but the political mileage. Even where there is undoubted corruption, the guilty could be punished without depriving poverty-line beneficiaries of their dues. Blocking all funds to Bengal under the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme is a remedy more mischievous than the disease. The intention seems to be to lay economic siege to this recalcitrant Opposition state. The panchayat elections will soon tell whether the rural poor would resist this blackmail or bow to it. Yet resistance will imply a re-entry pass for those whose misdoings triggered the crisis.
Citizens are caught between a rock and a hard place. Trapped by the wiles of the political class, even their most resounding verdict — if they muster the spirits to deliver one — will seem like a compromise, if not a surrender to one or other party. Can democracy assert itself beyond the ballot box? If so, how long before its new platform is compromised in turn?
Sukanta Chaudhuri is Professor Emeritus, Jadavpur University
