Tuesday, May 28, 2013
JYOTI BASU FOUGHT ALL FOR A NEW BENGAL - PRABHAT PATNAIK
ALL FOR A NEW BENGAL - PRABHAT
PATNAIK
JYOTI BASU ACHIEVED, WITHIN A FEW YEARS
OF FIRST TAKING CHARGE AS CHIEF MINISTER, A REMARKABLE TURNAROUND FOR A STATE
THAT WAS IN DECLINE.
EACH
generation has its own dominant image of Jyoti Basu. For an earlier generation
than mine this image is of an intrepid fighter in the cause of the working
class, an effective and unyielding “tribune of the people”, in the manner of
Auguste Bebel, in the West Bengal legislature of the 1950s and 1960s. For a
more recent generation than mine this dominant image is of a highly respected
elder statesman, an architect of a broad coalition of forces to save the
country from communal fascism and a voice warning the country about the dangers
of the imperialist embrace that is euphemistically referred to these days as
“globalisation”. For my generation the overwhelming image of Jyoti Basu is that
of the builder of a new Bengal .
All
these images of Jyoti Basu have their own validity. And they all share a common
perception: that of a remarkably courageous and straightforward person, totally
devoid of cant, and capable of seeing things without the blinkers that most
people choose to put on. I prefer here, however, to dwell on the image of Jyoti
Basu that my generation has, namely, as the builder of a new Bengal, because in
my view that is a role that no one else but Jyoti Basu could have played.
Before
the Left Front came to power, West Bengal presented the quintessential picture of a State in decline. Once the
centre of British power east of Suez, it had witnessed, over the half century
before Independence, an absolute decline in agricultural production per capita
and an even steeper absolute decline in foodgrain production per capita. Though
the post-Independence years witnessed some reversal of these dire trends, it
was far from adequate: West Bengal was afflicted by a deep-rooted and long-standing agrarian crisis. Its
traditional industries, tea and jute, originally owned by British managing
agencies and subsequently taken over by mainly Marwari businessmen, faced
inelastic world demand and overall bleak prospects. The engineering industry,
which had come up mainly during the War years, received a jolt from the mid-1960s
recession from which it never really recovered. The freight equalisation scheme
had hurt the State badly.
The
social crisis created by pervasive unemployment among the youth, refracted inter alia through the naxalite
movement, was captured chillingly in artistic creations of the time, such as
Mrinal Sen’s film Chorus.
While a social revolution remained a distant dream, the way forward short of it
was not clear. It appeared to be a society incapable as yet of making a leap,
but hopelessly lost without such a leap. And this turbulent stasis came
increasingly to be sustained through the use of semi-fascist terror by the
state.
The
remarkable turnaround in this situation, which the Left Front achieved within a
few years of assuming office under Jyoti Basu’s leadership in 1977, would
appear unbelievable to anyone who had witnessed the earlier situation. Indeed,
the dynamics of that turnaround are still not very clear and require a
substantial theoretical endeavour. There is only one thing, however, that one can
say about it with certainty, namely, at the core of it was the overcoming of
the long-standing agrarian crisis.
Lord
Cornwallis’ Permanent Settlement had left two important legacies in Bengal ’s economy. First, since the revenue accruing to the colonial
government was fixed, the rate of return to the government from any investment
in irrigation was nil, or at any rate way below the minimum rate of return that
the colonial government insisted on earning on all its investments. Hence Bengal saw very little irrigation investment in the colonial period. There
was an additional reason for this: following the report of the Royal Commission
on Agriculture (1926) a view had gained currency that the problem of Bengal agriculture arose from too much water and not too little. This
neglect of irrigation from the colonial period, though slightly reversed after Independence , continued to haunt West Bengal ’s agriculture.
Secondly,
as is well known, the Permanent Settlement had spawned a large parasitic class
of rent receivers living off a pauperised peasantry. At the very top were the zamindars, but between them and the
cultivators there were several layers of parasites, up to 27 in some places, which obviously discouraged any
productive investment on land. Post-Independence land reforms had removed the
top layer of zamindars but
already by the time of Independence, as the Bengal Provincial Kisan Sabha
pointed out in its memorandum to the Floud Commission (1940), a new and
powerful class of intermediaries, the jotedars,
had emerged, so that zamindari
abolition, far from freeing the peasantry from the stranglehold of these
parasites, had the paradoxical effect of strengthening the latter. The
disincentives to productive investment on land therefore continued, as did the abysmal
state of the cultivators, so much so that an influential academic work of the
time, which covered both parts of Bengal and the period from 1949 to 1980, was
titled The Agrarian Impasse in Bengal.
The Left
Front confronted both these constraints head on. Land reform measures,
initiated by the short-lived United Front governments earlier, were carried
forward through the recording of sharecroppers under Operation Barga, through
the conferring on them of rights to land, and through the distribution of ceiling-surplus
land. This was followed by the setting up of an alternative institutional
mechanism in the countryside, the panchayats, which not only entailed
decentralisation of power and decision-making but also provided an alternative
to the traditional power structure dominated by the jotedars. The balance of class forces was altered in the
countryside in favour of the oppressed peasantry and against the jotedars, which, apart from
strengthening democracy, also encouraged productive investment by the peasantry
and hence the development of the productive forces. At the same time, there was
a substantial step-up in public expenditure on rural development in general and
on irrigation in particular.
As a
result of these measures, a sea change occurred in the cropping intensity and
in the cropping pattern. Areas which for centuries had witnessed only a single
crop now started growing three crops. Local-level plans began to be drawn up
with the help of the democratically elected representatives of the people serving
on the panchayats. And agricultural growth in West Bengal began to pick up.
To some
extent, even before the Left Front came to power, the potentials of, and the
scope for, multiple cropping had become evident in small pockets in districts
such as Bardhaman and Birbhum, where potato and boro rice had been cultivated as a third crop in addition
to the traditional aman and aus. But what had remained confined to
small pockets now became the common practice over large tracts of the State, so
much so that in the decade of the 1980s West Bengal witnessed the highest rate of growth in
agricultural production among all the States in the country. In the 1990s, the
growth rate came down everywhere, a result inter
alia of the neoliberal policies adopted by the Centre, which
squeezed the peasantry even as they forced a curtailment of public investment
in rural development. Even so, among the States, West Bengal continued to be a high performer.
Rapid
agricultural growth, together with increased government expenditure in the
countryside, enlarged the rural market in the State, both for foodgrains and
for a variety of simple industrial goods. It is interesting that among all the
States West
Bengal and
Kerala were the only two that witnessed a steady increase in per capita cereal
consumption by the rural population in the decades of the 1980s and the 1990s.
The increased demand for simple industrial goods in the countryside brought
about a remarkable “industrialisation from below” in West Bengal , with substantial employment effects, whose reach
and significance have been inadequately appreciated until now. And with rising
incomes, the State government’s revenues also rose, making possible enhanced
social sector expenditures and a general improvement in the people’s quality of
life.
Just one
set of figures will suffice to establish the point. In 1977-78, the percentage
of rural population in West Bengal consuming less than 1,800 calories a person
a day, which really defines acute poverty
(since the official poverty line is 2,400 calories), was as high as
40 per cent, compared with 25 per cent for India as a whole. By 1993-94 the
figure had come down to 17 per cent, compared with 18.5 per cent for India as a whole. True, this figure went up in West
Bengal, as also in the rest of the
country, towards the end of the 1990s and early this century,
because the pursuit of neoliberal policies by the Central government undermined
food security in the country as a whole; but even in 1999-2000 the figure for
West Bengal was just 22 per cent (though there are statistical problems in
comparing 1999-2000 with the earlier years). The overriding objective of any
government functioning in a country such as ours must be the amelioration of
poverty; by that yardstick the Jyoti Basu government’s record remains
unparalleled in modern India .
When Bengal inspired EMS
The fact
that something remarkable was happening in West Bengal was appreciated, before anyone else in the world
outside could discern it properly, by that most insightful observer of the
scene, E.M.S. Namboodiripad. It was obvious to any participant at the first
International Congress on Kerala Studies, organised through his initiative in 1994 in Thiruvananthapuram, that the question which
haunted him was the following: why is it that Kerala with its remarkable record
of land reforms and remarkable achievements in the social sector (which had
prompted many to talk of a “Kerala model” of development) continued to witness
stagnation in the commodity-producing sectors, while the other progressive
State, West Bengal, had such remarkable successes in promoting growth in the
major commodity-producing sectors. EMS was not
looking for “bourgeois” solutions, but solutions in keeping with the
progressive traditions of his State, which is why he turned to West Bengal as his criterion for comparison. The answer he
came up with was the role of panchayats and, accordingly, launched his
momentous “People’s Plan Campaign”. But what is of significance for us is his
implicit tribute to the “West Bengal model” (if one may call it that).
Neoliberal hurdles
The
travails of the Left Front government from the end of the 1990s have been much
discussed. But what is often missed by both critics and even supporters of the
Left Front is that underlying these travails is the pursuit of neoliberal
policies by the Central government. The hurdles created by the neoliberal
environment against the Left’s approach were not immediately obvious. Indeed,
it appeared at first, and not without justification, that the scrapping of
licensing, which had been used as a tool of discrimination by the Central
government against recalcitrant States such as West Bengal, would usher in a
new era of growth of modern industry in the State. And the State government,
starting from the period when Jyoti Basu was at the helm, had worked tirelessly
for it. But there were two basic ways in which neoliberalism impinged adversely
on the Left Front’s strategy.
First,
as the tax-GDP (gross domestic product) ratio of the Centre declined over the
decade of the 1990s (the States, in fact, did much better in this regard), the
Centre not only cut back on its own expenditure, especially rural development
expenditure, but even passed on the burden of its fiscal crisis to the State
governments through reduced transfers to States and exorbitant interest rates
(even exceeding the rate of growth of the average Net State Domestic Product)
on its loans to States. The States thus became victims of a fiscal squeeze
imposed by the Centre, and West Bengal was no exception. The problem of State indebtedness can be traced
directly to this squeeze.
Having
first imposed this squeeze, the Centre then used it to force the States to fall
in line behind its pursuit of a neoliberal agenda. The Eleventh Finance
Commission insisted on a set of neoliberal reforms the States had to carry out
even to qualify for the resources that were their constitutional due. The
Twelfth Finance Commission addressed the issue of State indebtedness by
insisting that State governments pass fiscal responsibility legislation to
qualify for assistance, which was both constitutionally questionable and
uncalled for by the tenets of economic theory and which the West Bengal
government rightly refused to do. The origins of West Bengal ’s fiscal problems lay inter alia in these developments.
Secondly,
as a fallout of the withdrawal of state support from peasant agriculture under
the influence of neoliberalism, the current century has witnessed a virtual
stagnation in absolute foodgrain
output, at least until 2006-07 (after which procurement prices were raised, in
a reversal of neoliberalism, and appear to have had a favourable effect on
output). And West
Bengal has not
been spared the consequences of this stagnation. Many, of course, would find
fault with the Left Front government for not coping with the situation better,
but the situation itself, which arose from the pursuit of neoliberalism, must
never be lost sight of.
It
continues to pose severe challenges before the Left even today. The fact that
the Left will not have the benefit of Jyoti Basu’s sagacity in charting out a
new course in this complex scenario is a great tragedy. But it can draw genuine
pride from the fact that during the two decades and more when Jyoti Basu was at
the helm in West
Bengal , it achieved
something, which, though somewhat unsung, was nonetheless quite outstanding.
Courtesy:
FRONTLINE
Volume
27 - Issue 03 :: Jan. 30-Feb. 12, 2010
from the publishers of THE HINDU
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