Banyan
West
Bengal’s populist chief minister is doing badly. Yet she typifies shifts in
power in India
THE
ECONOMIST, Apr 21st 2012 | from the print edition
BUYER’S
remorse is common enough in the dusty markets of Kolkata, a delightful if
crumbling great city, once known as Calcutta and still capital of the state of
West Bengal. Those who buy cheap plastic goods or plaster-of-Paris busts of
Rabindranath Tagore, Bengal’s cultural hero, may come to regret their haste.
Likewise, many who voted in last year’s state election. Sickened by 34 years of
wretched Communist rule, they handed power to Mamata Banerjee and her party,
the Trinamool Congress. The sense of regret is palpable.
Her faults
are not the usual ones. She appears honest; home remains a two-storey
whitewashed box in a humble bit of Kolkata, wedged between a fetid river and a
tumbledown bakery. Her passions are not accumulating Ferraris but landscape
painting and poetry. A prominent Bengali businessman praises her energy and
direct manner, forgiving her much as she struggles with a dire legacy. The
state is India’s most indebted, and, despite a little spurt in the Communists’
relatively reformist final years, enjoys little development beyond Kolkata,
which has sprouted a property boom and outposts of India’s outsourcing empires.
One set
of complaints (Bengalis are talented, versatile grumblers) is over her style.
“Mindset of a Stalinist”, a journalist concludes. Cabinet colleagues “live in
mortal terror”, a senior party figure says. Her rule is “a one-man army”, a
young critic jeers. An autocratic bent leads to grotesque blunders. She claimed
that a victim of gang rape was conspiring to discredit her rule, and punished a
bright policewoman who caught the assailants. Then this month she failed to
disavow the arrest of two academics, one of whom was beaten. He had merely
shared a cartoon about her on Facebook and by e-mail. This suggested that she
cannot take even mild criticism. So does the alleged banning of newspapers she
dislikes from public libraries. Aveek Sarkar, a tycoon whose media group is
critical, expects her to order his arrest: he has lodged “anticipatory bail” in
eight as yet imaginary cases.
Defenders
claim she is growing in the job, for which a few years as a minister in Delhi
running the railways (badly) failed to prepare her. Derek O’Brien, her
Anglo-Indian spokesman, claims somewhat limply that “you haven’t seen the best
of Mamata yet”. Complaints about her style seem mainly confined to the urban
elite. A bigger concern is what she does with power. She has notched up one
success: cracking down on Maoist insurgents in their rural base. Otherwise,
things look grim. Most worrying, her economic policies outflank even the
Communists on the left. Trinamool, which means grassroots, won after she led a
campaign against plans by Tata, India’s biggest firm, to build a car factory on
land she claimed was taken unfairly from farmers. Tata fled to a friendlier
state, Gujarat, taking jobs, but voters cheered.
A
populist not an ideologue, Ms Banerjee’s success reflects a long-term trend
across India: the rise of regional parties at the expense of the national ones.
Poorer, less educated, rural people (“theLumpen! the Luddites!” an educated
Bengali sighs, in his plush office), who vote in greater numbers than the
wealthier minority, seem increasingly to prefer local parties, often, at least
in the north, with a statist bent. Ms Banerjee’s political approach is to dish
out public jobs and welfare and protect small farmers, and to duck reforms that
might lure investors to the state. Her government did recently pass a law
allowing business to lease modest plots of public land. Yet she vows loudly
never to help industry buy it. And with land titles a confused mess of
fragmented ownership, it is likely that land-hungry firms will stay away.
More
energy is devoted to symbols and aesthetics. The state has a new name, “Paschim
Banga”. And Ms Banerjee seems to think the way to lure tourists to Kolkata is
to paint every railing, kerbside, public urinal, roundabout and bridge in
blue-and-white stripes. She has also ordered that loudspeakers blast Tagore’s
music at junctions in the city, while Marx is purged from the school
curriculum. Yet she will not go to business forums, and rejects meetings with
ambassadors hoping to promote industry ties. The state’s budget last month
reimposed a barmy entry tax on goods from elsewhere in India. That will distort
trade but raise almost no revenue. Then this week Infosys, a big software firm,
put on hold a development centre that would have created over 10,000 jobs. Ms
Banerjee refused to allow a special economic zone offering tax relief.
All this
will prove costly, in time. Farmers alone produce too little tax revenue to pay
for planned roads, electricity, schools and hospitals. All her government’s
revenue goes to pay salaries and interest on its 2 trillion-rupee ($40 billion)
debt. That leaves Ms Banerjee with a single destructive strategy: begging and threatening
the central government in Delhi in order to secure debt relief. As a crucial
ally of the ruling Congress party, she is in a strong position. But the finance
minister, Pranab Mukherjee, is her main Bengali rival, and he refuses special
help. The result is paralysis for West Bengal and India. She helps block the
government’s reforms—on foreign investment in supermarkets; cutting fuel
subsidies; the railways budget; a water-sharing deal with Bangladesh; an
anti-graft bill. But she gets no relief.
Follow
the blue-and-white brick road
The
stand-off will continue. Congress wants its candidate elected as India’s
president in July, and will need her help. She and some other state leaders
want to wrest more powers from the centre, notably by scuppering a planned
national counter-terrorism body. As the ruling coalition’s spoiler-in-chief,
she typifies rising regional clout at a time when the centre is weakly led. Her
party talks grandly of a concept of “operative federalism”, meaning that states
should get more control of public funds. So the tensions with Congress will
rise. But nobody expects her to fly away from its coalition soon. She may be
seen as a mischief-maker; but, at least as yet, not quite as the wicked witch
of the East.
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