APRIL
07, 2014
Chalo
Delhi!
by VIJAY PRASHAD
How is a Harvard Professor of history to makes sense of the
grammar of Indian electoral politics? There is the retail end of things, the
door-to-door campaigns, the street meetings, the processions through congested
streets and the back-door deals cut with this or that power-broker. Harvard Yard
might be a den of conspiratorial faculty deal making, but it is a far cry from
the hustle and bustle of Indian electioneering. Nonetheless, Gardiner Chair of
Oceanic History Sugata Bose is now the Lok Sabha (parliament) candidate for the
Trinamul Congress (TMC). He will run to win the Jadavpur constituency in West
Bengal. A previous Harvard professor and US Ambassador to India, John Kenneth
Galbraith, wrote in 1958 that Indian society is “the world’s greatest example
of functioning anarchy.” How is Professor Bose to navigate this chaos?
Professor Bose is no stranger to Jadavpur, the home of one of West
Bengal’s most important universities. His mother has been the Member of
Parliament for the district three previous times. When he arrived from
Cambridge, Massachusetts to take up the cudgels for the TMC, the party workers
greeted him with the slogan, Netaji-er gharer chhele ke vote din, vote
din (Vote for the boy who is from Netaji’s family). They referred to
Bose’s granduncle, Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose, who is a beloved nationalist
leader. Netaji, as he is called, oscillated from bourgeois nationalism (he was
the president of the Indian National Congress) to socialism (he founded his own
Forward Bloc party). The Forward Bloc party is now in the Left Front alliance,
the adversary of Professor Bose’s TMC. Sugata Bose and his mother, Krishna
Bose, are both authors of books about Netaji, with Sugata Bose’s His
Majesty’s Opponent: Subhas Chandra Bose and India’s Struggle for Independence arriving
with the imprimatur of Harvard University Press in 2011. Professor Bose is
aware of the power of his inheritance. “You elected my mother from here three
times,” he says in the middle-class neighbourhood of Garfa, “I’m hoping that
you will bless me in the same way.” In his biography of Netaji, Professor Bose
sneered at the Congress for being “under dynastic control” of the Nehru-Gandhi
family. Nothing so bad when one is advantaged by a legacy.
But the bequest of this seat from his mother – with the aura of
his granduncle around him – seems insufficient. And herein comes the problem.
Professor Bose faces the CPI-M’s Dr. Sujan Chakraborty, a bio-medical engineer,
a leader of the trade union movement and an active participant in the All
Indian People’s Science movement. Apart from that, Dr. Chakraborty lives in
Baruipur, a small town in the Jadavpur Lok Sabha constituency. He studied in
Jadavpur University and has been the Member of Parliament from Jadavpur in the
14th Lok Sabha (2004-2009). Dr. Chakraborty is a hometown
leader. The road to Delhi for Professor Bose could not only be paved with
ancestral authority. It needed more.
Professor Bose’s Allies.
Electoral democracy is a peculiar institution. In the abstract, it
is wonderful – people are urged to go as citizens into the polling booth and
vote anonymously for their preferred candidate who has already laid out an
agenda. Social power gets in the way of the civic books. Political science
sections of the library are well endowed with books on Electoral Fraud and
Political Corruption, on voter intimidation and voter suppression. No wonder
that the United Nations Department of Political Affairs and the European Office
for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights train and deploy election
observers in any number of countries (there was a threat to deploy UN observers
in the United States for its 2012 election). In India, it is the task of the
Election Commission to monitor election campaigns, the vote process and vote
counting. On April 1, members of Professor Bose’s party attacked Election
Commission workers in Howrah, West Bengal, as they removed illegally placed
posters. The Commission workers filed a case against their attackers, “unknown
Trinamul activists,” wrote the police in their First Information Report.
Nothing will come of it. Violations by the TMC have become routine in West
Bengal.
Everyday political corruption is insufficient for the campaign of
Professor Bose. He is of course aware of the cesspool that the TMC has created.
At a campaign stop he said he wanted to change the face of a part of his
constituency “which often makes headlines in newspapers for incidents like
clashes and murder.” What he did not say is that the culprits in this violence
are frequently the TMC political muscle, and they are often people led by a
former Member of the State Assembly, Arabul Islam. Mr. Islam represented
Bhangar, a part of the Jadavpur Lok Sabha constituency.
Arabul Islam’s name is itself threatening. The charge sheet
against Mr. Islam is so long that it would take up more than this space to
explore each of his alleged violations. The word “alleged” will come up a lot
in what comes below because few of his acts of violence and intimidation have
reached a courthouse – let alone a judge or a jury. Mr. Islam is protected by a
political safety net that is inviolable. Professor Bose welcomed Mr. Islam to
one of his rallies, saying cryptically, “Arabul has a history of struggle.”
Might be worth considering the nature of Mr. Islam’s struggles. Professor Bose
is an educator, so it would be sufficient to list some of Mr. Islam’s
interventions in the educational business.
Arabul Islam is the President of the government-run Bhangar
Mahavidyalaya. Over the past three years, Mr. Islam has sought to excise the
teaching establishment of any CPI-M member or sympathizer. His adversaries,
however, need not have any link to the Left. They are simply people whom he
does not like. Here are three examples over the past three years of his
behavior toward teachers:
* (April 2012). Mr. Islam accosts Debjani Dey, a geography teacher
at Bhangar Mahavidyalaya, in the staff room. Dey and her colleagues complained
about the management at the college. “He walked into the staff room,” Dey said,
“and started rebuking us in filthy language. When we protested, he hit me with
a jug and hurt my chin.” Dey’s outspokenness vanished in a day. Mr. Islam filed
a defamation suit against her. A teacher at the college says that Mr. Islam’s
men threatened them to be quiet. The West Bengal College and Universities
Teachers’ Association stepped in. But they could not make a mark.
* (August 2013). Mr. Islam removed Luna Kanyal from her post as
teacher-in-charge at Bhangar Mahavidyalaya. Kanyal was accused of all kinds of
mid-deeds, but the rumor in the college is that she was ousted because Mr.
Islam said she was a “CPI-M cadre.” She was not given the chance to defend
herself. Mr. Islam replaced her with Nanda Ghosh, whom other teachers say is
close to Mr. Islam. Kanyal moved the High Court on the issue, since there was
“no serious charge against her.”
* (March 14, 2014). Mr. Islam barged into the examination hall at
the Narayanpur High School with a group of his associates. They went
floor-to-floor telling the invigilators to help students who were doing their
examinations. The teacher-in-charge, Gopa Roy, was rattled by the incident.
When she asked Arabul Islam why he had come into the examination hall, he
“verbally abused and threatened me before leaving.”
Ten days after this last incident, Professor Bose shared a dais
with Mr. Islam. When asked about his association with Arabul Islam, Professor
Bose said archly, “I am requesting everyone to maintain respect and decorum.”
Arabul Islam’s star has been somewhat tarnished by his antics, but
he is not out of favor. He continues to be the boss of Bhangar. To cross swords
with him would spell electoral trouble for the TMC, and for Professor Bose.
Mr. Islam is not alone in Mamata Banerjee’s West Bengal. Due west
of Jadavpur in Garden Reach and Chetla, Mamata Banerjee relies upon her
political associate, Firhad (Bobby) Hakim. He, in turn, relies upon his local
leaders, such as former councilor Mohd. Munna Iqbal – alias Munna Bhai. In
February 2013, the TMC and the Congress got into a battle at Hari Mohan Ghosh
College in Garden Reach during student election season. The police came in to
stop the battle, when, it is alleged, local councilor Munna Iqbal and his men
fired at the police and shot to death police sub-inspector Tapas Chowdhury.
Munna ran to Bihar, and after a deal was cut with Mr. Hakim, he reappeared to
court. This process did not take long. Munna is now back in charge of his
streets.
Mamata Banerjee could not afford to lose Bobby Hakim, who had to
stand by his man on the ground. Rather than take action in her party, Mamata
Banerjee secured the transfer of Kolkata’s chief of police, R. K. Pachnanda.
His fate was the same as Detective Damayanti Sen, who forthrightly investigated
the infamous Park Street rape case only to be transferred to the police
training school. It is not a promotion. The police and judiciary fear that if
they do not do Mamata Banerjee’s bidding, they will be sent to the other end of
the moon. It is what allows Munna Bhai and Mr. Islam to act with impunity. It
is part of the machinery that is working to send Professor Bose to Delhi.
Professor Bose experienced a negative election as soon as he got
to Kolkata. When Mamata Banerjee took charge of the state, she sought to take
charge of Kolkata’s premier educational institution, Presidency College. To
advise the administration, Mamata Banerjee appointed a board of Mentors, led by
another Harvard Professor Amartya Sen. Professor Bose joined the Mentors. When
he came to Kolkata, the students at Presidency held a non-binding election to
ask him to resign from the board since he had now entered electoral politics.
Twelve hundred students out of fifteen hundred voted for him to resign. On
April 10, 2013, as part of the attempt to take over the college, TMC men came
onto the campus, threatened students and trashed the Physics laboratory – one
of the most storied departments of the campus. The Student Federation of India
put up a poster on campus on the day Professor Bose’s nomination was announced:
“Shame! The Mentor has secured a Lok Sabha ticket by the grace of those who
vandalized your college on April 10.”
Vijay Prashad is
the author of The Poorer Nations: A Possible
History of the Global South (New Delhi: Leftword,
2013).
