Calcutta (52 page)

Once again it was announced that the air-conditioning would not be required in the Writers’ Building. Once again there was an inaugural rally on the Maidan; a million people turned out to hear the two leaders warn industrialists and big landlords to take note of the changed political situation and act accordingly if they did not want the Government helping the workers and the peasants in their struggle. Someone on the platform also suggested that Governor Dharma Vira had conspired to remove the United Front. The Government proceeded to settle its score with him when it drafted the inaugural address that he was obliged to read to the new Assembly. The Governor, however, could be as bloody-minded as anyone in the United Front and he coolly skipped two paragraphs that were quite pointedly offensive to his person and to the part he had played in the dying days of the first United Front. At which there was great uproar and a demand that he should be removed from office immediately. Within a month, Delhi took the hint and Dharma Vira left for a post in more tranquil surroundings.

There were other flourishes to celebrate the restoration. Jyoti Basu lodged a High Court claim for Rs 200,000 damages against the State of West Bengal, in compensation for illegal detention during the days of Congress administration twenty years
previously
. The Maidan statutes immortalizing the Raj were finally removed and a Martyrs ‘Memorial to local party heroes was put up across the road from the Writers’ Building. There was a great renaming of streets, which has always been a regular pastime of people with any kind of municipal power in Calcutta. In the twenties, C.R. Das and Subhas Chandra Bose rechristened several
thoroughfares in response to this or that episode in Bengali nationalism. After Independence, Harrison Road became
Mahatma
Gandhi Road and the upper part of Chowringhee was changed to Jawaharlal Nehru Road. At some stage or other Lower Chitpore Road was translated into Rabindra Sarani, though most people still use the first name. The United Front now ordained that Dalhousie Square should become
Benoy-Badal
-Dinesh Bagh, that Dharamtala Street should be called Lenin Sarani, that the Ochterlony Monument should be known as Sahid Minar. With a playful sense of humour, it changed Harrington Street (which contains the United States Consulate) into Ho Chi Minh Street, and surpassed even this masterstroke a little later when the Russians offered Calcutta a bronze statue of Lenin to celebrate the centenary of his birth. It cost the city Rs 40,000 to mount alongside the tram terminus at the top of the Maidan, but there it now stands, gazing down the new Lenin Sarani, upon a plinth which was placed in the centre of the small public garden dedicated to Lord Curzon.

Delhi was clearly not going out of its way to ease West Bengal’s predicament, whatever form that might take under its second United Front. Communists were not the only people in Calcutta who were arguing for improved financial aid from the Central Government. The United Front had scarcely been elected when the President of the Bengal Chamber of Commerce, Mr J. M. Parsons, told his annual meeting that if the state was to be properly rehabilitated it would require ‘a liberal measure of
sympathy
and assistance from the Central Government’. Within a month of re-election, the two United Front leaders had gone to Delhi to plead for a redistribution of resources between the Centre and the states, which received only a quarter of the income and corporation taxes collected in their area; West Bengal, with its comparatively huge contribution to the national economy on both these counts, obviously had a better claim than most states to a larger share in the final disbursement. The Central Finance Minister, that deeply conservative old Congressman, Morarji Desai, who was shortly to find his Prime Minister Mrs Gandhi too far to the Left for comfort, flatly refused to tolerate any review of finances. The Centre had already committed itself to
expenditure on a third Hooghly Bridge (whenever that might be built) and it had also been persuaded to put up the money for a circular railway in Calcutta (soon to be abandoned); more than that it was not prepared to do. For the rest of 1969 there was to be a running battle between the United Front and the Congress Centre, between Calcutta and Delhi, about this apportionment of money, and by the end of the year Delhi had still not yielded another rupee.

By then, there was again chaos within the province of the United Front. There had never really been anything else. There was the chaos of sheer frustrated exuberance, for example, that had nothing to do with politics in any sense that a political scientist would immediately recognize. Just after the election, a couple of Bengalis had arrived in the Andaman Islands after rowing all the way from Calcutta and half way down the Bay of Bengal. When they flew home, thousands turned out at Dum Dum to hail them as heroes. On the way to the airport a small boy clinging to an overloaded bus fell off and was killed; there was a riot and the bus was stoned by a crowd. At the airport, a crowd poured across the tarmac before the oarsmen’s plane had pulled up, surrounded it so thickly that the gangway couldn’t be placed in position for twenty minutes, and started throwing shoes at the plane in impatience at the delay. For three hours a mob overran Dum Dum. Some people tried to climb onto the tail of an international jet that was hoping to take off. Others roamed the aviation fuel stores, smoking as they went. Three aircraft of Indian Airlines were chased as they were taxied to the safety of hangars. A number of international airlines later
threatened
to boycott Calcutta unless security could be improved at Dum Dum.

There was the chaos of frustrated bitterness by students well aware that the degrees they were acquiring at Calcutta and Jadavpore Universities were almost useless to them as means to qualified employment and a standard of living that most
university
students throughout the world have some reason to expect. In September 1969, no fewer than one thousand graduates
applied
for jobs as peons with Calcutta Corporation, though there was not a single vacancy even for this lowliest municipal
occupation
of fetching and carrying. Months before that, sixteen
professors
of Calcutta University were gheraoed in their rooms for seventeen hours by students demanding that they should not be required to attend as many as half their lectures in order to be eligible for examination; the professors were allowed no food during the gherao, and a pitcher of water in one of their rooms was flung out when it began. The Vice-Chancellor of Calcutta was gheraoed so frequently by students abusing him as a CIA agent or something equally unpopular with them, that the
newspapers
were eventually reporting each incident as a
commonplace
worth no more than two or three inches of their space. By June, a conference of headmasters was claiming that its
members
had already suffered more than one hundred gheraos in the first six months of the year.

There was the chaos of things just breaking down under the strain of being Calcutta. Very early in the first session of the new Assembly, a Budget debate had to be carried on by candlelight because the electricity supply in the city had failed; and even when the electricity supply was working, the city gradually
became
dimmer and dimmer at night because so many bulbs on street lamps were smashed and so much wire was stolen. Garbage accumulated on the streets in mounds that were massive even by Calcutta’s standards because people living near the Corporation’s dumping grounds blockaded the entrances and refused to allow more lorries in; they complained that, because of the potholed roads, too much refuse spilled off the lorries and landed on their doorsteps. During the monsoon, five municipal wards in North Calcutta became completely awash for days because the manholes were blocked with silt. No sooner had the monsoon departed than the city endured a water crisis, when four-fifths of the filtered supply was cut off for a week because a short circuit had badly damaged the main pumping station; and it was the best part of two months before water flowed normally again.

The United Front’s performance was only more confidently different from its first year in office. It began by moving to abolish the upper house in West Bengal’s legislature. It followed this soon afterwards by declaring a one-day strike of absolutely everything without exception in the state. There had been a riot
at the Cossipore Gun and Shell Factory, which was controlled by the Central Government in Delhi. Some six thousand workers had demonstrated outside the gate, before starting the morning shift, for the reinstatement of fifty-four men who had been sacked during the period of President’s Rule. The security officers had lost their nerve and opened fire on the demonstrators, killing four of them. At once, the Politbureau of the CPI (M) demanded that the security officers should be handed over to the West Bengal police. Delhi replied that it preferred to conduct its own enquiry into the conduct of its own men. So the United Front declared a strike. For twenty-four hours West Bengal was at a standstill. Trains came to a halt wherever they happened to be inside the state boundaries at four o’clock in the morning. Four international jet flights landed at Dum Dum and there they remained until the twenty-four hours were up. Otherwise,
nothing
moved in Calcutta. Even the telephone service was almost completely cut off. In Delhi, the Indian Home Minister, Mr Chavan, called this a ‘deliberate effort to bring the functioning of the economic system to a standstill’. In Calcutta, Jyoti Basu, speaking as he was to speak more and more frequently for the Government nominally led by Ajoy Mukherjee, said ‘We are happy at the justified and peaceful protest by the people.’ It hadn’t, in fact, been entirely peaceful. At Kanchrapara, in the 24 Parganas, a group of men turned up for duty at the railway workshops and began to fight the pickets there. Bombs were flung, huts and shops were set on fire, and when the police arrived they were bombed too.

The United Front pressed on with its unfinished business on the land. Three bills were passed through the Assembly, one of them exempting families with less than three acres from the
payment
of revenue, the other two aiming to protect tenants against eviction. Meanwhile, the landless peasants were again marching round the countryside with their red flags, staking out their claims. Six months after regaining his Land Ministry, Hare Krishna Konar was saying that another 200,000 acres had been retrieved by the poor of West Bengal in addition to the 150,000 acres they had taken possession of under the patronage of the first United Front; and, with the paddy harvest shortly to come,
he gave warning that his peasants ‘would resist any onslaught that might come from the jotedars, which would lead to a blood bath’.

The Government could see nothing like the same progress in industry, even though four months of hard bargaining were to produce a twenty per cent wage increase for 200,000 engineering workmen. There were businessmen in Calcutta at the time who publicly declared themselves confident of being able to work with the United Front; who, indeed, expressed relief at the prospect of what they were pleased to call the restoration of stable government in the state. The fact is that from the moment the United Front returned to office nothing more was heard of the proposed share to be borne by the business community in a joint financial venture with the state and national Governments for the relief of Calcutta. And, immediately, the United Front, had to deal with the by no means unique problem presented by the British firm of Westinghouse Saxby Farmer Ltd. This had been established in Calcutta since 1906; it manufactured railway equipment and it employed 1,700 men. It had expanded until 1965, when a recession occurred and it ceased to make a profit. In October 1968, while West Bengal was under President’s Rule, one of its senior directors flew to India and offered to sell the entire works to the Central Government for the sum of one rupee; the offer had not been accepted and the London directors had therefore decided to close the firm on 26 March 1969. There was no chance of getting them to change their mind, particularly as National and Grindlays Bank (which is perhaps the most
substantial
bank in the city) was refusing to grant an overdraft though the bank’s chairman, Lord Earlington, did fly to Calcutta to meet Jyoti Basu. It was Basu who wrote to the London
directors
of Westinghouse, asking, them at least to defer the closure, which they did for a month, and it was Basu who lobbied Mrs Gandhi for the Centre to take on what it clearly regarded as a liability. In the end, it was the United Front which had to accept the running of Westinghouse at a loss; by which time, two or three other concerns in similar predicaments were all asking the state Government to control them.

Whatever constructive industrial policy the Government might
have had, it lay in ruins by the end of the year. In August there was an eight-day strike in the jute industry which cost
£
4.5
millions
in lost production. In September there was a fortnight’s strike in the tea gardens which cost
£
1,390,000 in lost foreign exchange. In October the Dunlop factory laid off 6,000 workers and Hindustan Motors declared a lock-out of 13,000 workers. In 1967 there had been 438 industrial disputes in West Bengal,
involving
165,000 workers and a loss of 5 million man-hours. In 1968 there had been 417 disputes involving 263,000 workers and 6.7 million man-hours. In 1969 there were 710 disputes,
involving
645,000 workers and 8.5 million man-hours. The strikes and disputes surged from one end of the state to another and not even the most vital enterprises, such as the steel works of
Durgapur
or the rising dam at Farraka, were left out of the turbulence. Firms had started to answer workers in some of their own
currency
. Not far from a long and whitewashed wall slogan
inviting
everyone to ‘Stand by the side of struggling Birla workers’, it was possible to find another one which said ‘Don’t believe false propaganda by dismissed workers’, under the imprint of Jusla Drinks, Winners of the All-India Mango Competition. Some organizations began to buy newspaper space to put their point of view in advertisements. The West Bengal Business Convention asked readers of
The
Statesman
one morning to ‘CONSIDER FOR A MOMENT … Consumer trade is facing disruption. Essential commodities are becoming scarce. Retail market is threatened with non-availability of goods. With mounting
wharfage
, railway yards and transport depots are piled up with goods not being cleared. Before long, day to day business will come to a stand-still. A section of porters have stopped work. Others are being deprived of their daily earnings through intimidation. There is organized obstruction of movement of goods. Goods are being secured for ransom and penalties realized under duress. Threatening demonstrations and general lawlessness are
prevailing
in the vital trade centres. Feeling of panic and insecurity is assuming serious proportions. All this because a section of porters in wholesale and retail business centres have started an agitation demanding Bonus … Is this agitation really justified? Where will all this lead to? What will happen when the
consumer 
trade virtually collapses? Who will provide the solution?’