Calcutta (54 page)

Mukherjee and Basu met shortly afterwards and declined to say what had passed between them for ninety minutes. Next day the entire United Front held a meeting (which a headline in
The Statesman
described as ‘Infructuous’) at which virtually every other party in the Government accused the CPI (M) of being at the bottom of West Bengal’s current troubles. The general secretary of the Bangla Congress produced a list of relevant incidents; according to this there had been 378 murders since the Government was elected, in September alone there had been 40 inter-party riots, 36 head teachers had been forced to resign after persistent gheraos, and in 292 cases of riot the police had remained conspicuously inactive. The leader of the CPI said that the CPI (M) wanted to annihilate other parties. To all charges Jyoti Basu replied that the Bangla Congress figures were a fabrication, though he conceded police inaction, this being partly because he had been waiting for the United Front to draw up a code which would facilitate his own work.

For a month there was an uneasy peace round the Writers ‘Building. The new Governor of West Bengal, S. S. Dhavan, lately Indian High Commissioner in London, was at this stage telling the Indian Institute of Management at Barrackpore that those who counselled the working class to wait for better days did not even have the merit of practicability; for himself,’ I hate to be a Governor of a State of slaves’; and he wondered how anyone could expect Communism to be halted under the existing state of affairs in West Bengal. At almost the same moment, the friends of the British Council in Calcutta were carrying, by thirty-one votes to twenty-one, a motion regretting the
disappearance
of the gentleman from their society; a fact observable, some of them suggested, from the scarcity of males who now opened the door for females, or offered their seats to women on public transport. Ajoy Mukherjee had gone to Delhi, where he was telling a press conference that although there was a feeling
of insecurity to life and property in West Bengal, he was in no position to relieve Jyoti Basu of the Home portfolio and its
control
of the police. Nor was he willing to invite intervention by the Central Government. As for the possibility of resigning himself, he said, ‘I do not like that the Government should fall just now.’ He had one positive announcement to make. Together with 42,000 Bangla Congress supporters in his state, he would shortly be taking part in a satyagraha, a peaceful demonstration with fasting, in the grandest tradition of Mahatma Gandhi.

The three-day public fast began on 1 December at 104
different
places in West Bengal. The Chief Minister held his own in an elaborate tent in Curzon Park, where Lenin’s statue was shortly to be placed. He had the telephone installed and he brought his ministerial work with him from the Writers ‘Building, as the Minister of Industries did in the canvas compartment alongside him. Thus fortified with Government files, with blankets,
pillows
, mosquito nets and buckets, the most distinguished part of the state-wide satyagraha began at eight o’clock in the
morning
, to the chanting of Vedic hymns and recitations from the Koran. It was not a peaceful demonstration at all. Thousands turned up to file respectfully past the Chief Minister, to garland him with flowers and to make their dutiful bobs to him. A
journalist
who went along reported that ‘The Chief Minister was at times seen disposing of office files.’ But at noon a mob arrived, cut the telephone lines, smashed tables and chairs, tore down
curtains
and flung a variety of missiles around, two of which hit the Chief Minister in the face, before police came and peace was restored. There was more violence outside the tent the next day and Ajoy Mukherjee told a crowd of friendly demonstrators that the police in the state who were not in the good books of the administration were either being transferred or dismissed. On the third day in Curzon Park, when it was reckoned that 800,000 had visited the ministerial tent, Mukherjee told a great gathering at dusk that ‘If the people of West Bengal think that the present state of lawlessness should continue we shall silently bid them farewell. We shall quit. We shall never be a party to the prevailing barbarism.’ As Chief Minister, he said, he had tried his best to resolve the differences at various levels, within the
Cabinet and within the United Front. Again and again it had been pointed out that the United Front image was being
tarnished
. There had been prolonged discussions and pious
resolutions
on resolving the inter-party disputes. But the agreement was looked upon as a scrap of paper to be thrown into the dustbin. It had turned out to be a great hoax. The police were made inactive and then violence was let loose. ‘I could have appreciated their guts,’ he said, ‘if they had confronted the police while launching their campaign. Let the people judge if the charge of barbarism made by me is correct or not.’

For the next few weeks the Chief Minister was busy touring the country around Calcutta, making the same points again, with a number of embellishments. In Krishnagar he said he had been reduced to the role of silent onlooker in Government, that neither the police nor the district magistrates would obey his orders. In Durgapur he said that fifth-grade CPI (M) workers were
dictating
orders to policemen. In Howrah he invited Jyoti Basu and his party to sue for defamation. Basu, meanwhile, was keeping his own counsel for the most part. He told his constituents that any attempt to form an alternative Government without the CPI (M), which had just happened in Kerala on the subsidence of another United Front for superficially different reasons from those now plaguing West Bengal, would have serious consequences. He thought that in the Bangla Congress’s concern for law and order could be heard ‘the voices of the jotedars and the big
bourgeoisie
’. Curiously, almost nothing was heard from any of the other political leaders in Calcutta, although the Congress leader P. C. Sen had artfully tried to make some capital out of the satyagraha by congratulating the Chief Minister on his ‘
purificatory
fast’ while observing that he could scarcely shirk
responsibility
for the failure of law and order in the state. But from a dozen party bosses in the United Front there was silence now. It was as though they were waiting to see what outcome there might be between two gladiators, the ineffectual politician who could bank on considerable moral support from the public in the land of Gandhi, and the supremely skilful politician who in this jungle stood or fell in the end upon the strength of his own political machine.

If some kind of truce had been implicitly called, it had not much farther to go. But before it ended there was a moment which in any other context would have been glorious farce. The state Assembly was due to sit again, after its mid-winter break, for a Budget session in the third week of January. It was
proposed
that the week before there should be an informal meeting of the United Front for the settling of differences. The CPI leader had insisted that, as a matter of party prestige, the meeting should be held at the CPI offices. Several hours before it was due to begin, some party leaders decided that it should be held at the offices of the Lok Sevak Sangha party instead, and instructed the convenors to see to the change of plan. Unfortunately the message never got right round the United Front; it had rather a long way to travel, after all. Five o’clock came with Ajoy Mukherjee and representatives of the Gorkha League, the
Forward
Bloc and the Socialist Unity Centre sitting with their hosts of the CPI, while Jyoti Basu, together with members of the Revolutionary Socialist Party, the Workers’ Party of India and the LSS, were gathering in another building at the other side of the city. A handful of Bolsheviks, members of the
Samyukta
Socialist Party, Revolutionary Communist Party of India and Forward Bloc (Marxist) had managed to distribute
themselves
in roughly equal proportions at both meetings. And there, for the next hour or so, the two groups sat, looking at their watches, wondering what new plot had now been hatched,
consuming
tea and toast (at the CPI office) or more seasonable Bengali delicacies (on the premises of the LSS).

There was to be no more fun and games in Calcutta for a long time, now. The Budget session began with the Chief Minister having to fight his way along the corridors of the Assembly, through a mob demonstrating against police
interference
in a riot at a school in Beliaghata the night before. It had scarcely started to debate West Bengal’s collapsing economy than Mukherjee and Basu were making public two long letters they had written to each other, extraordinary documents of perhaps ten thousand words apiece, in which a variety of British
politicians
from Winston Churchill to Harold Wilson were cited. Mukherjee’s share in this correspondence was first into the public
prints, accusing Basu of giving away state secrets about a recent intervention in police affairs by the Chief Minister, who had cancelled an order made by the Home Department for the
withdrawal
of eight criminal cases and for the transfer of a police officer. Basu’s reply was that it had been necessary to make public some facts because of the Chief Minister’s objectionable
propaganda
and that ‘Your dissertation on the provisions of the
Constitution
will do much credit to a schoolboy.’

No hope remained of healing the breach between the two leaders after this windy exchange or, by extension, of saving the United Front. Mukherjee’s response to Basu’s letter was to warn him of the legal consequences that could follow the violation of a ministerial oath of secrecy. A week later, in the Assembly, the Chief Minister repeated that his Government was now
uncivilized
and barbarous, and when a member of the CPI (M) jeered at him he turned in his temper and thrust an old Congress grudge at the Communists. ‘Don’t you feel ashamed?’ he shouted. ‘I was in politics before you were born. When we fought for freedom, you were acting as agents for the British.’ Somehow, the
Assembly
stumbled onto even harsher facts of life in Calcutta and West Bengal. Mukherjee himself was obliged to announce that the Budget Estimates showed a deficit of Rs 405 millions. The United Front had inherited a deficit of Rs 250 millions twelve months before but now, he said, unless production in the state could somehow be increased, ‘we shall have little to distribute except poverty’.

And terror. For the Chief Minister had not exaggerated in the least during his eccentric denunciations of the lawlessness
flowing
from his Government. Violence had been there throughout the year, but since 1946 Calcutta had not known greater
violence
than that which raged through the city from the start of 1970, during the last few weeks of the United Front. Before then, there had been the customary violence of Calcutta – a rickshaw runner strangled for refusing to subscribe ten paise to a collection for an impromptu concert in the street at Dum Dum, three people killed when 10,000 rioted in Burrabazar, barricaded the roads with handcarts and tar boilers and set fire to cars and a fire engine. There had been a spate of bank robberies with gun play
during 1969 and early in the New Year there was another one in Park Street, which led to the arrest of Ananta Singh, who had been a great Bengali hero in the Chittagong Armoury Raid against the British forty years before. More dreadful things than bank raids began to happen now.

Almost every day brought massive riots, which the police could no longer control even with firearms because they were outnumbered. On one night, seven cinemas were bombed
simultaneously
, one of them was set on fire, and everybody blamed the Naxalites. From time to time there would be an explosion in a house and rescuers rushing into the wreckage would
discover
the mangled bodies of youths who had been making bombs. An ambulance which picked up an injured man after a street battle was mobbed and its drivers were held at the point of pistols and knives while their patient was dragged out and stabbed. Couples coming out of cinemas to their cars were
surrounded
and stripped of their clothing. Women had their
jewellery
taken by men threatening them with knives; occasionally they were raped into the bargain. At the Racecourse one
afternoon
in January a crowd suddenly turned on the stands, the weighing rooms, the restaurants and the offices of the Royal
Calcutta
Turf Club and started to wreck and set fire to them. And, for the first time since the most violent years of the Raj,
Europeans
were now being attacked in Calcutta. At the Racecourse riot the wife of an official in the British High Commission had her necklace torn off by a man who reached to grab it through her open car window, while the wife of the West German Consul was injured when her car was surrounded by a mob carrying burning timbers. A week later, the wife of the French Consul was hacked to death in her bed one night, and her badly injured
husband
survived only because their son rushed into the room with a sword and frightened the three goondas away. The streets of Central Calcutta now became deserted after dusk by people too frightened to move out of their homes. And when, on 9 March, Ajoy Mukherjee announced that he and his Bangla Congress supporters would be resigning from the Government a week later, there was such a panic that, within hours, every
forthcoming
flight by Indian Airlines from Calcutta to Bombay, Delhi and
elsewhere in the land, was completely booked up by businessmen and their families fearful of a greater wrath to come.

The statement of resignation said what had been said time and time again for months now. ‘The 32-point programme which was pledged before the electorate on the eve of mid-term election has not been implemented as it should have been because of the atrocious, aggressive, high-handed and fascist activities of the CPI (M) … In spite of some spectacular achievements in some spheres, the number of unemployed in the state is on the increase. During the rule of the United Front, unbridled chaos and
disturbances
have taken place all over the state. The state
machinery
has become the pathetic onlooker in almost all activities of vandalism and barbarism. In fact, a reign of terror has been established by the CPI (M) in different parts of the state,
including
the metropolitan city of Calcutta.’ There was an attempt to cobble up an alternative Government after this, but it was a pointless exercise, as everyone well knew who took part in it. Even Jyoti Basu, standing before another huge Maidan rally the day before Mukherjee abandoned his seals of office, was making no more than a rhetorical gesture when he told his followers that the CPI (M) had a right to lead Government in these
circumstances
.