Tripura
Ends CPM Tedium By Trading Decency For False Eldorado
Saeed Naqvi
The extraordinary feat the BJP has pulled
off leaves one breathless. Which other Chief Minister in the country will have
a decorated Director General of Police, B.L. Vohra, write in his book,
Tripura’s Bravehearts, “Manik Sarkar was definitely unlike any Chief Ministers
whom I had seen, met, worked with and heard about…. He was honest personally
and that had percolated down to all echelons of the government – again one cannot find many examples
of his ilk unfortunately in the country.” This level of decency has been traded
by the Tripura electorate for mobs who pull down statues.
The universal assessment of Manik Sarkar
even among opposition leaders in Tripura would flatter any politician. It was
not just that he was himself a gentleman but he appeared to have instilled his
qualities in his cabinet colleagues and the administration across the board. By
all accounts his predecessor and Guru, Nripen Chakraborty, was even more
admirable. The staff in the Chief Minister’s house had never ever dreamt that
they would serve a boss whose groceries were purchased on a ration card and who
never saved enough money to open a bank account. This may be syrupy stuff in an
era when materialism is the mantra, but do, for a moment, reflect on the
Chakraborty-Sarkar duo against the amoral wasteland that stretches as far as
the eye can see.
Also, it is elementary that 25 years of
CPM rule could not have lasted only because of the leadership’s decency.
Despite the economic crunch, the government in Agartala implemented every
central scheme with greater efficiency than any other state. 96% literacy? Show
me another state. The gender ratio is something of a record. That is how
Tripura’s middle class was created. True, having created a new middle class,
the government found itself flat footed. It could not cope with the next stage
of aspirations. It produced distributive justice but found itself bereft of
ideas to generate wealth to accommodate the educated unemployed and to promote
two wheel drivers to the four wheel level.
Upon arrival in Agartala I was able to
find accommodation only in a government guest house. When I asked the CM if the
absence of reasonable hotels was state policy, he was frank: “we are not in a
position to cope with social imbalances that come with five star hotels, bars
and restaurants.”
This may sound odd, but the reasons for
the rout of the CPM in Tripura are, to some extent, similar to the ones
responsible for the decline of West Indian cricket.
Never again will the likes of Weekes,
Sobers, Viv Richards, Michael Holding and Brian Lara adorn world cricket. In
the 70s and the 80s, the West Indies cricket team was like Don Bradman’s
invincibles. The culture of cricket was their inheritance from the British
colonial period.
Aggressive globalization of the 90s,
placed the West Indies in the sphere of American media. US centered television
beamed at the islanders not cricketers but basketball and baseball stars like
Michael Jordan and Jose Ramirez, with proselytizing persistence. Within a
generation, all that remained of the cricketing legends were their fading
photographs in the scrap books of schoolboys of the 80s in former British
colonies.
A CPM government in Tripura was, likewise,
as remote from any Left ruled enclave as the West Indies are from cricket’s
birth place. After the end of Left rule in West Bengal, it had no structure to
lean on. In this friendless era it was exposed to hostile TV bombardment. Riding
the crest of economic liberalization, market fundamentalism galloped at
breakneck speed to accommodate advertising for rampaging consumerism marketed
by dream merchants, architects of plush malls and multiplexes.
CPM Chief Minister, Manik Sarkar’s
controlled austerities withstood this barrage of televised razzmatazz for 25
years. By this time another generation had arisen, torn between a lifestyle of
simplicity and the Eldorado on the horizon that metropolitan centres of control
teased and tempted them with.
Agartala is in trauma. Before they find
their feet, the stunned CPM cadres are having to adjust to another reality:
Party sympathizers are suddenly not making eye contact with them. Some, with an
eye on the main chance, have been seen on the margins of mobs attacking CPM
offices, even pulling down of the Lenin statue.
To a considerable extent, the outcome in
Tripura and elsewhere in the North East is the Congress’s gift to the BJP. Himanta
Biswa Sarma, a genius in electoral management, walked out of the Congress because
he could not bear Rahul Gandhi’s insulting silences. Tarun Gagoi, the former
Assam Chief Minister, was eager to create his own dynasty, make his son Gaurav
the Chief Minister. This would cut out Sarma whose political brilliance
underpinned the latter half of the Gogoi years.
This kind of a dynamo, backed by money
power that would make Nirav Modi salivate and an adversarial centre controlling
the purse strings – this is how the
Left was uprooted in Tripura. Just imagine, when state after state is
implementing the 7th pay commission, Tripura found itself stranded
at the 4th pay commission. CPM dogma also stood in the way: “7th
pay commission made some demands which were anti people.”
The change of cultures was imminent from
the day the BJP planted Tathagata Roy as Governor of Tripura. The genteel tone
of Chakraborty-Sarkar gave way to a inelegant vocabulary. “They should be
buried head first in pig’s excreta”, said the Governor by way of a
recommendation for dealing with terrorists.
Pulling down of statues is a milder form
of retribution compared to the coarse standards set by the Governor.
# # # #
No comments:
Post a Comment