This column in the Telegraph of 29 July 2003 was about the war of words between Atal Bihari Vajpayee and Buddhadev Bhattacharjee after the Prime Minister criticized the performance of the chief minister's CPM government in his address to the 150th anniversary conference of Bengal Chamber of Commerce.
Keep it cool, Bengalis!
The Prime Minister could not have
wished for a better response to his remarks in Calcutta on West Bengal’s poor
economic record. The chief minister, at whom the comments were directed,
listened quietly like a mouse. He gave the Prime Minister a monopoly of the
sound waves; it was translated into a monopoly of media headlines the next day.
Then the lion within the chief minister woke up. He barged into a meeting,
screeched to a full stop and launched a scathing counterattack. The theme was
that in some respects West Bengal had done quite well.
The merits of the debate do not
concern me at the moment. It is the tactics that are important. The PM spoke at
an occasion that was bound to be covered by the national media; so his words
reached smirking Tamils, Kannadas, Gujaratis and Punjabis. The CM chose a place
where some local reporters were present; so whilst his remarks got top billing
in Calcutta, they barely managed the bottom of page 11 in national newspapers.
And he made a surprise attack: the journalists had not expected him to grow
muscles so suddenly and to show them off at that point. So they had to scramble
inside their back pockets and scribble up his reports on whatever paper they
found there. One even wrote everything down on a visiting card; no wonder his
report was based more on imagination than on what the CM really said. To put it
briefly, the CM was maladroit.
And who are the adroit West
Bengal politicians? Jyoti Basu is a great speaker, but he never misses a chance
to make his distaste for the Delhi rulers clear. Ashim Dasgupta is a good
rhetorician (I have heard that he was once a good economist, but I have not
come across any signs of it); but he harangues. And Somnath Chatterjee makes
buildings quake. If I wanted Rs 5 billion for jute mills, these are not the
persuaders I would unleash on the center.
Who else? I guess I am closer to
West Bengal than most other foreigners; but I cannot think of a third. Although
they call themselves communists, the CPM leaders run a pretty feudal government
in West Bengal. The leader speaks; the rest gulp. A leader emerges from these
communist masses once in thirty years; for the rest of the time, the masses
scurry about like mice. I believe Sonia learnt to hold her biannual jamborees
from CPM, which has been having them for decades. But the use she puts them to
is quite different from theirs. She actually sits there most of the time and
listens; outside the meeting she talks to many. The Congress meetings are
consultations; although most of the time is taken by boring, hagiographic
speeches, Sonia still has been trying to give the meetings an agenda and a
structure. The chief ministers have to explain and justify what they have
achieved. They have to listen to others who have done better. If one looks at
the successive conferences, one can see that the Congress is very slowly
turning into a learning organization. Although the CPM has been following the
process far longer than the Congress, it has made no difference to how it has
governed West Bengal.
