Thursday, December 3, 2015

THE ART OF POLITICAL BAD MANNERS

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.