I want to know why most CPM bigwigs discuss poverty and communism happily when they themselves are neither regular farmers or workers.
Go ask them. Why should I answer for their stupidity? If I had to, I would attribute it to their being f***ing Communist babus - in it for the regular employment and the predictable nature of work, and the guarantee of a lifelong job. But it's still for them to own up to it, not for a liberal democrat like me who loathes the BJP, the Congress and the CPM in that order.
I am talking about CPM alone,i see people of all castes in it as CPM cadre,i am not talking on the basis of caste or religion.
You mean once they are CPM, they lose caste and religion? Are you talking about the concept of declasse?
It's a mistake.
They remain caste-ridden scoundrels. You can't take caste out of Indian politics. We have a long way to go for that to happen: we need reservations to enable several generations more of the Dalit, we need these enabled generations to earn shoulder to shoulder with the upper castes, and be able to match vulgarities in social practices, during celebration of birth, weddings and death, in apparel, in choice of housing and transportation and entertainment and holiday destination, in every external vulgarity, in short, quite apart from achieving decent sufficiency in terms of health care and education and access to public services without undergoing grinding humiliation.
The Communists managed to make themselves superbly irrelevant by managing to cling on to caste, and by managing to make yet another occupation, at best a vocation, out of being full-time Communists.
And you are highly mistaken if you think Communism destroyed Bengal. Communists destroyed Bengal; they did it by committing a number of crimes against Marxism as it is known in the rest of the world, and adopting extreme populism coupled with organised, institutional kleptocracy.
I have been to Bengal and even beyond to Assam,I am talking about the Naxalite movement,Charu Mazumdar,Inability to fight against Bangladeshi Immigration,supporting and hiding the same people who voted for a separate country,i am talking in general about the political culture of Bengal and the skewness of it.
If you think all these things, you are a poster case of the defects of today's anti-humanist education, of the trouble with our steroid-driven growth of our education system.
Take your bugbears one at a time.
The Naxalites started as an agricultural, rural movement. The seeds of this were in the 40s and the 50s, in the 'tebhaga' movement, in the movement for limiting the landlord's share to one-third the produce (they used to take away half). Because none of the intervening governments actually reformed land-holding as they should have, and left huge tracts in the hands of the former zamindar, a condition that continues in most of north India and Andhra, share-croppers (=tenant farmers) fell further and further behind. Landlords took away vast proportions of the produce. Charu Mazumdar was a CPM activist who brought in the twenty-year old Tebhaga practices of chasing out or of killing landlords. His political interpretation of the objective condition of the Indian state was interesting, but since we are not discussing communist doctrine here, it is not relevant.
The mainstream party was appalled. It had been lectured and scolded by Stalin into cooperation with the Indian state, it had split at the time of Chinese aggression, into a sleepy and increasingly sidelined conservative wing which at times acted as the left wing of the Congress, and into a supposedly radical version, which was different only in that it took up trade unionism as the backbone of their movement, and it rapidly became hungry for exercising state power. Now, just as they were playing their end-game, some crazy radical out in a corner of the state starting killing policemen. So they expelled those radicals - Charu Mazumdar, and Kanu Sanyal and Jangal Santhal, and while you're at it, look at the castes - and set the police on them. The rest, as they say, was history.
Nothing Bengali about it. More or less the same things happened in a different sequence and with different, less publicly known figures, in Bihar, in Jharkhand, even in bucolic corners of Maharashtra, in Kerala, and hugely in Telangana and in Andhra.
Next on your list was the inability to fight against Bangladeshi immigration.
It happens when you are neighbouring a dirt poor country. In the 50s and 60s, East Pakistan was way behind West Bengal, for whatever reason (I don't want a Pakistani bucko jumping into the conversation with undeniable proof that Pakistan was richer then, is richer now and will be richer for ever in the future). So there was a constant trickle of people coming over, into Bengal, into Assam, heck, into Tripura. They were nurtured by local politicians, and they grew.
So how does this become something Bengali? I could argue with greater evidence on my side that it was typically Assamese.
Then you repeated yourself, so that was done.
Finally, the skewness of Bengali politics.
Huh? As compared to what? Had you really been following politics around the country? Apart from the Communist tag to the ruling party, what was distinctively Bengali about this situation?
I am not counting on Modi or BJP to win anything in Bengal so far,neither in Calcutta nor elsewhere.
Progress.
We'll cure you yet.
I dont know the pulse of Bengalis and how they view the CPM or Mamta.
That's great. That now qualifies you as an expert on matters within Bengal.
I know enough about Kerala and how things work there and their communist culture of talking and not working.
You summed up the problem I have. To you, the experience you have of communists in Kerala is now a general theme that can be applied to communists everywhere. How can we universalise it? Considering that the basics are so different in the two states, they are chalk and cheese.
I dont know the pulse of Bengalis and how they view the CPM or Mamta.
That's great. That now qualifies you as an expert on matters within Bengal.
Bengal's decline is not your business but as a Bengali,you have to own upto it just like i have to own upto what happened in TamilNadu,even if my own family might have nothing to do with it.
Once again, I am baffled. Why should I 'own' up to it, like some schoolboy acknowledging his authorship of a lake of blue-black ink?
I dont know the pulse of Bengalis and how they view the CPM or Mamta.
That's great. That now qualifies you as an expert on matters within Bengal.
I am not saying without NRN,there is no IT in India but as someone growing up in the 90s,the role of Infosys in creating aspirations amongst the children/students cant be ruled out.
He certainly didn't do charity and kept his brand and solved his needs of human capital but it is still worth everything.
My point about the Licence Raj is again proven as they watched things happen and do nothing about it because it was beyond their control.
Coming to the point here,as one of the main guys of Infosys,his opinion about Modi's governance and his ability in making processes efficient is worth its weight as against a common man's perception.
This last section is different in tenor from the others, and I shall answer it separately.