India After Independence: 1947-2000 (52 page)

Since the late nineteenth century and especially after independence, a certain cultural renaissance had taken place enhancing people’s pride in language, culture, literature, folk art and music in Assam. Even while becoming a part of the Indian nation-in-the-making, a distinct Assamese linguistic and cultural identity had emerged. The process was a complex one, given the state’s cultural, linguistic and religious diversity. Many Assamese felt that the development and consolidation of a wider Assamese identity, by the gradual assimilation of Assamese tribes, was prevented by the central government’s decision to separate large tribal areas from Assam and create small non-viable states such as Meghalaya, Nagaland, Mizoram and Arunachal Pradesh.

The demographic transformation of Assam created apprehension among many Assamese that the swamping of Assam by foreigners and non-Assamese Indians would lead to the Assamese being reduced to a minority in their own land and consequently to the subordination of their language and culture, loss of control over their economy and politics, and, in the end, the loss of their very identity and individuality as a people.

There was undoubtedly a basis for these fears. In 1971, Assamese-speaking persons constituted only 59 per cent of Assam’s population. This percentage covered a large number of Bengali speakers, many of whom had in the course of time and as a result of generational change also learnt Assamese and had given the census-enumerators Assamese as their mother tongue because of pure political expediency. Moreover, Assamese speakers lacked a majority in Guwahati and several other towns, which are the main habitat of literature, the Press, culture, modern economy and politics.

Though illegal migration had surfaced as a political matter several times since 1950, it burst as a major issue in 1979 when it became clear that a large number of illegal immigrants from Bangladesh had become voters in the state. Afraid of their acquiring a dominant role in Assam’s politics through the coming election at the end of 1979, the All Assam Students Union (AASU) and the Assam Gana Sangram Parishad (Assam People’s Struggle Council), a coalition of regional political, literary and cultural associations, started a massive, anti-illegal migration movement. This campaign won the support of virtually all sections of Assamese speakers, Hindu or Muslim, and many Bengalis.

The leaders of the movement claimed that the number of illegal aliens was as high as 31 to 34 per cent of the state’s total population. They, therefore, asked the central government to seal Assam’s borders to prevent further inflow of migrants, to identify all illegal aliens and delete their names from the voters list and to postpone elections till this was done, and to deport or disperse to other parts of India all those who had entered the state after 1961. So strong was the popular support to the movement that elections could not be held in fourteen out of sixteen parliamentary constituencies.

The years from 1979 to 1985 witnessed political instability in the state, collapse of state governments, imposition of President’s Rule, sustained, often violent, agitation, frequent general strikes, civil disobedience
campaigns which paralyzed all normal life for prolonged periods, and unprecedented ethnic violence. For several years there were repeated rounds of negotiations between the leaders of the movement and the central government, but no agreement could be reached. It was not easy to determine who were the illegal aliens or ‘foreigners’ or how to go about detecting or deporting them. There was also lack of goodwill and trust between the two sides.

The central government’s effort to hold a constitutionally mandated election to the state assembly in 1983 led to its near total boycott, a complete breakdown of order, and the worst killings since 1947 on the basis of tribal linguistic and communal identities. Nearly 3,000 people died in state-wide violence. The election proved to be a complete failure with less than 2 per cent of the voters casting their votes in the constituencies with Assamese majority. The Congress party did form the government, but it had no legitimacy at all.

The 1983 violence had a traumatic effect on both sides which once again resumed negotiations in earnest. Finally, the Rajiv Gandhi government was able to sign an accord with the leaders of the movement on 15 August 1985. All those foreigners who had entered Assam between 1951 and 1961 were to be given full citizenship, including the right to vote; those who had done so after 1971 were to be deported; the entrants between 1961 and 1971 were to be denied voting rights for ten years but would enjoy all other rights of citizenship. A parallel package for the economic development of Assam, including a second oil refinery, a paper mill and an institute of technology, was also worked out. The central government also promised to provide ‘legislative and administrative safeguards to protect the cultural, social, and linguistic identity and heritage’ of the Assamese people.

The task of revising the electoral rolls on the basis of the agreement was now taken up in earnest. The existing assembly was dissolved and fresh electrons held in December 1985. A new party, Assam Gana Parishad (AGP), formed by the leaders of the anti-foreigners movement, was elected to power, winning 64 of the 126 assembly seats. Prafulla Mahanta, an AASU leader, became at the age of thirty-two the youngest chief minister of independent India. Extreme and prolonged political turbulence in Assam ended, though fresh insurgencies were to come up later on, for example that of the Bodo tribes for a separate state and of the secessionist United Liberation Front of Assam (ULFA).

Experience in Assam since 1985 has shown that while it was and is necessary to stop the entry of foreigners, massive detection and deportation of the existing illegal entrants has not been easy and perhaps was not possible. Expulsion of old or recent minorities of all types was not the answer. Rather their gradual integration and assimilation into the Assamese identity was the only long-term and realistic solution. Chauvinism, whether in the form of their exclusion or their forceful elimination would only disturb and weaken the historical process of Assamese identity-in-the-making.

It is noteworthy that the Assam anti-foreigners movement was not communal or secessionist or disruptive of the nation in any other form. It was therefore possible for the central government and the all-India political parties to negotiate and accommodate its demands, even though they were sometimes exaggerated and unrealistic.

There were elements in the Assam movement, such as RSS, which wanted to give it a communal twist because most of the illegal aliens were Muslims. Similarly, some others wanted to give the movement a chauvinist, xenophobic, Assamese colour. The movement, however, succeeded in avoiding both these eventualities because of the non-communal cultural tradition of the Assamese, the role of the national parties such as the CPI, CPM and large parts of Congress, and the wide base of the movement and leadership among Assamese Muslims and Bengalis. Undoubtedly, the movement suffered from many weaknesses; but, then, no movement is generated and develops according to a blue-print.

The conflict in Assam and its resolution again showed that while communal and secessionist movements disruptive of the nation cannot be accommodated and have to be opposed and defeated, it is quite possible and, in fact, necessary to accommodate politics of identity based on language or culture, or economic deprivation and inequality, for they are quite compatible with progressive and secular nationalism.

West Bengal presents the case of a Communist government that came to power through the parliamentary process and has functioned according to the rules of a democratic and civil libertarian polity and under conditions of a capitalist economy, though with the presence of a strong public sector. This government has ruled the state for over twenty years, winning five state elections so far in a row, and given people on the whole an effective, reformist government.

The Congress government in Bengal had not performed badly till the early sixties. Despite dislocation and disruption of the economy due to the partition of Bengal and the refugee influx of over four million coming from East Bengal till 1965, the government had been able to provide economic stability. West Bengal had maintained its position for industry in the hierarchy of states. There was marked progress in the public health programme, electricity generation and road construction. The government, however, had failed on two major fronts; unemployment among the educated and the rural landless grew continuously, and, while the zamindari system had been abolished, the power of the intermediary jotedars and landlords over sharecroppers and tenants was not curbed.

Since 1930 the Communist party had enjoyed significant support among intellectual and workers in Calcutta, and it emerged as a major political force in Bengal by 1947. The united CPI in the fifties and CPM in the sixties and seventies organized a large number of mass movements and trade-union struggles, including gheraos during 1967-69, and combined them with an effective use of the legislature to ‘expose the government’s misdeeds.’ As a result there was a steady growth of the united CPI and later CPM, both electorally and organizationally. Congress was defeated in the state elections of 1967 and 1969 and United Front governments led by breakaway groups from Congress and with CPM participation were formed. Both United Front governments broke up because of internal contradictions but they added to CPM’s popularity. During these years
CPM was also able to organize massive agrarian movements of the tenants and sharecroppers and thus extend its political base to rural areas.

During the decade of 1967-77, West Bengal witnessed increasing violence and chaos, a crisis of governability, heightened factionalism and splits in Congress, which ruled the state directly or through President’s Rule from 1969 to 1977. Unprecedented levels of state repression were especially directed-against the Naxalites and the movements of the rural poor. In the end CPM’s popularity, combined with the mass reaction against the Emergency, was transformed into an electoral victory in 1977, and CPM, along with its left allies, was able to form the government, Since then CPM has further consolidated its power and entrenched itself, especially among the peasantry. It has succeeded in maintaining the left coalition as well as control of the government during the last twenty-seven years, and through five assembly elections.

Two significant achievements of the CPM are worthy of analysis, in terms of improving the conditions of the rural poor. The first one has been in the field of land reform or rather tenancy reform. Though the Congress government had done away with the zamindari system in the fifties it had allowed two aberrations:
jotedars
(intermediaries for rent collection between zamindars and sharecroppers who were the actual cultivators) were permitted to stay, and many large landowners allowed to retain above-ceiling land through
benami
transactions.

After coming to power CPM launched the programme called ‘Operation Barga’ (discussed in detail in chapter 28) which reformed the tenancy system in the interests of the
bargadars
(sharecroppers), who constituted nearly 25 per cent of the rural households. For decades, sharecroppers had suffered from the two ills of (1) insecurity of tenure, for their tenancy was not registered, though law provided for permanency of tenure, and (2) high, illegal levels of the share of the crops they had to give to jotedars as rent. Through Operation Barga, which included politicization and mobilization of sharecroppers by the party and peasant organizations, the government secured legal registration of the sharecroppers, thus giving them permanent lease of the land they cultivated and security of tenure, and enforced laws regarding the share of the produce they could retain, thus improving their income.

The decision to drastically reform the jotedari system in the interests of the sharecroppers but not end it in toto was a brilliant political tactic. Jotedars were of all sizes. The small and middle-sized jotedars were large in number. Moreover, many of them were simultaneously cultivators on their own land as rich and middle peasants. Some of them were petty shopkeepers in villages and teachers, clerks, chaprasis, etc., in towns and cities. As such, in terms of both sociopolitical power and electoral clout and the interests of increased agricultural production they mattered—they could not be totally antagonized. Their economic power and income could
be limited by reducing their crop-share and giving permanency of tenure to sharecroppers, but their rent-share and therefore income and ownership of land could not be completely abolished. After all, elections can be won only by a broad coalition, i.e., on the basis of broad-based political support, which would have to include, and at least not permanently and completely alienate, a significant section of rural society, consisting of small jotedars, who also happened to be rich and middle peasants and small shopkeepers. This strata was, moreover, capable of politically influencing and mobilizing a large number of small peasants and the rural and urban lower-middle classes. The party therefore treated only the large and absentee landowners as permanent ‘class-enemies’.

Significantly, reform of the jotedari system provided the incentive to all concerned to increase production. It became a contributory factor in the ushering in of the Green Revolution and multi-cropping, leading to increase in income of both sharecroppers and jotedars. It also enabled those jotedars who were cultivators to concentrate on increasing production.

For political and administrative reasons, the CPM government took up the tasks of unearthing benami above-ceiling land and its distribution to the landless with great caution, spread over several years, lest the rich peasants went over
en bloc
to the Opposition. The government supplemented tenancy and land reform measures with programmes for providing cheap credit to sharecroppers and small peasants, saving them in the bargain from the clutches of the moneylenders. The Congress government at the Centre had evolved several schemes for providing subsidized low interest loans through nationalized and cooperative banks to peasants and specially to landless labourers and small peasants for investment in Green Revolution technologies. The West Bengal state government was one of the few which successfully implemented these schemes with the help of panchayats and party and peasants’ organizations.

The second major achievement of the West Bengal government has been its restructuring and transformation of the Panchayati Raj institutions, through which the rural poor, the middle peasants and the rural intelligentsia were empowered, or enabled to share in political power at the local level.

The Panchayat Raj experiment of the sixties had failed in West Bengal as also in whole of India because of the domination of its village, taluka and district institutions by the economically or socially privileged sections of rural society and by the local and district bureaucracy. It had yielded no benefits to weaker sections.

The CPM government and the party ousted the large landowners and other dominant social groups from the Panchayati Raj institutions—district-level zilla parishads, block-level panchayati samitis and village-level gram panchayats—involved the rural lower and lower-middle classes, teachers, and social and political workers, brought the bureaucracy under their control, and strengthened their authority and financial resources.

In addition, the CPM government took several other steps to improve the social condition of the landless. Its record of implementing centrally financed anti-poverty and employment generating schemes was not
unblemished but was better than that of other states. The ‘Food for Work’ programme in particular was implemented effectively to generate jobs for the landless. Moreover, the West Bengal government took up projects, such as road construction, drainage and cleansing of irrigation channels and village tanks which were meaningful from the point of view of the lower classes in the villages and tried to implement them through the reformed Panchayati Raj institutions so that the opportunities for corruption were drastically reduced.

CPM also speeded up the organization of agricultural labourers and regularly organized mass struggle for higher wages. Interestingly, rather than concentrate on taking away land from rich peasants, and distribute it among the agricultural labourers and thus equalize landownership, CPM concentrated on enhancing the latter’s capacity to struggle for higher wages. The success of the Green Revolution strategy and multi-cropping also resulted in greater employment as well as increase in wages in the countryside throughout the eighties and nineties.

The CPM government’s record in containing communal violence has been one of the best in the country. Despite having a high ratio of Muslims in the population and the large influx of Hindu refugees from East Bengal, West Bengal remained relatively free of communal violence. In 1984, it successfully contained the communal fallout of Indira Gandhi’s assassination and in December 1992 of the Babri Mosque’s demolition. The CPM also did not permit the growth of casteism and caste violence in West Bengal.

In 1986, the Gorkha National Libration Front (GNLF) organized under the leadership of Subhash Gheising, a militant, often violent, agitation in the hill district of Darjeeling in West Bengal around the demand for a separate Gorkha state. Following negotiations between GNLF and the central and state governments, a tripartite accord was signed in Calcutta in August 1988, under which the semi-autonomous Darjeeling Gorkha Hill Council, within the state of West Bengal, came into being. The Council had wide control over finance, education, health, agriculture and economic development.

Overall, CPM has succeeded in giving West Bengal a moderately effective and on the whole non-corrupt, and relatively violence-free government, especially in rural areas. It has also held its alliance with other smaller left parties, i.e., CPI, Revolutionary Socialist Party and Forward Bloc. The worst of poverty and naked oppression by the dominant classes in rural areas has been mitigated in some measure. CPM has also successfully checked and even reversed the role of the police and lower bureaucracy as the tools of the rural rich and as the oppressors and exploiters of the rural poor. The support of the rural poor is the reason why the party has remained in power in West Bengal for as long as it has.

The urban sector and the field of industrial development have emerged as
the vulnerable areas of the CPM government. Unlike in the countryside, it has been unable to find suitable structures or forms to work properly the institutions through which civic problems could be solved and the urban people involved in civic affairs. There has been no replica of Panchayati Raj in the cities. Before 1977, CPM had organized struggles of urban citizens for higher wages and salaries and cheaper urban facilities such as transport. These struggles could obviously not continue for long under a CPM administration. Consequently, the deterioration in the urban infrastructural facilities as well as in the quality of life that began under Congress rule has continued under CPM rule in most of West Bengal’s towns and cities.

But the most important weakness of the CPM government has been the failure to develop industry and trade because of the absence of any theory or strategy of economic development, of industrialization, of large-scale creation of jobs in a situation where a state is ruled by a Communist party while the country as a whole is not. There can be no removal of poverty, or long-term improvement in the living conditions of the mass of rural landless, or large-scale redistribution of wealth, or a meaningful dent in the burgeoning urban and rural unemployment without rapid industrialization and significant overall economic development and the resultant creation of jobs in industry, trade and services.

This is particularly true of West Bengal where the landless and marginal farmers constitute nearly half the rural population who cannot be absorbed on any significant scale in agriculture. But how can this economic development be integrated with the socialist orientation of the government and the ruling party? The CPM did not even undertake to find an answer to this pressing issue, what to speak of taking up the task.

Large-scale flight of capital from West Bengal had taken place during 1967-1975 as a result of near administrative anarchy, gheraos and bandhs and labour militancy. After coming to power in 1977, the CPM did try to deal with the problem of capitalist investment in the state in a pragmatic manner. It began to restrain labour militancy, so much so, that in a few years West Bengal came to have more industrial peace than most other parts of the country. West Bengal under CPM displayed one of the best records in the maintenance of law and order. The CPM no longer threatened property-owners; on the contrary the government began offering numerous incentives to capitalists, both Indian and foreign, to invest in West Bengal. But the capitalists did not respond and were not inclined to come back to West Bengal and to make fresh investments there in the field of industrial activity.

An important reason for the capitalists’ staying away from the state has been lack of work culture and accountability, a malaise that has been difficult to cure. The real problem, however, has been that the potential investors are not willing to trust a Communist government and a Communist party. Most of them believe that the leopard can disguise its spots but not change its nature. The problem is intractable and the party’s dilemma is inherent in a situation where it is committed to the abolition
of capitalism, however gradually, and has acquired partial and limited power in a state of the union. This difficulty could have been foreseen.