Malevolent Mamata and the Dance of Death in West Bengal
Arindam Sen
Safar Molla, an enterprising marginal farmer of Kaltikuri village in Bardhaman district, had lost his father at an early age and had been maintaining the family since then against heavy odds. Thanks to spiralling input prices including irrigation costs, he had to take loans and leave some bills unpaid, expecting a bumper paddy crop that would allow him to pay back. And a bumper harvest it indeed was! But he could not be happy. The market price was clearly lower than his cultivation costs. With no help from the government forthcoming, there was no way he could pay the bills and save his and his family’s honour. On 18 November he consumed some of the pesticide he had bought to protect his well-cared crops. He was only 17. Before and after him some 30 peasants, including a few sharecroppers, committed suicide since the middle of October last year under similar circumstances.
Vikram Singh of Kolkata Tramways Corporation was one among the many workers of five public transport corporations in West Bengal who were not receiving their salaries and other dues like retirement benefits for the past four months because the state government suddenly stopped subsidising these units. Surviving on borrowed money, Vikram was perhaps expecting some relief from the new, avowedly pro-peasant government. What he got instead was the transport minister’s statement that workers won’t be paid unless and until they pull their corporations out of the red and that the workforce will be downsized. Hearing this in a news broadcast, the 28-year-old worker immediately hanged himself, leaving behind his pregnant wife and a girl child.
The tragic stories of Safar, Vikram and others like them typify the plight of peasants and workers in post-“change” Bengal. In the case of starving transport workers, the blatantly irresponsible policy of the state government is directly to blame. As for the distressed peasants who are helpless victims of a deep agrarian crisis generated by successive governments at state and central levels, the TMC-led government has betrayed a total lack of political will to help them out. It has failed to make adequate arrangements for state procurement of paddy at minimum support price, leaving the peasants to the mercy of private rice mill owners and their agents. The latter are forcing the farmers into distress sale of their crop at prices much lower than the MSP, which itself is way below actual production costs. Mamata Banerjee claims she is not in a position to help, because the MSP is determined by the Central Government. But why can’t she pressure that government, as she claims to have successfully done in some other cases, to properly determine the MSP? Alternatively, why doesn’t she add bonus, as state governments have often done, to the MSP to save the cultivators? She pleads a severe funds crunch, but why doesn’t she use the available money on saving human lives rather than on beach festivals, doling out favours to youth clubs and increasing the salaries and daily allowances of ministers and MLAs?
Lacking proper answers to such pertinent questions, Ms Banerjee has fallen back on a shameless denial mode. Instead of taking prompt action to save lives, including the lives of babies who are dying in horrifying numbers in state-run hospitals, she blames the media, the opposition parties and even her coalition partner Congress for blowing things out of proportion. She claims, for example, that barring one incident, the peasants who committed suicides did so for purely personal reasons unrelated to debt burden or non-availability of remunerative prices!
Matching its criminal negligence in protecting human life, the government has stepped up attacks on people’s right to protest and get organised. The labour minister has announced that police personnel and government employees would no longer be allowed to form trade unions or hold rallies against the government. Meanwhile, public transport corporations have initiated the process of laying off the so-called irregular/temporary/ contract workers who have been serving their concerns for years on end.
But such attacks have only prompted the workers and employees to close their ranks and fight back. In a momentous move, ‘temporary’ workers in the Balurghat depot (North Dinajpur district) of North Bengal State Transport Corporation have formed a joint struggle platform comprising CITU-led and INTUC-led unions and struck work with full support of permanent workers, paralysing bus services in large parts of the district. In many places jute, potato and paddy growers have voiced their protest by destroying their crops which cannot be sold even at cost prices.
To be sure, this is only the beginning. The new government is fast exposing itself. The hour has arrived, perhaps sooner than many expected, for genuine left and democratic forces to unite and unfurl the banner of resistance against the autocratic ways of this anti-worker, anti-peasant government.