Capital
Sharanam Gachchhami,
Italy
Sharanam Gachchhami,
Gucci
Sharanam Gachchhami*:
GUCCI, the renowned Italian fashion brand, was first made famous in India by Rajiv Gandhi. Wearing Ray Ban glasses, Rolex watches and Gucci shoes, Rajiv Gandhi was the first Indian Prime Minister to personify the spirit of economic liberalization and the concomitant craze for foreign brands that had started blossoming in the 1980s on the ruins of the Nehruvian mixed economy.
West Bengal’s culture-friendly ‘Marxist’ Chief Minister Buddhadev Bhattacharya is not the kind of person who should be ideally bracketed with the late Rajiv Gandhi in terms of his love for foreign, especially Italian brands. One could expect him to fall for Gramsci, the great Marxist thinker, or the celluloid masters of Italian neo-realism, De Sica and Fellini, Antonioni and Bertolucci. Yet neither Gramsci nor Bertolucci, Buddhadev has fallen precisely for Gucci. Persuading Gucci to invest in Kolkata was the declared principal purpose of his recent visit to Italy. And back from Florence to Kolkata, Bhattacharya is still reeling under the magnetic, magical spell of Gucci!
Accompanied by a battery of eight industrialists, who we have been told have all paid for their tickets unlike the ‘brigade of better halves’ journeying with Advani, and his principal secretary, Buddhadev visited Milan, Rome and Florence from 10 to 13 June, 2003. The industrialists included all the top names in the Bengal industrial circles: R P Goenka, Harsh Neotia, Sanjoy Budhia, Y C Deveswar, C K Dhanuka, Anil Sen, Sisir Bajoria and S S Kumar. This was Buddhadev’s second business trip to any foreign land after the visit to Japan two years back. Addressing mediapersons at the airport before his departure, Buddhadev had dedicated his mission to Italy exclusively to the unemployed youth of west Bengal. Gucci would bring jobs for the jobless.
On reaching Milan on the morning of 10th June, Buddhadev made a fervent appeal for Italian investment in Kolkata. During his conversation with the political rulers and corporate bosses of the province of Lambardy, he offered "half the city (of Kolkata) for investment". What he got in return was an MoU signed by the provincial heads of Lambardy and West Bengal to promote bilateral cooperation in trade, tourism, health and environment and an assurance by the government of Lambardy to help build small and medium industries in West Bengal.
A second MoU was signed at Florence between the National association of Italian manufacturers of footwear, leather goods and tanning machinery (Assomach) and the Indian council of leather exports (CLE) to invest in the upcoming Bantala leather complex in Kolkata. In concrete terms it only means that a team of experts from Gucci and its subsidiary would visit Kolkata to study the possibility of outsourcing of leather goods, building a design park and a fashion design studio in Kolkata and imparting technological knowhow to those engaged in tannery and leather industry. How much investment would really flow in and how many jobs would really be created at the end of the day? Those who are bothered about such trifling details would have to keep watching. But for Buddhadev, the mission has been a grand success. While leaving Italy, he was palpably high on excitement: "Just imagine the tremendous impact it would have on the state’s image, if Gucci were to open an outlet, its first in India, in West Bengal."
Marketing West Bengal as an investment-friendly destination where investors could always count on the generosity of a red carpet welcome and would never have to bother about either the tyranny of the red tape or the militancy of the red flag is the main purpose of Buddhadev’s ongoing overtures to capital, Indian or foreign. Real productive investment and more crucially, creation of real jobs are just incidental concerns.
Let us take a quick look at the background to Buddhadev’s new-found love for Gucci. Kolkata has always been known for its vibrant tannery industry. Apart from the market leader Bata, several successful Indian brands are headquartered in Kolkata and its outskirts. But the recent Supreme Court order banning tanneries in the Topsia-Tiljala-Park Circus region in the eastern part of the city has pushed the 1,50,000 tannery workers into a grim battle of survival. The state Government promised to relocate the tanneries in a new leather complex to be built at a new centre Bantala at a distance of 15 kilometres. Promoters ML Dalmiya and Co. Ltd. (owned by Jagmohan Dalmiya of the BCCI) have been entrusted with the job of building this leather complex. The cost estimates have already escalated from Rs. 247 crore five years ago to Rs. 345 crore, but the complex is yet to get anywhere near operational. The land prices in the Bantala region are so high and other infrastructural facilities so sparse or expensive that most of the tannery owners are unwilling to go there. Many small tanneries have no other option but to go out of business. It is in this backdrop that the West Bengal government has started worshipping the Italian fashion giant Gucci to ‘save’ the dying tannery and leather industry in the state.
Apart from offering urgent invitations and lucrative guarantees to foreign giants, the State Government is also busy ushering in labour law reforms to placate capital and transform Bengal’s labour-friendly ‘image’. Before embarking on his Italian trip, the Chief Minister had a direct dialogue on 2-3 June with some of the top Mumbai industrialists. He took this opportunity to come down heavily on militant trade unionism and even went on to attribute the crisis of the jute industry to the absurd demands and irresponsible conduct of the jute workers and their unions! The State Government has also finalised the policy of setting up new special economic zones (SEZs), which will be declared in the month of July. These SEZs are exclusively meant for exporting agro-industrial products, gems and jewellery, hosiery goods or IT products and services. The draft policy declared by the government clearly states, "No wild cat labour strikes will be allowed in the SEZ because the complex will be declared a zone providing public utility services". So gems and jewellery have now become a model public utility service in the eyes of the Left rulers of West Bengal. Labour laws and industrial dispute acts applicable elsewhere in the state will not be in vogue in this SEZs. "The arbitration of industrial disputes including payment of minimum wages, gratuity, provident fund and bonus will be done by the development commissioner of the SEZ, not by the state labour commissioner", says the proposed policy for SEZ.
To return to Buddhadev’s encounter with the big bosses of the Mumbai corporate world including Ratan Tata, Anand Mahindra and Adi Godrej he pleaded with them for pumping in fresh investment in automobile, textile and pharmaceutical sectors. He offered them all help from free power and water supply and availability of cheap land and labour to the assured services of a state government determined to stamp out the last vestiges of trade union militancy. The chief minister also assured the corporate giants that his government had now been freed from the old ‘public sector first’ hangover. But the CII magnates reciprocated only by promising to send a ‘working group’ to examine the scope of agro-industry in West Bengal.
Agro-industry is indeed the new buzzword in the emerging discourse of industrial rejuvenation of West Bengal. It is being prescribed as a cure for both the brewing agrarian crisis and the growing scourge of joblessness in the state. The state government and the corporate bosses are pressurising the Bengal peasantry for diversification of their crop-pattern. The American consultancy firm McKinsey has in fact suggested that 41% of arable land (65 lakh acres) should be used for diversification from paddy to vegetables and fruits like potato, pineapple, lichi and mango. This ‘diversification’ is indeed the crux of the new agricultural policy of the state government. But what is the actual situation on the ground? The State Development Report, commissioned by the National Planning Commission, presents a grim picture for the near future. West Bengal witnessed a spurt of growth in food grains production in the 1980s (nearly 5.15% growth annually, well above the then national growth rate of 3.5%), but in the 1990s, rice production lapsed into stagnation, the growth rate dropped to nearly half of the rate that prevailed over the previous decade and a shortfall of nearly 3 million tonnes of food grains is projected by 2007. To feed the 87.6 million people of the state, the requirement is well above 17.5 million tonnes of food grains, but at the current growth rate the production can only reach 14.5 million tones by 2007.
Diversification of agricultural production, assured supply of cheap and docile labour and red carpet welcome to private capital of preferably foreign origin – these then are the key inputs of the West Bengal Government’s new recipe of industrial revival. If the success of this strategy is to be measured in terms of reduced numbers of strikes and increased lockouts (between 19995 and 2001 while the number of strikes dropped from 33 to 20, the number of lockouts shot up from 136 to 305) and trips made, MoUs signed and study groups appointed (Jyoti Basu used to undertake one trip every year and Buddhadev has just completed his second successful trip), then the strategy has already been immensely successful. But if you are interested in testing this strategy on the basis of jobs created or destroyed, West Bengal leads the country from the front with a record army of 6.6 million registered jobseekers.
Before we stop, it would be unfair not to mention that while in Italy Buddhadev may not have had any time for paying tribute to the legacy of either Gramsci or Carlo Giuliani, the young protester killed by the Italian state at the time of the G-8 summit in Genoa in July 2001 and who was immediately hailed by the CPI(M) leaders of West Bengal as the first martyr of the anti-globalisation movement, in Maharashtra he also addressed a conference of Left activists and a big workers’ rally. Advising the workers of West Bengal to abhor militancy and exhorting the workers and peasants of Maharashtra to intensify the Left movement are certainly not contradictory for our wonderful ‘Marxist’ manager of contradictions and crises.
(* based on the three tenets laid down by Buddha’s disciples – Buddham Sharanam Gachchhami, Dhammam Sharanam Gachchhami, Sangham Sharanam Gachchhami, seeking refuge in Buddha, Buddhist religion and the Buddhist collective)
- DB with Partha Ghosh