Calcutta (49 page)

What they did next partly explains why Communism has made comparatively little headway in India, which many
outsiders 
find remarkable in view of the country’s appalling and endemic poverty alongside its grotesque and overwhelming
examples
of wealth. The British had sent Stafford Cripps to India in 1942 to parley with its Congress leaders in an effort to get the country wholly behind the war effort against the Japanese. Cripps, who was virtually repeating an offer made a couple of years previously, proposed greater Indian representation on the Viceroy’s executive council after the war, together with a local voice in the organization of the war effort. Congress, bent on post-war independence and nothing less, turned it down. The CPI leaders not only supported Cripps and refused to touch the Quit India campaign of Congress, but had the satisfaction of watching Mr Gandhi and his colleagues restored to prison cells which they themselves had only just vacated.

They were to pay for this treachery. From the moment of Independence they began to fight the new Indian Government for pandering to Anglo-American imperialism, and they were responsible for outbreaks of terrorism in West Bengal, in Madras, in Uttar Pradesh and in Bombay. In February 1948, they played host in Calcutta to what was described as a South-East Asia Youth Conference under the auspices of such bodies as the World Federation of Democratic Youth, which turned out to be nothing less than the final and joint planning operation for the Communist uprisings shortly to begin in Burma, Malaya, and Indonesia. By April, the CPI was outlawed for a second time and its leaders remained in totally Indian prisons until 1950 at least, though the detainees in Bengal were not released until the following year, after a ruling by the Calcutta High Court. With terrorism added to treachery and with leaders cut off from their supporters, the party membership throughout India fell from ninety thousand in 1948 to twenty thousand a couple of years later. Yet by 1957 the CPI had revived enough to win an
election
in Kerala; twenty months later its government was dismissed by Delhi, in accordance with the Indian Constitution, for being unable to maintain law and order in the state. Given the
all-Indian
factors weighted against the success of Communism, even a fairly short reign was a triumph.

No other land and people can offer such difficult ground as
this one for anyone demanding unity and solidarity of effort from his supporters. Always, and however you examine India and its people, there are infinite conflicts of loyalty, of belief, of life style, of regional and self-interest; they all go very deep and they all run fiercely strong. Nothing could be more
discouraging
or shocking to a good international Communist than the effect of Indian Linguistic antagonisms, for example, on the communications of Indian Communism. When the CPI
organized
its national peasant congress at Barasat, in 1970, every speech made by delegates from Bihar, Bombay, Rajasthan, Kerala, the Punjab and all other corners of the republic, was made first of all in English which, according to the literature of the congress, was the language of notorious despots and
merchant
-pirates. The speech was then translated several times over. When asked why the first version was not delivered in Hindi, which a majority of delegates would have understood as well as they understand English, and possibly better, shrewd party men said that if Hindi had been made the official language of the
congress
, the South Indian delegates would have walked out in
protest
against the implicit insult offered their own Tamil.

The fact that India has always been fundamentally a peasant society and is still predominantly a peasant nation, is yet another counterpoise to the advance of Communism which, until fairly recently, concentrated its efforts among industrial workers. Yet in Calcutta, the party made much slower progress than anyone with a knowledge of conditions there would think possible. It suffered, paradoxically, because its local leaders were Bengalis and inevitably conducted themselves as such. Not only did they fight against the partition of their province at Independence on the traditional grounds of Bengali nationalism, but they rooted their organization within the local trade unions among Bengalis, which meant that they were basing themselves upon a minority of the labour force; only one sixth of the dock workers in
Calcutta
, for example, are Bengalis. Apart from disbanding, they could not have done very much more to help Congress to rule without a break for the first two decades of Independence.

First there was the Government of B. C. Roy, once a brilliant surgeon who entered politics under the patronage of C. R. Das
and his Swaraj Party in the 1920s; then there was the
Government
of P. C. Sen, who once advised people to eat green bananas if they could not obtain rice, which would have been rather less helpful to them than Marie Antoinette’s cake. But throughout those twenty years there was, above all, always in the background the lurking figure of Atulya Ghosh, a Bengali Tammany boss with a picturesque black eyepatch (legacy of a disease contracted in a British Indian prison) who, when not manipulating people and politics in city and state, was frequently to be found
camouflaged
behind his current subscription copy of the
Times
Literary Supplement
. Between them, these three Congress leaders and their henchmen gradually made it inevitable that Communism, its own enormous handicaps notwithstanding, would run
Calcutta
and West Bengal according to any prescriptions it cared to offer.

Apart from the hopeless poverty and the nauseating wealth, together with a certain incompetence in administration, there was the corruption. Governor Casey had confessed himself ‘
appalled
by the hold which bribery and corruption had taken on the public, and on the subordinate ranks of the administration’, not long before the British left. There was an occasion in 1945 when the Government of Bengal was beaten by a snap vote during a budget debate ‘by reason of twenty Government supporters
crossing
the floor, a manoeuvre engineered by a Muslim with
ambitions
to get into the Ministry. A lot of money was said to have passed and it was clear beyond doubt that it had. The individual who engineered it was frank enough to let it be known that he would repeat the performance the next day unless he were told that he would be given a place in the Ministry.’

The Biswas Commission, which looked into the workings of Calcutta Corporation shortly after Independence, reported in 1950 that instances of corruption were to be discovered
throughout
the municipal organization. So many people appeared to be involved, or under some obligation to those who were involved, that the members of the commission found fewer witnesses
prepared
to give them evidence than they expected. All the same, they compiled a dossier so damaging to men of influence that it is perhaps not surprising the authorities shrank from publishing
it in the end. Late in 1947, for example, the Government had ordered a sample survey to be made of rating assessments in the city. The commissioners found that, generally, assessments had been undervalued by half and in some cases by up to eighty per cent. ‘A well-known house in Calcutta, for instance, was in the occupation of the Secretary of State for India in Council. He occupied a part on Rs 3,000 a month, and the remainder was in the occupation of a limited company. Rs 2,000 a month was the actual rent, and the annual value was computed on that footing. There is no doubt that if, on the average, half the actual rent was taken as the actual value, described as based on the actual rent, the Assessing Inspector assisted in the undervaluation and he could not have done so unless someone made it worth his while to do so. The Assessing Inspector draws a salary of Rs 60 rising to Rs 185. We have seen no case in which the figure he had put down as the annual figure was increased.’

The commission found that ‘No Assessing Inspector has ever been punished for dishonest assessment, even when this was manifest. The flats at 6, Bishop Lefroy Road, have an interesting feature. In respect of these flats the tenants mentioned the rents. In each case a lesser figure was adopted as annual value,
apparently
because the owner was a Councillor, not on the theory of reasonable rent.’ There were even instances of reduction in
assessment
, such as that in the case of a garden house in Buttokristo Pal Lane. ‘In the first quarter of 1944–5, the Assessor valued the building at old rates and valued the land at Rs 2,250 per kottah, and allowed thirty-six per cent as depreciation on the value of the buildings estimated at the old rate, all obviously intended to reach as low a figure as possible… The Deputy Executive Officer it reduced it to Rs 1,275 as Lump Sum reduction (which means a reduction on no special ground). The owner is an
influential
Councillor.’

The commission was suspicious of the public health
department
, too. ‘In May 1948, Food Inspector Dr Daud sent thirty samples to the laboratory and against only two the result noted is “adulterated”. Against the rest the column was blank and on the day of his examination he put down the word “good” in each of the blanks as though all the samples were good and only two
bad. If that was so, the true position would seem to be that Dr Daud is an adept at securing “good” samples, and everyone who lives in Calcutta knows that out of the articles from which he has taken the samples (milk, dahi, butter, ghee, mustard oil etc.) it would be hard to find a single one in Calcutta that is not adulterated.’ There was another racket in the New Market. ‘On 5 March 1946 the Public Utilities and Markets Committee sanctioned settlement of what was called the Chhota Chandney at the South-west corner of the Vegetable Chandney with Sheik Amjadali for the opening of a hotel. The Chhota Chandney, with four doors and measuring 1,636 sq. ft., was numbered as stall No. 40 of Block H. There were seventeen applicants for the stall, which was put to auction. The settlement was made with Sheik Amjadali for an initial rent of Rs 17,000 and a daily rent of Rs 30, calculated on the basis of the usual rate of Rs 50 per 100 sq. ft. of floor space per month plus ten per cent increase as per resolution of the committee meeting dated 17 March 1945. On 26 March 1946, without any application from the party and without calling for any report from the department, the
committee
, on the motion of Councillor Mr Md Rafique, reduced the daily rent from Rs 30 to Rs 15.’

The report continues along, those lines for six chapters before it begins to analyse the merely inadequate though not necessarily dishonest workings of the Corporation. It reviews the racket run by the councillor who was trying to get stallholders evicted from one market to another, where they would become his tenants; it notes the curious reappearance of thirty-five cases of tinned butter after reaching the District Health Inspector for
destruction
because they were judged unfit for consumption; it remarks upon the workings of a Law Department which allowed some very rich people to remain unsummoned for arrears of rates a full fifteen years after the summonses had actually been drawn up ready for serving; it reviews many similar things besides.

And while the Biswas Commission was investigating a
Corporation
dominated by Congress councillors, other abuses were mounting in the name of the Congress Ministers of West Bengal and their supporters. These were not to become public knowledge until 1967, when the Communists at last gained power in the
state and swiftly opened the accounts as a piece of highly effective propaganda. Quite apart from the nepotism that had been obvious to many people for a couple of decades, there had been financial swindling on a gigantic scale in the year preceding the election; something over Rs 43 millions was involved. This was the amount that had been budgeted for the relief of the poor and distressed in the 24 Parganas, in the Bankura, Purulia and
Midnapore
districts of West Bengal that year. It had been spent through local government bodies whose chairmen and
vice-chairmen
were in each case Congressmen. Nominally it had been used on sanctioned schemes of relief, but not once had the
spending
been first reviewed by the local finance standing committee, as required under law. Where work had been done, it bore no relation to the payments made; account books had not been kept for months and sometimes didn’t even balance. In the 24 Parganas, Rs 850,000 were never accounted for even after the Communists had sent their men in to investigate. In Bankura the sanctioned funds had risen from Rs 2 millions in 1965 to Rs 7.5 millions in the following pre-election year; Rs 84,000 was unaccounted for and relief had apparently been distributed to people who did not exist. In Purulia, three of the paymasters appointed by the local government chiefs were fictitious. All this was merely the tally for one year. In addition, the
Government
had been allotting Rs 20 millions annually for fifteen years previously for relief and rehabilitation work and, bearing in mind the refugees who spent nine years on the platforms of Sealdah Station and another ten in the decrepitude of a disused jute mill godown, a distinctly non-Communist observer might well remark that ‘one comes to the conclusion, on the evidence, that if all the money allotted had been used for the purpose intended, the problem would have been solved long ago.’

The last years of Congress rule over Calcutta and surrounding district had become so unpopular that P. C. Sen and his
Ministers
were unable to address public meetings or move anywhere without very large police escorts. Congress had moreover,
suffered
a serious internal dispute. Although its effective commander in chief was Atulya Ghosh, its President in West Bengal was Ajoy Mukherjee, and the two had become such bad enemies
by September 1965 that Mukherjee was expelled from office; whereupon he publicly denounced corruption among his old colleagues and formed his own party, the Bangla (Bengal)
Congress
. When the 1967 elections arrived it joined forces with an already shambling collection of political units opposing the Ministry of P. C. Sen. This opposition’s backbone consisted of the original Communist Party of India and the rival Communist Party of India (Marxist). Communism had itself split in 1964 on the issue of Sino-Soviet differences. The CPI broadly maintained its allegiance to Moscow while the CPI (M) was created by those who found themselves much more in sympathy with Peking, and in West Bengal these had now become a loud majority of local Communists.