What Mamata has left for Suvendu

Amitava Mukherjee

(mukherjeeamitava439@gmail.com)

Suvendu Adhikari, the new Chief Minister of West Bengal, has received from his predecessor Mamata Banerjee a state that is culturally degraded and economically bankrupt. A tall task lies ahead of the new chief minister. Suvendu will have the central government by his side in his attempt to revive West Bengal's economy. But erasing the cultural degradation that has gripped the state in the last decade or so will be a really difficult job.

A telltale sign of it was the way Mamata Banerjee addressed many of her senior officials. She called them by their first names, which often sounded outlandish and out of taste. Bidhan Chandra Roy used to do the same. But when he had become the chief minister of West Bengal, he was much more senior to all of his officers in terms of age and had a towering stature nationally. It did not cross Mamata's mind that she was not Bidhan Roy. Both Jyoti Basu and Buddhadev Bhattacharjee used to address their officials either by their surnames or by suffixing the word 'babu' after their first names.

West Bengal is no longer known for producing acclaimed academics, renowned filmmakers like Satyajit Ray or Mrinal Sen, or theatre personalities like Shambhu Mitra. The University of Calcutta lost its glory a long time ago. Other universities are in shambles. Trinamul Congress wanted university vice chancellors to declare holidays in their institutions on the occasion of the birthday of their students' wing. As the then-Calcutta University vice chancellor refused, heaps of abuses were showered on her. There were attempts to support client intellectuals in every aspect of life. This tendency started from the time of the Left Front and was continued after the Left's exit.

Similar situations were evident in different areas of administration. The post of the mayor of the Kolkata Municipal Corporation (KMC) is always taken for an august office. Deshbandhu Chittaranjan Das was once the mayor of the Calcutta Corporation as the organization was then called. Subhas Chandra Bose was once the chief executive officer of this body. Various other respectable political figures and freedom fighters have graced this institution in different periods of time. But did Mamata do any justice to the KMC after she came to power? She forced upon this august body a person whose social acceptance as the mayor was under serious doubt, as he could hardly be compared with the respected names who occupied this chair in the past. The result was unpleasant. KMC got embroiled in one controversy after another, including corruption charges.

Plainly speaking, the people of West Bengal have never taken Mamata seriously. On her part, she also did not do justice to the official post she held by stacking rows of books written by her in West Bengal government-owned textile goods stalls. Comments may be reserved on the literary values of those books. Jyoti Basu had also written his autobiography. Buddhadev Bhattacharjee had also dealt with the works of the Russian litterateur Mayakovsky. But none of them exhibited their works in government-owned consumer goods shops.

Instead Mamata should have paid attention to the all-around decay that had engulfed Bengali life. In 1960, West Bengal's share in the nation's GDP was 10.5 percent. Presently it has come down to 5.8 percent. This is the sharpest decline recorded for any major state of the country. The relative per capita income, which used to be 127.5 percent of the national average, has crashed to around 83 percent.

There are some historical reasons. The most important of them is the partition of the country. In addition to it, the Bengali psyche, since the late 1930s, has tended to move away from the national political mainstream, exemplified best by Subhas Chandra Bose's voluntary exit from the Indian National Congress and then coming up with his Forward Bloc. This same psychological distance of the Bengalis from the political mainstream had goaded Subhas Chandra's elder brother, Sarat Chandra Bose, to float the idea of a united independent Bengal, away from both India and Pakistan. Although West Bengal experienced Congress rule from right after independence to 1967, even the presence of the redoubtable Bidhan Chandra Roy could not erase Bengal's mental distance from the center of power in Delhi. Even Bidhan Roy could not stop the central government's freight equalization policy, due to which West Bengal lost its leverage over the strategic minerals it has.

Still, in 1960 West Bengal was the 3rd richest state in India after Maharashtra and Gujarat. In 2024, it tumbled to 24th position. Years of destructive trade union practices by the Left parties also contributed to it. Most of the large-scale heavy industries were located in the western part of West Bengal, like the Durgapur-Asansol and Ranigunj belts, with the notable exception of Hind Motor, where the Birla group used to manufacture the Ambassador car. While the Hind Motor factory of the Birlas gradually became sick due to lack of technology modernization, the Asansol-Durgapur belt bore the heaviest brunt of senseless trade unionism. However, one particular thing is to be noted here. Kolkata and the surrounding districts had large concentrations of medium-scale industries owned mostly by Bengali families, providing huge employment. These units bore the brunt of first left trade unionism and then extortion culture during the time of Trinamul Congress rule. As a result, most of them downed shutters.

So Suvendu Adhikari inherits a state that is deeply in chaos and debt and has suffered from years of fiscal mismanagement. When the Trinamul Congress came to power in 2011, the state's debt was about 1.92 lakh crores of rupees. By the end of the 2025-26 fiscal year, that figure is slated to go up to a staggering 7.7 lakh crores of rupees. It means that every single citizen of West Bengal carries a debt burden of approximately 70,653 rupees over his/her head.

How has the situation come to such a pass?

This is entirely due to the culture of unproductivity that the Trinamul Congress had instituted in West Bengal-freebies, useless expenditure on fairs and sports events, and, of course, the culture of massive corruption. Revenue collection has gone down, revenue sources have shrunk, and huge amounts of money had to be earmarked for servicing of debts. West Bengal spends 20 to 28 percent of its revenues for paying interest on loans, while some other big states spend only 5 to 15 percent of their money for such purposes. Needless to say, West Bengal's money is going down the drain of subsidies rather than towards capital expenditure, i.e., for building of infrastructure.

There is a fallacy that Suvendu Adhikari will have to unravel. According to the Periodic Labour Force Survey, West Bengal's unemployment rate is 3.6 percent, much below the national average of 4.8 percent. In terms of rural-urban parameters, also, West Bengal's performance is much better than the national average. If that be the case, then why did the previous government of Mamata Banerjee have to launch the Banglar Yuvasathi scheme through which a dole of Rs 1500 per month was promised to be given to all the unemployed men of Bengal aged between 21 and 40? Moreover, till 2025, an estimated 22.4 lakh workers have left West Bengal and are now working in different other states of the country. They have left their homes and families in West Bengal, where employment is scarce, to take up mostly low-end, unskilled jobs.

The industrial base of the state has crashed. This is clearly evident even to the naked eye as one after another closed industrial unit stands as a mute witness to a sad story of the state's economic degeneration. Large numbers of business establishments have shifted their registered offices from Kolkata to other states. The best example of it is the Dalhousie Square area of the city, once famed for its conglomeration of 'merchant offices.' Now very little of them exists there.

So Mamata has passed over virtually a graveyard to Suvendu Adhikari. At the same time, it is also a fact that the people of West Bengal will no longer tolerate any perpetrator in such a scenario. That is the reason behind the tectonic verdict that they have given in the just concluded assembly election.

(The author is a senior journalist and commentator on current affairs.)