Hello Soma. You haven’t called me for a long time. Were you out of town? Or is your throat posing a problem once again? – I would get this phone call several times every year. Maitreyidi was one of those who always remembered that I suffer from a bad throat, and since I have to teach, often end up not talking to people on other occasions, skipping meetings because I would have to talk there, and so on.

I first met Maitreyidi in the mid-1980s, when I was just getting involved in the autonomous women’s movement. At that time I was a member of Sachetana. At that stage we had limited relationship. However, one memory sticks out. I did not then have a long political past, and hesitated to approach many of the members who had longer years in politics and linkages going back several years. But Maitreyidi had the knack of talking without any condescension. In 1987, following the murder of Roop Kanwar, there was a rally in Kolkata and the Natri Nirjatan Pratirodh Mancha was one of the major organisers. This was how I became well acquainted with the Mancha. The militant approach of Mancha members was an important factor in my deciding subsequently that I needed to be there.

Then for several years the nature of my job kept me out of practically all political work. When at last I was able to return to political work, the women’s movement had changed quite a bit, with a large number of NGOs and Voluntary Organisations working mainly along particular areas. (Maitreyidi used to call the voluntary organisations Voltu). This was when I became active in the Nari Nirjatan Pratirodh Mancha, around 1992-3 and one member of Mancha suggested that I might occasionally come to the Friday Mancha meetings. Maitreyidi’s immediate reaction was – why occasionally, try to be regular. Maitreyidi’s residence was the Mancha office, and Maitreyidi herself was in those days fully active. Not only was she politically alert, but she also cared for the individual well being of the members, and kept in regular touch through phone.

In the 1990s, work over numerous issues – state/communal violence on women, the Uniform Civil Code controversy, all brought us closer. In 1996, there was an all India workshop on Gender Just Laws. Nari Nirjatan Pratirodh Mancha presented a position paper on the Uniform Civil Code, a text hammered out through numerous meetings by many members of Mancha, including Maitreyidi. She was also among those who travelled to Mumbai to present our views on that and other issues.

Being active in a political movement which does not compromise with political parties, especially over the struggle against patriarchy, has its pains. Several times, we faced difficulties because the use of patriarchal authority had come from forces considered friends of women’s movements. In all cases, I found Maitreyidi taking a strong position on women’s rights, and refusing to tone down her views just because a “friendly” party/activist was involved.

Another dimension was her willingness to be aggressive in defence of the rights of women. A well known study of the women’s movements in West Bengal and Bombay/Maharashtra characterised the Nari Nirjatan Pratirodh Mancha, (of which Maitreyi Chatterjee was the Convenor), as an organisation having “sensationalist and politically irresponsible actions”. As it is well known, women, even when they dare to come to the political stage, must always be decorous and timid, as respectable academics will otherwise tar them with such brushes. Maitreyi Chatterjee, like many other Mancha members, rejected these imposed codes. Precisely for rejecting this gentility, the Mancha was depicted as sensationalist and politically irresponsible. Two instances of our “irresponsibility”, one collective with her participation, and the other entirely her own, might be mentioned here.

On the 12th of December 1998, Rekha Chowdhury, a national basketball player, was assaulted by upper class youth, resulting in her hospitalisation. Next morning, when the news of this assault appeared in a Calcutta daily newspaper, the police had yet done nothing, and in this situation members of Maitree, at that time a 36-organisation West Bengal based network, got in touch with each other and quickly organised a demonstration in front of the B. R. Singh Hospital, near the Sealdah Station. It was a Sunday, so there were no ministers in their offices.  No senior policeman was available for comment either. It was therefore decided that protests would be lodged at the residence of the Home (Police) Minister Buddhadev Bhattacharjee. Despite her age and her physical ailments Maitreyi Chatterjee was also one of those, along with the even more senior Vidya Munshi, who stayed the entire duration, vocally shouting slogans. The incident, which would have been hushed up as a mere accident but for pressure from Maitree, now had to be investigated at least a little bit.

The other occasion was an article entitled Hell’s Angels by Maitreyidi, tearing into the government run Homes for women like the Liluah Home, where in one year a large number of suicide attempts had been recorded and  a deaf-mute pregnant girl (pregnant due to rape) ill-treated. She had also posed uncomfortable questions about the State Commission for Women. This resulted in an exchange of letters in The Statesman, in which, in my opinion, she certainly came off best.

But this principled stance did not mean that she was just a person who thought in narrowly political terms. Her politics was not cold and calculating but passionate. Injustice stirred her deeply, and her indictments were written from the heart. More than a decade back, we organised a seminar on Human Rights in our college, in which she was one of the speakers. Many of the speakers spoke as academics do, scholarly, serious works, but devoid of feeling. Maitreyidi spoke about women’s rights, and students could identify with what she was saying, because it was evident she herself was speaking from personal convictions, not merely presenting a paper.

Something I saw repeatedly in Maitreyidi was an all India perspective and a staunch anti-communalism. She never succumbed to what existed as a real trend in the social movements -- a provincial narrowness that saw the CPI(M) as the only reality and the only threat. Whether it was the Unifrom Civil Code controversy, the rights of Muslim women, the Gujarat pogroms and violence on women, she would tell me things like, “we have to make clear our differences with the BJP” as well as, “I don’t agree at all with the CPI(M)s politics where it papers over minority communalism and is silent about the rights of minority community women”.

At a personal level again, whenever I have been discouraged, Maitreyidi was a source of strength, telling me that there was no reason to give up on my activism, and supporting me in particularly difficult periods. At critical moments in life, especially when downturns occurred in the movement, or when unexpected blows left me depressed, I found her by my side. The silent way in which she left us was a great blow. It is difficult to reconcile with that the image of Maitreyidi I have, always ready to take up a cause, ready to fight the good fight.

“Tears for Our Brave Jawans” ?

Kunal Chattopadhyay

Star Ananda, the television face of West Bengal’s most powerful bourgeois media group, had a panel discussion on the killing of Kishenji, the CPI (Maoist) leader. The intention was put CPI leader Gurudas Dasgupta on the mat, for having dared to express some sympathy for the slain Kishenji.

Guruas Dasgupta’s stance is not new. Within reformist politics, he has always shown exemplary courage. Back in the 1970s, when he was a CPI youth leader, he was well-known as one of the people defending tortured Naxalites during the notorious Sidhhartha Sankar Ray regime. But back then, even Indira Gandhi was hiding her politics under the mask of socialism. Today, when unabashed nationalism and economic liberalism rule, when India is seeking to position itself as not merely a regional power but as an emerging global powerhouse, Dasgupta, who also happens to be a leading trade unionist, the General Secretary of the AITUC, and an MP from Ghatal, is the most important mainstream left leader to have questioned the entire story behind Kishenji’s death. Like Varvara Rao, he has questioned whether there was truly an encounter or whether Kishenji had been arrested and then killed in cold blood.

Among the various modes of attack on Dasgupta, one came from police and ex-army people, including the left’s one time darling, General Shankar Roychowdhury. The point was, people shed copious tears when someone like Kishenji is killed, but when our brave jawans lay down their lives, whether in Kargil or elsewhere, whether they are soldiers, the paramilitary if the police, people ignore their heroic deaths in defence of the country.

We should consider a few brief points here, which can be developed at later times, but which do need at least a summary articulation.

First, what is or should be the revolutionary attitude to the armed forces, to the police, etc? Is it not obvious, someone might ask, that even if a revolution does take place, for law and order maintenance, for peace-keeping, for myriad reasons we will continue to need the police? And is it not even more obvious that as long as we have threats from across the border we must have an alert army? And finally, even today, whatever your criticism of governments, should you not salute the heroic jawans for doing their duty?

Any revolutionary, who answers these simply by quotations from Marx, Engels and Lenin, or from any other chosen canonical figure, is engaging in sterile politics. If we arrive at conclusions similar to what thy said, it has to be on the basis of our reflections on the current reality.

Why will we need the army, and why do we need it now? The Indian army is not a merely silent actor carrying out the will of the people expressed through their elected members of parliament wehose majority determines the composition of the government and the shape of policy, as official theory would have us believe. As the recent debate over the Armed Forces Special Powers Act showed, the army is an active and vocal shaper of policies. The chief Minister of a province, an elected representative, wanted the AFSPA lifted from some parts of the province. The army replied that this was not acceptable to it. Any talk of modifications of the AFSPA has been met with strident opposition from the army. It is therefore necessary to mention briefly what the AFSPA is about. The Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act of 1958 (AFSPA) is one of the more draconian legislations that the Indian Parliament has passed. Under this Act, all security forces are given unrestricted and unaccounted power to carry out their operations, once an area is declared disturbed. Even a non-commissioned officer is granted the right to shoot to kill based on mere suspicion that it is necessary to do so in order to "maintain the public order". It was first applied to the North Eastern states of Assam and Manipur and was amended in 1972 to extend to all the seven states in the north- eastern region of India. They are Assam, Manipur, Tripura, Meghalaya, Arunachal Pradesh, Mizoram and Nagaland, also known as the "seven sisters". The enforcement of the AFSPA has resulted in innumerable incidents of arbitrary detention, torture, rape, and looting by security personnel. This legislation is sought to be justified by the Government of India, on the plea that it is required to stop the North East states from seceeding from the Indian Union. The 1972 amendments to the AFSPA extended the power to declare an area disturbed to the Central Government. In the 1958 version of the AFSPA only the state governments had this power. In the 1972 Lok Sabha debates it was argued that extending this power to the Central Government would take away the State's authority. In the 1958 debates the authority and power of the states in applying the AFSPA was a key issue. The Home Minister had argued that the AFSPA broadened states' power because they could call in the military whenever they chose. The 1972 amendment shows that the Central Government is no longer concerned with the state's power. Rather, the Central Government now has the ability to overrule the opinion of a state governor and declare an area disturbed. The army can shoot to kill, under the powers of section 4(a), for the commission or suspicion of the commission of the following offenses: acting in contravention of any law or order for the time being in force in the disturbed area prohibiting the assembly of five or more persons, carrying weapons, or carrying anything which is capable of being used as a fire-arm or ammunition. To justify the invocation of this provision, the officer need only be "of the opinion that it is necessary to do so for the maintenance of public order" and only give "such due warning as he may consider necessary".

The army can arrest anyone without a warrant under section 4(c) who has committed, is suspected of having committed or of being about to commit, a cognisable offense and use any amount of force "necessary to effect the arrest".

Section 5 says that the army has to hand over arrested persons to the police with the "least possible delay". There is no definition in the act of what constitutes the least possible delay. As a result, arbitrary arrests are regular.

Section 6 gives full immunity to the army for any action, since no legal proceeding can be brought against any member of the armed forces acting under the AFSPA, without the permission of the Central Government.

According to the Association of Parents of Disappeared Persons, some 8000 persons who have “disappeared” cannot be traced because of laws like the AFSPA which frees the Indian army from any accountability in Kashmir. Our brave jawans, in other words, are busier killing Kashmiri youth than in fighting in Kargil.

This raises another, even more basic question – what is the Indian army doing in Kashmir? Answer – trying to hold on to valuable real estate. If Kashmir is an integral part of India, why does India spend so much time killing civilians of that part of India? Why does the army and the paramilitary forces beat up journalists for covering incidents of protest in Kashmir, to say nothing of the Kashmiris who are routinely killed, tortured, sexually assaulted? Despite all media hype to the contrary, when has anyone proved in a court of law that Maoists assaulted or raped women the way the army and the paramilitary do with impunity in Kashmir, in Manipur, and anywhere else?

There is another important difference that one feels should be highlighted. It is true, that of late, surrendered Maoists (or are they captured Maoists or locals cxompelled to play roles taught by the state?) have said things about how the CPI (Maoist) tortures people, and forces them to do certain things. It is also known that if you hold so-called courts where armed guerrillas are all over the place, verdicts contrary to the ones sought by the guerrillas might not be delivered. Nevertheless, the bulk of people joining the CPI (Maoists) have done so out of certain ideological-political commitments. One can debate the precise nature of that ideology, as we in Radical socialist have repeatedly done. For that, the present author was once attacked as a degenerate by a Maoist supporter. But one has to make a distinction between an institution like the state, which prints Gandhi all voer the place, including in every note, which claims it is there to upholds the constitution, and then uses massive violence. The “brave jawans” are cannon fodder of the state. At the same time, in order to make them feel important, in order to keep them happy while they do the dirty work of the state, the state has various sops – ranging from alcohol at low rates to, in “disturbed areas”, the right to rape and kill with impunity.

It is true, that deaths of young men, even in uniform, are sad losses to the country and to their families most certainly. But these deaths are very often unnecessary deaths, created by contending states and their struggles for power and their conflicting ambitions. When we re asled why we do not shed tears for jawans who died fighting the Maoists, we need to ask, exactly why are those jawans being sent to fight? In vast tracts of India, tribals are repressed. Had the state spent half the money it does for Green Hunt and similar operations, on real development for the people, supplying them with education, health care, providing them with opportunities to earn more , would the CPI(Maoist) have found such strong support in those areas? But the state cannot do it. The Indian elite can enrich itself, can amass vast amount of capital, by superexploiting adivasis, by repeatedly evicting them whenever mineral wealth is to be extracted, and so forth. So the jawans who are dying in Green Hunt or in Manipur or in Kashmir, even if they have been led to believe, through repeated propaganda drives that they are serving the country, are in precise fact serving the country’s rulers.

Before shedding tears for them, will General Roychowdjhury shed tears for the unnamed and unnumbered adivasis who across india lose land, way of life, and are tortured for even standing up and protesting (I am leaving aside those killed, for of course, General Roychowdhury and all his cothinkers will yell that everyone killed must be a Maoist)?

When we witness thousands marching for a Jan Lokpal Bill, it’s time to re-interpret lines from Tagore’s song Ekla Chalo Re

Himanshu Upadhyaya Delhi

originally posted in http://www.hardnewsmedia.com/2011/09/4131

Although being a legal practitioner Gandhi walked to Dandi to break the salt law, by inventing a respectable and memorable phrase ‘civil disobedience’.  By walking to the sea shore and lifting a fistfull of salt, he inspired strugglers who resorted to peaceful art of breaking laws, in pre and post independence times. But now there is a man masquerading as Gandhi who is leading thousands to ‘make a law’. A law to get an ombudsman to get rid of that all too pervasive disease afflicting our democratic governance called ‘Corruption’. A legislation whose rite of parliamentary passage and presidential assent is still awaited since last four decades.

We need novel statutory institutions with stronger powers, they shout. From what we see on Newsrack (a very useful resource that captures RSS feeds from English language Indian newspapers and magazines and archives news and articles on a theme for long term tracking and research), on Lokpal there are 22,162, on Jan Lokpal 5,382 and on Anna Hazare’s Fast 7,903 newsclips. We have repeatedly been told that here is an upsurge and a single idea that ‘we the people’ can have voice in legislation-making has caught the imagination of the masses. Political scientists are busy writing polemical pieces asking us that why do people on the Left have a tendency to run away from the place where people are.

When cacophony drowns us, we shall step back, observe some moments of silence and reflection and come out with a muted response, for our definition of ‘we the people’ include those who communicate through signs and not speech, those who communicate orally and not through script, those who can’t dream of entering the sophisticated debates on 24x7 television channels. When icons are being invented and promoted claiming to ‘represent the voice of the voiceless,’ we need to talk against this tendency to ‘represent’.

When we witness thousands marching, it’s time to re-interpret lines from Tagore’s songEkla Chalo Re. We need to go home and read Gandhi’s advice to lawmakers faced with a dilemma. We need to ask ourselves what else made ‘news’ what other battles were fought on the front of law making. In last week of July, Jairam Ramesh came out with a draft of Land Acquisition, Resettlement and Rehabilitation Bill giving ‘we, the people of India’ a month’s time to send in our comments, and soon after Anna Hazare broke his fast, we were to witness it being introduced in Lok Sabha.

I wonder if all those who thronged Ramlila Ground also deliberated upon this bill on which people’s comments were sought. I also wish to assume that some of them like Medha Patkar (whom media kept addressing as ‘key member of Team Anna’) did get time to discuss this equally important piece of legislation. However, if Team Anna’s response to critical dissenting voices and other versions of Lokpal is any indication to go by, by last week of August Anna Hazare appeared to be sending the message that ‘legislation has been drafted, you initiate a discussion over it at once in Parliament’.

Aren’t there some things called sections, sub-sections, clauses and sub-clauses, what is called a fine print? If indeed we wish people to think that ‘novel and stronger statutory authority’ that seeks to police from a peon and policeman to the prime minister and from CBI to judiciary, what about examining what other such statutory authorities have done to constitutionally established accountability mechanisms?

The Discovery of Defeat

- Abhijit Kundu and Trinanjan Chakraborty

“ I took to the crowd and the crowd took to me “, Nehru wrote in 1936. Nehru in his autobiography was pointedly indicating the turnaround in Indian National Congress. The turnaround was the emergence of the second generation of Congress leaders who constituted the ‘we’ in Nehru’s The Discovery of India. Nehru, Ali brothers or Abul Kalam Azad belonged to the same political generation who indulged in a shared critical, cynical stance vis-à-vis the older generation of political leadership, while showing the same disdain and desperation vis-à-vis their contemporary socio-political order. It was time of the gradual fading of the port city politics of Kolkata, Chennai or Mumbai. The upper Indian, both Muslim and Hindu urban elite communities constituted the aspiring generation of leadership who were clearly dismissive of the politics of talk and were searching for a breakthrough. Nehru’s writings signaled this shift in abundance.

The shift was from the political realm of oratory and verbal sparring, very typical of port-city centered politics. The emergence of the United province taking the front rank in Indian national politics was consequent upon the shifting of the Capital from the lower to the upper-Gangetic plane, i.e., from Kolkata to Delhi in 1911.. The time rendered oratory skill redundant in favour of the coming of themasses and political action- the TRUTHS of Gandhi’s Experiment. This mass politics was different from what Bhagini Nivedita claimed that the ultimate aim of every politics was to provide food to people.

Rather, making people aware of the right to food or any kind of political right, an organic participation from the below towards achieving a political goal marks mass politics as opposed to politics as rendering service to the people- the provider and the provided matrix. Thus came the much celebrated Rail journeys which took the second generation Congress leaders to the countrysides. As Nehru euphorically wrote to his US based friend Dhanogopal Mukherjee in a personal letter, “…of a much clearer vision of the essence of our national movement which you have missed in Calcutta or in other big cities.” The Railways acted as the crucial vehicle of such proliferation of mass action….as he wrote’….the crowd took to me ‘. The redundancy of Kolkata based politics was over, the peripheralization of Bengal saw the emergence of the United Province as the site of nationalist movement. If such a fading away process started in the year 1911, exactly hundreds years later, we are experiencing the demise of the LEFT from that peripheral site of politics. Ironically, in peoples’ perception quite euphemistically the image of the Railways as bearer of change was built -in through popular and pedestrian limericks. Mamata Banerjee being the central railway minister.

The demise, the term we prefer, instead of calling it an electoral loss for the combined Left in Bengal is possibly a catharsis of the process which started with the redundancy of Bengal in national politics, which in turn allowed the development of a unique Bengali political cultural identity. The identity which sustained itself and propelled on the ‘difference’ that the peripheralization of Bengal by the United Province offered. The specific collective identity thrived on the question of denials and differences. The subsequent Partition of Bengal and the huge influx of refugees consolidated the social construction of Otherness. The ‘otherness’ of being differentially treated on the question of refugee settlement than their counterparts in the western provinces. The Left politics which sailed on since late 1920s, could actually grow ; interestingly at first, it attracted many Hindu Mahasabha sympathizers/ followers who directly bore the irrelevancy of masculine and linear politics by the shaping up of the secular in the United Province. And, secondly the rootless Bengali refugees from the East Pakistan largely fuelled Left politics in Bengal. The idea of being distanced from the centre of power constituted the very political culture of Bengal in not many myriad ways. Even the immediate post independent Bengal’s chief minister Bidhan Chandra Roy’s recurrent verbal duels with Nehru used to be the staple for people, always insecure of self-pride. The entrenchment of Left politics was actually embedded in such a political culture of symbolically ( materially as well ) created  boundary between the Centre and Bengal as a pariah.

The material substance of such a denial was graphically authored by Ranajit Roy in his The Agony of West Bengal, first published in 1971 during the United Front government. Drawing upon the fiscal policy of the central government, Roy focussed on the assymetrical Union -State relationship and perpetuation of British Rulers' mind set by bureaucrats in corridors of power in New Delhi. The vernacular print media supportive of the Congress party even lauded the exercise, and the banning of the book during the Emergency virtually consolidated the cultural boundary with harsh and hard economic facts. That Bengal is separate and being denied upon provided the plank upon which the Left gained its momentum and could premise its agenda. Riding on the much evocative slogan of ‘neglect of the centre’ they could build the Left movement in Bengal, much different from that in Kerala ( where the left in fact held state assembly power alternatively with the Congress). The success of land distribution or panchayat elections too were couched in a pride of achieving something  different from the Centre. The hardening of the boundary denied any osmotic relationship with the mainland politics.

The fledlging and prosper of the Left rested on an understanding of mass politics, reminiscent of the early twentieth century idea of ‘providing food’ to the people- a proto chief-clan relationship. The notion of the vanguard party supplemented the creation of a political society. As a misnomer, the communist party tried to operate in a multi-party constitutional set-up, striving to be the only truth – oblivious of the concept of ‘party’ as a part of political power. The disdain for the liberal model of democracy was so pronounced in the orthodox Left lexicon as an enchantment, that in Bengal, the left divested its energy exclusively in absolute political mobilization. The hardened ideological-intellectual position had to tread an uneasy path of promoting a peoples’ democratic revolution. Working within the system of parliamentary democracy it simultaneously subverted the participatory spirit of democracy at the ground level. The specter of absolutism haunted the everyday life of Bengal. In fact, the continuous rule of the Left over more than three decades baffled the world. The Left possibly enjoyed the world attention at the unique ‘communist rule’ in one constituent state of a federal structure polity. It is an exemplar of a regime rather than the rule of a party.

The 1977 victory heralded not a victory of a party but a paradigmatic shift to a coming of a regime. The regime was built on a wide nexus across the middle and lower echelons of the society to constitute a monolithic power- bloc. The coming of the regime was evident with all opposition voices were being muffled and subsumed by an encompassing ideology of ‘truth’. The regime rested on the power wielding middle-class which was sustained economically and otherwise by the state power. A de-facto patron-client relationships were fostered in the distribution of not only material but symbolic social capital as well across the graded social structure. The schism between the stated ideology and the practical/practice became inescapable in the post 1990’s scenario of a liberalized economy. No longer the cultural consruction of ‘different/ denied’ identity could sustain Left Ideology for long.

Post 1990s did not only signal the end of the license Raj by opening up the economy, its cultural connotation was more of a global appeal. Any ideological boundary proved to be anachronous –  incongruent with aspirations of a new breed of globalised civil society. The Left strategy of thriving on the consolidated separateness between the centre and the state were put to test as no longer the purity of exclusion could sustain an insulated regime. The Left had to embrace the opportunity of the liberal economy as it welcomed the entry of private capital for industrialization. The visible revolt of Bengal against the land acquisition and industrial policy of the government might have given an impression of people resisting private corporate capital, but actually it dissented against the leftist language of private investment. The Left vocabulary so long constructed and guarded the ‘purity’ of Bengal as against private enterprise, the contradiction seemed so obvious as the same voice without acknowledging the right of private property and speech tried to embrace private enterprise. The voice and the language sounded audacious and brute. The inherent incongruity in the Left language suffered a short-circuit as it attempted to tread a path of development which it itself denounced and nurtured/dreaded historically.

Since 2007, the voice of discontent spread across in Bengal on the question of land acquisition. It was more than an upsurge of a mass- rather a crowd, spontaneous and not being mobilized, which subsequently revolved around the most tangible alternative chief ministerial candidate, Ms Mamata Banerjee. The incidental brutalities of the state government were just a logical culmination of an enterprise which had exhausted its possibilities. Possibilities can endure talks and analyses based on facts, figures and data. While the calculation of figures and swings following the May 2011 electoral revolution in Bengal could form the staple for psephologists, the other side of the coin is the profusion of analyses from the recurrent faces on the electronic media representing contending political camps. All embroiled in deciphering the rights and wrongs of the electoral agenda strategies, and some even weighing the possibilities of a left comeback.

Over the last two years or more we have experienced, ever since the Left Front started suffering electoral reverses in various polls, the same exercise. The indomitable Left so astute for decades in managing electoral numbers claimed of re-assessment, rectification and recovery – a regime does never commit suicide. Yet it fell flat on its nose- the margin of defeat kept increasing. Herein, the hallowed promise of ‘possibility’ signals a closure. The spectacle of a possessed crowd rejoicing at the passing of the Left rule on the Kolkata streets defies any analysis of numbers and figures. The crowd is more than a mass as a maker of history, it does rejuvenate a malaise body politic and baffles an analyst too often.

In recent political memory, apart from the mammoth mobilized rallies by different political parties to the run up for the assembly election, Kolkata saw a spontaneous deluge of people on the 4th of August, 2009. People singing, chanting slogans , mourning and marking the last journey of West Bengal State Minister and the left leader Subhas Chakraborty. It was the most striking gathering in recent history of Bengal. The timing of Chakraborty's demise caught the left in the most uneasy juncture of its tenure. It was at a cross-road of a palpable dent in its mass base and the death of its most prolific face of the political society. The constellation of events and forces at that point in Bengal's political map made visible an apparent withdrawal of the mass from the hitherto overwhelming left-front. The surge of the mass, thereby, at the last journey of Chakraborty almost caught many a political observer off guarded, even the party possibly. The crowd upsurge at the funeral was euphonic for the party desperate to win back a sulking electorate. As if to combat Mamata-magic who outshone all the left-leaders single-handedly in her capacity to pull crowds and organize huge gatherings, the shriveling left power seemed to be caught into wish-fulfilling fantasies.

Lost into the time, yet, it dared to call its most formidable political enemy, as if, to fight a duel. In recent times, after that spectacular demonstration of the 14th November, 2007, where people came out spontaneously in huge number protesting against the killing in Nandigram, the surge of the masses had become synonymous with the existing opposition allies led by Mamata Banerjee. Interestingly the collective, not just as a summation of individuals is a reality onto itself. The moment of its getting encoded in time and space surpassed what Chakraborty as an individual, all that a maverick left leader embodied. It was probably a cathartic moment of self-purgation. From the side of those who broke into condolence, it was a moment of release. Release of anger toward a leadership who had deceived them as much as they had done injustice to a people’s leader. Thereby, in this shared space of condolence, the uneasiness of inner schism created after the Nandigram-killings, had the opportunity to get some momentary relief. Pathos has been rampant while bidding adieu to any beloved leader passing away, though it hardly goes beyond the pleasure principle; clinging to a hypercathected object doomed to fade away.

Yet, the crowd cannot continue to stray in an eternal mourning without being appropriated by some form of political gaze. In those days of “Discovery of India”, it was duly captured by the Nehruvian gaze in the state of United Province. With projection of such a political gaze, its dynamics was invested to realize a real political goal. In Bengal's collective memory, the political has always been informed by mass upsurge. The shifting of such upsurge away from the left-block beset with the complication of the civil society created a unique opportunity for Mamata Banerjee to seize the moment. If at all it resulted in a political appropriation, it rang not just a victory or defeat of a political party. It seized the possibilities of a regime. A regime overthrown never  stages a return in history.

Abhijit k./T, Chakraborty