Maybe it is time to observe, yet once more, the
separate paths the two Bengals have taken over
the last many years. With the Left Front scoring
one more decisive win in the state elections in
West Bengal, it becomes pertinent to assess the
ways in which politics has shaped up in a
geographical region that once formed a political
whole.

And let no one miss either the point that it was
precisely a hundred years ago that the All-India
Muslim League was given shape in Dhaka, a
political move that was to have pretty negative
consequences, not only for the whole of India,
but, and especially, for Bengal as well.

Overall, the impact of Muslim League politics on
the psyche of Bengali Muslims was terrible, a
malady which not many who form part of the
independent People’s Republic of Bangladesh are
yet to turn their backs on. History, it cannot
but be acknowledged, has been harsh to Bengalis
on both sides of the border. It is in light of
that harshness that one must observe the manner
in which life and society have evolved, or
regressed, in West Bengal and Bangladesh in these
last many decades.

But by far the general impression, one that we
cannot quite ignore or dismiss out of hand, made
by the process of historical movement in Bengal
(and we refer to it from the perspective of
history) is that West Bengal today happens to
epitomize all, or nearly all, that we in
Bangladesh once struggled for in the 1960s and
then fought for in the early 1970s.

No, we do not mean that struggle in the sense of
a movement for political sovereignty. We mean,
fundamentally, the sustained movement that East
Bengal put up more than four decades ago for the
creation of a secular entity in Bangladesh. This
new electoral triumph of the Left Front in West
Bengal somehow puts paid to our own pretensions
to a secular political framework.

In the twenty-nine years in which the communists
and their allies have governed West Bengal,
secularism has increasingly defined the attitude
of the Bengalis inhabiting the state. That sort
of reality, unfortunately, has been conspicuous
by its absence in Bangladesh. But we did begin
well, surely. The entire course of the movement
for regional autonomy in the 1960s followed by
the armed struggle for independence from Pakistan
was based on the principle that Bengali culture,
purely Bengali politics, would serve as the
underpinning of life in this part of the world.

Indeed, the emergence of the free state of
Bangladesh in December 1971 was clear proof of
the maturity the Bengali in the eastern half of
divided Bengal had arrived at. The Muslim
Bengali, without in any way damaging his
religiosity or clipping away at it, readily
accepted the thought that the province he had
transformed into a country would be a Bengali
state, meaning a democratic structure with the
very necessary principle of secularism serving as
its ethos.

While East Bengalis suffered through the
inhumanity of the Pakistan army and yet moved on
to create their secular state, West Bengal
struggled to free itself of the Naxalite shadows
that had come across its skies. At the same time,
the communists waged a sustained, long struggle
to wrest control of the state from the Congress
as it was led by Siddhartha Shankar Ray.

And then something terrible happened. The
Bengalis of Bangladesh simply fell back, or
faltered, somewhere along the way. What they had
never imagined would come to pass actually
happened. Their soldiers killed their own
founder-president and the very leaders who had
shaped and led the War of Liberation.

Between 1975 and 1977, the independent state of
Bangladesh took a swift slide into the past.
Secular Bengali nationalism was put out to
pasture by authoritarian decrees and politics
mutated into the silhouette of a Pakistani past.
Democracy was placed in the straitjacket of a
general’s uniform. MG Tawab, the air force
officer brought in from his adopted home in
Germany, was utilized as a hint of the future. He
presided over a conference of clerics that
clearly intended to redefine Bangladesh as a
Muslim state. And thus was the first disturbing
move toward supplanting Bengali nationalism with
“Bangladeshi nationalism” taken.

And even as Bangladesh went through such manifest
brutality, West Bengal was charting a wholly
different course altogether. In 1977, its
leftists, having cohabited with others in
government for quite a while, finally seized
control of the state through winning the
elections.

In Bangladesh, as the Awami League stayed busy
warding off the blows inflicted on it by a
military regime and its rightwing, pro-Pakistan
hangers-on, the Left lay paralysed. The segment
of it that had its politics tuned in to the
Beijing antenna, however, quickly linked up with
the Zia regime and so accelerated the decline of
the state.

The tragedy for the Bengalis of Bangladesh is
that while their state has slowly but surely
retreated into a cocoon, certainly of a communal
variety, the Bengalis of West Bengal have
constantly reasserted themselves in the matter of
building a properly democratic political
structure. If communal riots have upset political
wagons in the rest of India, the Left Front in
West Bengal has made sure that on its watch
Bengalis did not collapse into religious or
sectarian disorder.

In Bangladesh, General Zia sent secularism
packing and then filled the space thus made
glaringly empty with invocations to Allah.
General Ershad carried the whole thing a few more
absurd steps further, through decreeing that the
religion of the state of Bangladesh would be
Islam. It was a curious condition. While West
Bengal gained in health and political wisdom,
Bangladesh was being systematically pushed into a
condition of darkness.

Healthy enervation set in. What Bangabandhu
Sheikh Mujibur Rahman had started out doing for
Bangladesh, through promoting secularism and
socialism, was actually being done in earnest in
West Bengal by Jyoti Basu. The people of West
Bengal were noticeably giving short shrift to
political leaders and workers outside the Left.
In Bangladesh, it was the enemies of
independence, the collaborators of the Pakistan
army, who were taking over nearly every area of
politics and administration. In these decades
since 1975, or 1977 (it depends on how you look
at the whole idea), the Left Front in West Bengal
has carried out extensive land reforms, has
expanded the network of statewide education, has
disciplined Calcutta in the civic sense of the
meaning.

In Bangladesh, those who have benefited from the
assassinations of 1975 have persistently divided
the country right down the middle, have confused
people with their spurious brands of politics and
have simply handed over the economy to the robber
barons.

Of course, West Bengal’s leftists have
restructured their economic programs to inject
pragmatism in their politics. Jyoti Basu,
Buddhadev Bhattacharjee, and Asim Dasgupta have
solicited foreign investment without undermining
their core socialistic principles.

Contrast that with Bangladesh. The quality of
political leadership has been embarrassingly low,
non-government organisations have claimed
increasingly bigger shares of the cake and
foreigners have found endless opportunities to
meddle in the nation’s politics.

The World Bank and the IMF have never called up
the courage to tell the Left Front government
what it must do as an administration; in
Bangladesh, these two representatives of Western
interests are everywhere in the corridors of
power, have unlimited access to policy making.
Ask the finance minister of this independent
country.

It is intriguing how divergent the two Bengals
have been in the operation of politics. In
Calcutta, politics has remained, despite the
structural changes to the economy, in the hands
of the political classes — and they extend from
the grassroots to the highest level of power. In
Dhaka, with as much as eighty four per cent of
membership in the Jatiyo Sangsad in the hands of
businessmen (and the major political parties
happily throwing around nominations at hefty
prices), politics has slipped into the clutches
of a class that knows not the high calling of the
profession. Parliament, predictably, is no more
the focus of governance.

In Jyoti Basu, Buddhadev Bhattacharjee, and the
recently expired Anil Biswas, West Bengal has had
the very enviable good fortune of being led by
the politically savvy and idealistic. In
Bangladesh, apart from the government of Sheikh
Mujibur Rahman, and, twenty-one years after his
assassination, that of his daughter, politics has
been in free fall. The mediocrity and
incompetence all around us say it all.