Kolkata Korner

What Damage Control?
After having received a lot of flak from all quarters, including its alliesand the Left-leaning ‘intellectuals’, the CPI(M) has gone into a damagecontrol mode, mainly by holding public meetings to explain the need forindustrialisation to the people. But, truth be told, the exercise is bound to bean eminently futile one. The reason being that our Marxists, especially CMBuddhadeb Bhattacharjee, have no genuine regrets for the mayhem at Nadigram andwon’t shed their arrogance or won’t approach the problem with an open mind.This became amply evident from recent statements made by top CPI(M) leaders.Earlier this week, Bhattacharjee told a gathering of student activists belongingto his party’s affiliates that he’s owning moral responsibility for themassacre. But his body language, the words he chose, the tone of his deliveryand his gestures showed he was far from being contrite. And then, he exposedhimself by castigating the people of Nandigram for continuing to wallow inignorance and not realizing that had they handed over their lands, their liveswould have changed dramatically for the better. Bhattacharjee mocked them andthundered that the chemical hub that was to have come up at Nandigram woulddefinitely be set up elsewhere. Bhattacharjee’s senior colleagues have alsobeen speaking in the same vein, mocking and insulting all those opposed to theCPI(M)’s arbitrariness. That is why the damage control launched by the partyis bound to fail.

Just Another Incident
This is how filmmaker Raja Sen, drafted by the CPI(M) to counter the anti-CPI(M)outbursts of prominent artistes, actors, litterateurs and other prominentpersonas, described the Nandigram bloodbath. Sen, a prominent player in thenewly floated Shanti-o-Sanghati Mancha (Peace & Unity Forum) along withwriter Sunil Gangopadhyay and others known for their proximity to the CPI(M),said the Nandigram killings were "condemnable", but "deaths resulting frompolice firing were not extraordinary and could not be a reason for Left-leaning‘intellectuals’ to lambast the CPI(M). Gangopadhyay blasted author andactivist Mahasweta Devi and others for using "provocative and irresponsible"language and condemned those demanding CM’s resignation. And West Bengal, headded, would slip into anarchy if Buddhadeb steps down! Wonder who Gangopadhyayis kidding. His, and Sen’s utterances, provide more proof that the CPI(M) hasn’tlearnt any lessons from Nandigram. If it had, it would have shown remorse andnot deployed its henchmen to justify the massacre or pour scorn on critics.

Undue Haste
We’re very often told that Bengal needs to catch up with other states and,hence, the hurry to attract capital for industries. Land acquisition forindustrial, commercial or housing projects takes a long time and, in the normalcourse, this process would have taken more than six months at Singur (for theTata small car factory). But since time could not be wasted, what with manyother states wooing the Tatas as well, the process was put on fast-track andcompleted in a little under two months. And this haste caused the problems atSingur, we’re told by the Bengal government. But then, why has Bengal slippedcompared to other states? Who’s responsible for the decline spanning the threedecades of Left rule in Bengal? For all these years, the CPI(M) and its Leftallies allowed Bengal to slide into decline. They, in fact, were singularlyresponsible for the downslide and did their best to hasten the southwardmovement. And now that some among them have realised how disastrous the Left’spolicies have been, they’ve slammed the brakes and reversed gears. And whathas just happened to Bengal is just what would happen if the driver of a carspeeding downhill slams the brakes and tries to do a U-turn—the car would skidor overturn or careen or crash into the side rails. Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee, inthe driver’s seat, would’ve been well advised to apply the brakes gently,bring the downslide to halt gradually and only then reverse gears to make aU-turn and climb uphill. Now that his car has crashed, he would be well advisedto allow time for a complete repair job instead of a patchwork that would onlylead to a disastrous breakdown during the far tougher journey uphill.

Who’s To Blame?
A drive down the eastern metropolitan bypass always reveals the criminal damagebeing caused to the fragile ecology and bio-diversity of the East KolkataWetlands by its side. The wetlands, a Ramsar site, should have been a fiercelyprotected area. Instead, there have been encroachments galore and, over the pastfew years, giant hoardings have been erected in complete contravention ofenvironment laws and rules. In fact, the hoardings—advertising mostly upscaleproducts—stand as a mockery of the country’s environment protection laws andinternational covenants guarding Ramsar sites. The hoardings stand on concreteplatforms constructed by illegally filling up waterbodies. They’re illuminatedfor more than 12 hours a day by powerful lamps powered by generators that notonly spew smoke, but also fuel and other wastes into the waterbodies. The lightskeep migratory birds away and have been causing irreversible harm to nocturnallife forms in the wetlands. The air and water pollution has also been causingincalculable damage. It is only now that the East Kolkata Wetlands ManagementAuthority has woken up to this and issued notices to those who put up thehoardings, asking them to dismantle these structures within a fortnight. Butbodies like the Kolkata Municipal Corporation, the Kolkata MetropolitanDevelopment Authority and the Bidhannagar Municipality (a part of the wetlandsfalls under its jurisdiction) had given permission for these hoardings. How didthat happen? It’s impossible to believe that the officers manning these bodieswere unaware of the laws and rules governing the wetlands and waterbodies. Theymust have issued these permissions for some consideration. It is thus not enoughfor the wetlands management authority to issue notices to the advertisingagencies that had put up these offending hoardings. The people who allowed themto come up have to be penalized, and penalized in an exemplary manner. And whatabout the wetlands management authority itself? Was it unaware all these yearsthat the hoardings were causing a lot of damage to the wetlands and wereillegal? Heads have to roll, and some should belong to this authority as well.And it shouldn’t be enough for the agencies to just dismantle thehoardings—they have to be penalized heavily for the damage they caused and forviolating the law by obtaining permission (definitely by crooked means) for anillegal act.

Powerless
An oft-repeated claim of the Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee government is thatBengal is a power-surplus state. This is touted as one of the advantages ofsetting up industries in Bengal during the frequent interactions Bhattacharjeeand his ministers and babus hold with the moneybags. It now transpires that thisclaim, like many others made by Marxists, is a hollow one. Come summers, thepower department has warned, West Bengal will witness extensive power cuts dueto a crippling power shortage. The expected shortfall will be about 400megawatts during the peak evening hours. The peak hour deficit in Kolkata hasalready crossed 100 megawatts. The state electricity board’s mainstay, a 210megawatt generating thermal power unit at Bandel, suffered damages last yearwhen its turbo-generator caught fire last year. It is yet to be repaired! Thus,long power cuts will be the flavour of Kolkata over the next few months. Buttrust the Marxists to put a spin to this embarrassing lie—power cuts, they nowsay, are a worldwide phenomenon and even cities in the US of A suffer powercuts.

Heat Onslaught
March has not even ended yet, but the mercury has been shooting up wildly. Theweatherman says it’s because of hot and dry winds blowing in from the west.Since no moisture-laden wind is blowing in from the Bay of Bengal, the westerlywind is having a free run. Temperatures are already a couple of degrees abovenormal and there’s no respite in sight in the immediate future. Some metofficers predict that the summers this time will be long and hot. And with theprospect of power cuts looming large, Kolkata would be one uninhabitable placevery soon.