'War Against Books'

There are few things more alluring than the smell of a new book; the prospect of retiring for the day with a good book in hand excites me (and many, many others, I'm sure) no end.Genuine book-lovers--and I count myself as one--will agree that the reading habit needs to be encouraged;and that events like a book fair may go some way in inculcating this habit among youngsters. There's something electrifying and immensely satisfying in transporting oneself to the midst of millions of books and tens of thousands ofbibliophiles to look through, select and purchase sought-after titles--even ifwe agree that all who go to the fair aren't definitely book-lovers; many go just to soak in the ambience or for trysts with theirbeaus/belles. 

The Kolkata Book Fair is undoubtedly a major event in the city's calendar and needs to be encouraged and supported. Kolkata and Kolkatans are justifiably proud of this fair, which also happens to be the largest-attended book fair in the world.It is, thus, very disappointing that the book fair won't be held this year. An unfortunate turn of events has robbed Kolkata of the book fair this year.

But who is to blame for this? Definitely not the Calcutta High Court. Also not the citizens and environmentalists who moved the Calcutta High Court to bar the Publishers' & Booksellers' Guild (the organizers of the fair) from hosting the book fair at the Park Circus Maidan. It is, in fact, the Guild and the state government that are to blame for this fiasco. 

The Guild because of its strange obstinacy in holding the fair at the Maidan (till 2005) and at the Park Circus Maidan this year, disregarding popular sentiments and the damage to environment that results from holding the fair at such venues. The state government's inexplicable failure to construct a permanent venue for events like large fairs and exhibitions even after it promised in November,2003 to get such a facility constructed in a year's time is wholly responsible for the fair not being held this year.

And, thus, one arrives at the inescapable conclusion that it is in order to cover up their failures, their foot-dragging and their stubbornness, Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee and the so-called 'intellectuals' havetaken to criticizing the Calcutta High Court order and twisted it to suit their game of spreading lies and obfuscating the main issues.

Bhattacharjee says that the Court order amounts to a "war against books". A man of Bhattacharjee's intellect is expected to understand that the Courthas not  ruled against the Kolkata Book Fair, but against holding the event at venues that can cause pollution and inflict untold hardships on lakhs of people. But he ignores this factto propagate the fiction that the Calcutta High Court is against the book fair and is out to destroy Bengali culture! 

Author Sunil Gangopadhyay obliquely accused the Court of failing to understand Bengali culture. Other 'intellectuals', taking a cue from their chief patron (the Chief Minister), have started demanding that the Maidan be declared the permanent venue for the book fair because, as Sunil Gangopadhyay put it, what's a book fair without the cloud of dust that's raised by lakhs of footfalls.The small detail that it is precisely because of this that the book fair was ordered out of the Maidan last year and out of the Park Circus Maidan thisyear seems to escape them entirely. It was the dust, and the mauling of the city's vital lungs,that was deemed environmentally devastating. And no laboured argument about pollution or environmental degradation being a small price to pay for a prestigious event like the book fairseems logically sustainable. 

Gangopadhyay's argument that holding this fair at a venue in Kolkata similarto Delhi's Pragati Maidan would rob it of its charm and character can only be termed as specious and puerile.But the moot point is that the state and its agencies have abjectly failed, even after more than five long years since the state advocate general gave an undertaking before the High Court that a permanent fair ground would be constructed and fundshad been allotted for the project, to give to Kolkata this vital facility. And Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee & Co, which includes all these so-called intellectuals who draw legitimacy and sustenance from Bhattacharjee and his party (the CPI-M), don't want Kolkatans to dwell on this failure.

Many among those opposed to the fair being held at the Maidan or the ParkCircus Maidan,  I am sure, are as ardent as a Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee or a Sunil Gangopadhyay in buying and reading books andperiodicals. Which is why being denied the book-fair rankles. 

Let us look at the primary issue fairly and squarely. A bit of history first. The first Kolkata Book Fair was held in 1976 and grew slowly over the years to become the world's third largest book fair after Frankfurt and London. It had, till 2006, been held at the Maidan of which the army is the custodian. As this fair grew in size and popularity, rising footfalls ignited environmental concerns and in October 2002, green crusader Subhas Dutta filed a public interest litigation (PIL) before the Calcutta High Court seeking an order against holding fairs at the Maidan due to the damage being caused to the Victoria Memorial. 

The Court constituted an expert committee to look into the issue. In September 2003, the committee submitted its report stating that fairs at the Maidan were, indeed, harming the Victoria Memorial and endangering lives of lakhs of people due to dangerously high levels of pollution caused by footfalls and increased traffic movement and congestion in and around the Maidan. In November 2003, the Court asked the state government to shift all fairs from the Maidan. 

Following this order, the state advocate general promised the Court that a permanent fair ground would be set up at a place off the Eastern Metropolitan Bypass andthat funds had been allotted for this project. It was on the basis of this promise that the Court agreed to allow fairs to be held at the Maidan that year and the next. 

But with the state government dragging its feet on constructing a permanent fair ground, Subhas Dutta filed a PIL once again before the High Court in January 2006 against holding the fair at the Maidan. Moved by growing public opinion against mauling of the Maidan that the Book Fair results in and serious environmental concerns, the army also refused permission to the Guild to hold the Fair at the Maidan. 

The state government moved quickly on two fronts: one, by promising the court that a permanent venue would be readied within a year and praying for permission to hold the book fair at the Maidan "one last time", and, two, getting the Defence Ministry to overrule the local army authorities to grant permission to the Guild to hold the fair at the Maidan. 

The Court allowed the Guild to hold the fair on the Maidan "one last time". But in a shameless turnaround, Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee declared in November 2006, ten months after his advocate general told the court that the book fair would be held at the Maidan "one last time" in January-February that year, that the Maidan would be the permanent venue for the Kolkata Book Fair. 

Emboldened by the Chief Minister's support, the Guild sought permission from the army to hold the fair on the Maidan in January-February 2007, but the local army authorities declined again. Bhattacharjee, ever so willing to bat for the Guild, intervened with Defence Minister A.K.Anthony to secure the army's approval. The Guild started preparations for the fair at the Maidan but the Court intervened andordered the fair out of the Maidan. It shifted to the Salt Lake stadium, but registered fewer visitors, thereby lending credibility to criticism that all whoflock to the book fair aren't bibliophiles--for surely a true book lover would happily trudge a few more kilometres to a book fair, afterall? 

In November 2007, the Guild announced that the Park Circus Maidan would be the venue for the 33rd Kolkata Book Fair from January 29-February 10, 2008, triggering a volley of protests from residents of the area, from students, guardians and teachers of four major educational institutions and two major hospitals around the Park Circus Maidan. 

Even dire warnings by the Calcutta traffic police that holding the book fair at that venue would immobilize nearly half the city failed to create any impact; environmental concerns that an already polluted Park Circus would not become a living hell due to the Maidan were vainly dismissed. Till the Court ordered the fair out of this venue again earlier this week. 

Interestingly, the Guild's plea against holding the fair at the Salt Lake Stadium was that the venue isn't safe for women and children; a phony argument at best since there were no complaints from any women or children who visited the fair last year of any sort of harassment.

Now, for some facts. The Book Fair is organized by the Guild that earns a mind-boggling sum of money from entry fee (fourrupees per head, multiplied by the estimated 25 lakh visitors) to rent of stalls (ranging from Rs 3500 to Rs 42,000 per stall for the 550-odd stalls) and the food kiosks (Rs 10,000 at least from each of the 50-odd kiosks and stalls) it hires out at the fair each year. The accounts aren't audited and no one, save the Guild authorities, has the foggiest idea of how the crores ofrupees earned from the book fair are spent -- or, perhaps,  misspent. 

That the Chief Minister and a section of the city's (so-called) intellectuals choose to back a profit-making venture by a private body so unabashedly is, to put it mildly, quite strange and suspicious and leaves them open to the charge of having a vested interest in ensuring that this fair is held at a venue (the Maidan or the Park Circus Maidan) that'll draw lakhs of people and not allowing it to be shifted to a more salubrious locale that may be given the miss by people other than true bibliophiles for whom the fair isavowedly held anyway. What could be the vested interest? I'd leave it to your imagination; not that it takes much imagination to guess what the motivation (to support the Guild's 'Book Fair only at Maidan' line) could be.

Five years after it started work on the project, all that the state government has to show for the permanent fair ground it had promised to the Calcutta High Court is a half-constructed site way too small for a fair the size of the Kolkata Book Fair. That construction is still on and there's no saying when it will be ready. It appears that the state government is not at all interested in getting this facility ready. That is why, perhaps, Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee said at a token inauguration of the Book Fair on Tuesday that he'd do all he can to make the Maidan the permanent venue for the Book Fair. Books, he fatuously added, "can't pollute the environment" (as if the Court said that in its order) andthen went on to label the court order as a "war against books". 

How can a person like the Chief Minister indulge in such willful distortion of the court's order and its highly mischievous misinterpretation? More important, what drives him to go to such lengths? It isn't as if the Book fair, if held at the Salt Lake stadium, will be a flop show. As has been acknowledged by all, book lovers won't have any problems going to Salt Lake Stadium, as they did last year. Those who just crowd the fair and go there to eat and make merry won't, but who needs them anyway? Why is the Guild so obstinately refusing to shiftthe fair  to that venue? What prevents the state government, with all the resources at its command, to build a permanent fair ground like New Delhi's Pragati Maidan big enough to accommodate the Kolkata Book fair? Why can't work on the Milon Mela be accelerated and the venue expanded by acquiring vacant and unutilized land around it? And why do environmental concerns matter so little to Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee and the state government?

There's perhaps another, and more sinister, reason forBuddhadeb Bhattacharjee, Calcutta Mayor Bikash Ranjan Bhattacharjee, a sectionof the literati and the state government displaying such belligerence towards the High Court and those who petitioned the Court to have the fair shifted away from the Maidan and then the Park Circus Maidan. Their ideological moorings, they seriously believe, vest upon them the burden of being custodians of the masses. The masses, in turn, cannot act (or even think) independently of Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee & Co. 

Petitioning the court to ban a CPI(M)-blessed and Buddhadeb-backed event like the Kolkata Book Fair is a dangerous show of defiance and that has to be curbed. The Court cannot challenge the authority of the Marxists and has to be beaten into submission, even if it is through spreading lies and misinterpreting its orders. How dare residents of Park Circus, and the students, guardians and teachers of educational institutions around that place, challenge the Guild whose office-bearers are known to be close to the CPI(M) apparatchik? Challenging the Guild amounts to challenging the party and the authority it wields. Allowing such challenges to go unanswered would only embolden Kolkata's and Bengal's citizenry to mouth other challenges. 

And how can a party that draws inspiration from the perpetrators of the Tiananmen Square massacre and the butchers of the Cultural Revolution ever permit that? Hence, fair or not, the Kolkata Book Fair has to be taken back to its original venue, the Maidan. Environmental concerns be damned. And truth be trampled on.