After the recent burst of students-related clashes, Mamata Banerjee needs to take risks and be seen to act decisively against perpetrators of crime. The time for caution and balancing is over
There is no doubt that the vandalism at Presidency University (formerly Presidency College) is going to cost the Trinamool Congress in Kolkata. Allegedly carried out by Trinamool youth activists, the violence saw severe damage to the Baker laboratory in the Department of Chemistry of what is a cherished Kolkata institution. Admittedly, the Presidency is past its prime. like the city it is located in, it has seen better days. Yet, for middle-class Kolkata it still represents a marker of the city’s identity in a manner that, say, St Stephen’s College does not for Delhi. It is not just the college for a power elite but an embodiment of middle-class aspiration and reverence for learning.
It is a fair point that Presidency College has been under attack for years — physically and intellectually. Successive left Front Governments, motivated by a crass anti-intellectualism, sought to diminish the college, transfer its best teachers to provincial institutions and in a sense degrade it. It was only with the coming of Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee, himself an old student, and Mamata Banerjee that a move began to give Presidency College autonomy, encompassing authority to recruit teachers, shape its curriculum and liberate itself from the University of Calcutta’s bureaucracy.
All of that good work — some of which Ms Banerjee is responsible for — will come to naught if the perception is allowed to prevail that politicians, including those of the ruling party, are happy to treat Presidency College and other colleges as playthings. To argue the CPI(M) and the Congress did likewise in the 1970s and 1980s will not do. The damage and the middle-class hostility are something Trinamool will simply have to factor in.
The issue, really, goes beyond the vandalism at the Baker laboratory. If this were a one-off incident — and to be fair such egregious incidents are still few and far between in Kolkata — it would be one thing. It comes, in the backdrop of a period of student violence in the city. The CPI(M)-backed Students’ Federation of India is finding its decades-long hegemony challenged by the Trinamool students’ wing. The result has been a messy, bloody college students’ union election season. Already a police officer has been killed. An SFI activist has died, in all probability accidentally, after being taken into custody following a demonstration.
Ms Banerjee’s colleagues have stressed not at all the provocation has come from the Trinamool side. Much of it has been caused, they argue, by an SFI desperate to stay relevant and fighting inch by inch. This may be true. The college campuses of Kolkata are seeing an angular and disagreeable offshoot of a more democratic and competitive political environment. The era when the SFI held sway — except in a handful of colleges, including, ironically, Presidency College — meant the establishmentarian students’ groups were not challenged. Non-violence in such a case was the product of fear and not the absence of acrimony. On the other hand, the coming to power of Trinamool Congress has prised open spaces — and this process can occasionally have troubling consequences.
To the average Kolkata resident, irrespective of political affiliation, Presidency College is a place of reverence. This sentiment invokes the city’s past and its history of achievement. It is a potent emotion, especially since nostalgia is pretty much all Kolkata has going for it today. The fact that Trinamool Congress cadre violated the sanctity of a college, and of Presidency College in particular, will add to the frustration and disquiet in the city.
Urban voters are among the most fickle. Kolkata voted for the CPI(M) and its allies in 1977, but began to turn against the left in 1982. By then the Communists had captured the rural heartland and no longer needed the big city. Kolkata has long been Mamata territory but it is expected she will suffer a setback there in the 2014 lok Sabha election. like the left in the 1980s she may well make up the numbers in rural areas, particularly in central and northern Bengal. This is where Trinamool is still the underdog and the rising force.
What does this mean for Kolkata, thoughIJ A second spell of sustained alienation from the dominant party in the State — presuming Trinamool emerges on top in 2014 and maybe later as well — will not serve the city. If it loses its political clout, as it did in the early 1980s, a cynical Government will tend to neglect it and its sorry saga will only lengthen.
The onus is on Ms Banerjee to take remedial steps. Kolkata has been good to her and has stood by her in her darkest hours, including in an election in which her party won only a single lok Sabha seat. Also, urban voters — especially from small towns and the rust belt on the periphery of Kolkata — have traditionally formed the bedrock of Trinamool. There is no natural antipathy as there was in the case of the CPI(M). Even so, ordinary citizens have a right to be worried Kolkata may be slipping into the sort of chronic street violence that defined life in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
It is all very well to say there was greater violence in the CPI(M) years, mainly in the rural areas. The Communists were shrewd in limiting overt display of excesses on the streets of the state capital. This saved them from a bad Press, particularly in New Delhi. Having said that, Ms Banerjee’s mandate of poriborton (change) requires her to curtail existing violence and certainly not allow political workers to expand its remit.
The campus strongmen; the musclemen in the Kolkata Port region; the autorickshaw driver unions; the syndicates that double as protection rackets for anybody who wants to run a business or just repair a house — it is a fact that many of these have migrated from the CPI(M) to Trinamool Congress. Thus far Ms Banerjee has desisted from hard action because she is afraid, and legitimately, that the CPI(M) will embrace these lobbies once more and cripple her electorally. After the recent burst of students-related violence, however, she needs to take risks and be seen to act decisively. The time for caution and balancing is over.
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