Left's parasites will survive by SUNANDA K DATTA-RAY
March 02, 2011 2:34:59 AM
SUNANDA K DATTA-RAY
http://www.dailypioneer.com/320014/Lefts-parasites-will-survive.html
March 02, 2011 2:34:59 AM
SUNANDA K DATTA-RAY
http://www.dailypioneer.com/320014/Lefts-parasites-will-survive.html
CPI(M)'s goons were the first to make the move and join Trinamool Congress. Industrialists and intellectuals are following them.
Logically, the end of West Bengal’s Left Front rule — whenever it happens — should also mean the end of two parasitic groups that benefit hugely from Alimuddin Street’s patronage. One is the tribe of building promoters who get land virtually for the asking; the other the peculiarly Bengali phenomenon of Marxist intellectuals (or is that tautology?) who rake in capitalist loot.
Recent meetings in Calcutta of Oxford Thinking, a high-powered visiting group trying to cash in on the university’s India links to raise money, reminded me of this second species. Bengali opportunism has a hoary literary lineage. I am told of a writer boasting in 1857 that he was prepared for whichever side won by wearing a dhoti over his trousers. The dhoti could quickly be discarded if the British prevailed; no one would know of the trousers lurking beneath if the sepoys were victorious.
The Oxford Thinking meeting was equally revealing when a Marxist intellectual who wrote venomously against Indo-British cooperation in fellow-travelling Samar Sen’s Now weekly appealed to Lord (Chris) Patten, the Chancellor, to ensure that Indian students are not deprived of the Oxford experience for lack of funds. In short, he was begging for British money so that Indians could study in England. The plea was not surprising; that it should be made publicly was. After all, a former Marxist Mayor kept it a dark secret that he had approached the American Consul-General to have Kolkata twinned with San Francisco (we already had a twin in Odessa) because his son was in California.
But, perhaps, with time running out, reticence can be dispensed with. The thinking brigade has done so well out of 30 years of Left Front rule that its sensitivities about taking what it can and asking for more are blunted. I am talking of the regime’s cultural hangers-on though full-time Communists can also be spectacularly self-contradictory. When Eric Hobsbawm first met Indian Communists in their salad days in England, worshipping at the feet of Rajani Palme Dutt, the British Communist Party’s half-Indian half-Swede but wholly upper class English guru, he “did not realise how untypical they were of their societies … the elite of the elites of the ‘native’ colonial populations”.
Like Mrs Indira Gandhi’s one-time confidant, Mohan, son of the Zamindar of Kumaramangalam (as he styled himself though others remember him better as Dr P Subbarayan), they illustrated how in the absence of an European-style hereditary aristocracy, the haute bourgeoisie rule the roost. This “bizarrerie”, as Hobsbawn called it, came to life with Renu Chakravorty’s Christmas dinner in Calcutta. Hobsbawm was served ham and turkey from the Calcutta Club (where her cousin was secretary) followed by biryani, and then plum pudding, also from the club.
A titled Englishwoman representing a British philanthropic trust told me how nervous she had been about calling on Indrajit Gupta, then Home Minister in Mr HD Deve Gowda’s Government. North Block was uninviting and Gupta’s room bleak as she awaited her first encounter with a Communist. Then her eyes lit on a framed photograph of King’s College, Cambridge, and all fear vanished. Mohan, son of the Zamindar of Kumaramangalam, was also a King’s, Cambridge man.
If, returning to Hobsbawm, “the dominant ideology of every society is the ideology of the dominant class”, its lifestyle is the prize that inspires the masses who are not born bourgeois like Ms Brinda Karat. Her rajbati and Westernised boxwallah background makes her UHB (urban haute bourgeoisie) as the bright young White Anglo-Saxon Protestant sparks call themselves in the 1989 film, Metropolitan. Others become bourgeois like the successful producer of revolutionary films and plays who hired an interior decorator to create two sitting rooms in his house. The upstairs one in black leather and white wrought iron with a bar was for Society guests; the one downstairs with rough benches for party hoi-polloi. Not for them the fine distinction Gupta drew when talking to the leftist academic, Mr Kamal Mitra Chenoy, between being “not gentlemen of privilege, but gentlemen of the people”. Being born to privilege, Gupta could afford to spurn it.
A fiery young radical who used to threaten scathingly to call his book about yesterday’s revolutionaries The Lost Generation (with no apologies to Gertrude Stein) himself scaled dizzy corporate heights under Left Front benevolence. The men he held in contempt but whose ranks he gladly joined also became managing directors of public sector organisations, chairmen of important statutory bodies, university Vice-Chancellors or Rajya Sabha members. These high positions are supposed to be occupied by apolitical people but they owed their elevation entirely to Left Front patronage. As the baddie in John Le Carre’s The Night Manager says, “Today’s guerrillas are tomorrow’s fatcats.”
There are also the businessmen and promoters who may have suffered socially when Jyoti Basu retired since his puritanical successor doesn’t hob-nob with them over a whisky at the Tollygunge Club. But their commercial position remains secure for even a revolutionary party needs funds. Only tycoons to whom the revolution that will never come has been mortgaged in advance can provide the funds in exchange for permits and licences.
That nexus continues. It always will. Judging by the astuteness with which Ms Mamata Banerjee handles her appearances under the aegis of the Indian Chamber of Commerce or the Ananda Bazar Patrika group, she is anxious to prove that rabble-rousing is only for street rallies. There is another side to her, and this should command middle and upper middle class allegiance. Scenting power, the classes are ready to oblige.
Neither group — intellectuals and promoters — need produce an Indian version of The God That Failed whose promotional tag read “Six famous men tell how they changed their minds about Communism”. They had no god, only Mammon in which no one ever loses faith. Moreover, Trinamool Congress’s language is also comfortingly progressive.
It’s the Vicar of Bray all over. Defined as a person who changes beliefs and principles to stay in favour with the powers that be, the term is taken from an 18th century satirical song whose chorus explains the philosophy of survival:
And this is law, I will maintain Unto my Dying Day, Sir.That whatsoever King may reign,I will be the Vicar of Bray, Sir!
The CPI(M)’s goons were the first to make the move. Industrialists and intellectuals are following them.
--(sunandadr@yahoo.co.in)
Logically, the end of West Bengal’s Left Front rule — whenever it happens — should also mean the end of two parasitic groups that benefit hugely from Alimuddin Street’s patronage. One is the tribe of building promoters who get land virtually for the asking; the other the peculiarly Bengali phenomenon of Marxist intellectuals (or is that tautology?) who rake in capitalist loot.
Recent meetings in Calcutta of Oxford Thinking, a high-powered visiting group trying to cash in on the university’s India links to raise money, reminded me of this second species. Bengali opportunism has a hoary literary lineage. I am told of a writer boasting in 1857 that he was prepared for whichever side won by wearing a dhoti over his trousers. The dhoti could quickly be discarded if the British prevailed; no one would know of the trousers lurking beneath if the sepoys were victorious.
The Oxford Thinking meeting was equally revealing when a Marxist intellectual who wrote venomously against Indo-British cooperation in fellow-travelling Samar Sen’s Now weekly appealed to Lord (Chris) Patten, the Chancellor, to ensure that Indian students are not deprived of the Oxford experience for lack of funds. In short, he was begging for British money so that Indians could study in England. The plea was not surprising; that it should be made publicly was. After all, a former Marxist Mayor kept it a dark secret that he had approached the American Consul-General to have Kolkata twinned with San Francisco (we already had a twin in Odessa) because his son was in California.
But, perhaps, with time running out, reticence can be dispensed with. The thinking brigade has done so well out of 30 years of Left Front rule that its sensitivities about taking what it can and asking for more are blunted. I am talking of the regime’s cultural hangers-on though full-time Communists can also be spectacularly self-contradictory. When Eric Hobsbawm first met Indian Communists in their salad days in England, worshipping at the feet of Rajani Palme Dutt, the British Communist Party’s half-Indian half-Swede but wholly upper class English guru, he “did not realise how untypical they were of their societies … the elite of the elites of the ‘native’ colonial populations”.
Like Mrs Indira Gandhi’s one-time confidant, Mohan, son of the Zamindar of Kumaramangalam (as he styled himself though others remember him better as Dr P Subbarayan), they illustrated how in the absence of an European-style hereditary aristocracy, the haute bourgeoisie rule the roost. This “bizarrerie”, as Hobsbawn called it, came to life with Renu Chakravorty’s Christmas dinner in Calcutta. Hobsbawm was served ham and turkey from the Calcutta Club (where her cousin was secretary) followed by biryani, and then plum pudding, also from the club.
A titled Englishwoman representing a British philanthropic trust told me how nervous she had been about calling on Indrajit Gupta, then Home Minister in Mr HD Deve Gowda’s Government. North Block was uninviting and Gupta’s room bleak as she awaited her first encounter with a Communist. Then her eyes lit on a framed photograph of King’s College, Cambridge, and all fear vanished. Mohan, son of the Zamindar of Kumaramangalam, was also a King’s, Cambridge man.
If, returning to Hobsbawm, “the dominant ideology of every society is the ideology of the dominant class”, its lifestyle is the prize that inspires the masses who are not born bourgeois like Ms Brinda Karat. Her rajbati and Westernised boxwallah background makes her UHB (urban haute bourgeoisie) as the bright young White Anglo-Saxon Protestant sparks call themselves in the 1989 film, Metropolitan. Others become bourgeois like the successful producer of revolutionary films and plays who hired an interior decorator to create two sitting rooms in his house. The upstairs one in black leather and white wrought iron with a bar was for Society guests; the one downstairs with rough benches for party hoi-polloi. Not for them the fine distinction Gupta drew when talking to the leftist academic, Mr Kamal Mitra Chenoy, between being “not gentlemen of privilege, but gentlemen of the people”. Being born to privilege, Gupta could afford to spurn it.
A fiery young radical who used to threaten scathingly to call his book about yesterday’s revolutionaries The Lost Generation (with no apologies to Gertrude Stein) himself scaled dizzy corporate heights under Left Front benevolence. The men he held in contempt but whose ranks he gladly joined also became managing directors of public sector organisations, chairmen of important statutory bodies, university Vice-Chancellors or Rajya Sabha members. These high positions are supposed to be occupied by apolitical people but they owed their elevation entirely to Left Front patronage. As the baddie in John Le Carre’s The Night Manager says, “Today’s guerrillas are tomorrow’s fatcats.”
There are also the businessmen and promoters who may have suffered socially when Jyoti Basu retired since his puritanical successor doesn’t hob-nob with them over a whisky at the Tollygunge Club. But their commercial position remains secure for even a revolutionary party needs funds. Only tycoons to whom the revolution that will never come has been mortgaged in advance can provide the funds in exchange for permits and licences.
That nexus continues. It always will. Judging by the astuteness with which Ms Mamata Banerjee handles her appearances under the aegis of the Indian Chamber of Commerce or the Ananda Bazar Patrika group, she is anxious to prove that rabble-rousing is only for street rallies. There is another side to her, and this should command middle and upper middle class allegiance. Scenting power, the classes are ready to oblige.
Neither group — intellectuals and promoters — need produce an Indian version of The God That Failed whose promotional tag read “Six famous men tell how they changed their minds about Communism”. They had no god, only Mammon in which no one ever loses faith. Moreover, Trinamool Congress’s language is also comfortingly progressive.
It’s the Vicar of Bray all over. Defined as a person who changes beliefs and principles to stay in favour with the powers that be, the term is taken from an 18th century satirical song whose chorus explains the philosophy of survival:
And this is law, I will maintain Unto my Dying Day, Sir.That whatsoever King may reign,I will be the Vicar of Bray, Sir!
The CPI(M)’s goons were the first to make the move. Industrialists and intellectuals are following them.
--(sunandadr@yahoo.co.in)
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