West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee, leader of the TMC at a ceremony for the festival Kali Puja honouring the Hindu goddess of destruction Kali.
Nestled along the Hooghly River of the Ganges Delta is Kolkata, which along with neighbouring suburbs is the third largest metro area in India behind Delhi and Mumbai. In the colonial era, like Mumbai which had been known as Bombay, Kolkata is still known among many in the western world by its British colonial appellation "Calcutta". Indeed, one of its most famous institutions retains the name "University of Calcutta", and it remains world famous thanks to one of its alumni the physicist Satyendra Nath Bose who made some of the greatest advances in quantum mechanics and was the person who first proposed an exception to the Maxwell-Boltzmann distribution that became known as Bose-Einstein statistics.
Modern Kolkata still retains some of the stately architecture of the colonial era alongside a teeming hub of modern India. But is immigration and corruption endangering its growth while the rest of India prospers?
In the British colonial era, the city became famous when the Nawab (Lord Viceroy) Siraj ud Daulah of the Mughal principality of Bengal stormed Fort William and imprisoned 63 British and Anglo-Indian troops in a 14' x 18' room known as the Black Hole of Calcutta leading to the deaths of all but 23 men. This incident would cause the British to retaliate and conquer Bengal when Col. Robert Clive defeated the Nawab at the Battle of Plassey in 1757. Under the British East India Company's rule Calcutta grew and became the capital of Bengal as a whole, but almost two hundred years later the Bengal Province had to be partitioned just as the entire British Raj was between Hindu and Muslim states.
Partitioned into isolation.
Partition map of India, showing the partition of the subcontinent and East Pakistan, Hyderabad, Goa, and Kashmir as unresolved zones that eventually led to conflicts between the new states that were once the British Raj.
This was despite a separate plan to form a separate state known as United Bengal. Why was Bengal divided? In the 1941 census the province's population was split between 32 million Muslims and almost 24 million Hindus. While most of the people living in the province spoke Bangla, like the rest of India religious divisions remained the paramount obstacle to achieving a nation state that could adequately replace the soon-to-be leaving British colonial rulers. In fact by the end of World War II the British Indian Army had 2.5 million soldiers under its command that served in both the European and Pacific Theatres of the war with distinction. However, whereas the Muslim League supported the British effort the India National Congress desired to call for the empire to leave India prior to committing to enter the side of the Allies in the war. This was just one example of an issue where Hindus and Muslims split in relation to their relationship to the Raj.
Had Bengal been given independence in 1947, it would have joined Burma, India, Pakistan and Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) as the new nations that succeeded the Raj. Whereas Burma and Ceylon were naturally going to leave the Union of India anyway due to ethnic, religious (Buddhism as opposed to Islam or Hinduism) and linguistic differences that were too resolute from the rest of the country, the nation of Pakistan was formed purely along religious lines. Therefore, regions that were previously multi-religious like Punjab (Sikh and Muslim) and Bengal were completely bisected by the partition and underwent a population exchange accompanied by some of the most bloody episodes of genocidal violence in world history. The Partition remains to this day one of the most polarizing episodes in the history of the Indian subcontinent, but the botched formation of the Muslim nation of Pakistan from otherwise incompatible Sindhis, Pashtuns, Punjabis, Balochis, and Bengalis continues to haunt its constituent provinces to this day. In 1971 India and Pakistan fought their third war since the Partition, and East Pakistan (formed from the Muslim majority eastern part of Bengal Province) fell leading to the birth of the new nation of Bangladesh with its capital at Dhaka.
Another result of this war was the rise of India, a Non-Aligned socialist union of secular Indian states, as the preeminent power on the subcontinent at the expense of the pro-western Muslim state of Pakistan. However, Bangladesh rather than embrace India as an ally following its independence soon was roiled by military coups and eventually drifted into the orbit of other Muslim majority states in the Organization of the Islamic Cooperation.
What of the remnant?
Jyoti Basu and Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee together. Leading India's most powerful provincial communist party the CPI(M) in Bengal the two leaders implemented land reform, but by 2011 it became clear that a proletarian revolution was not going to happen in West Bengal.
Meanwhile West Bengal was also affected by the Partition, as the '47 refugees led to a new dispossessed underclass from what became East Pakistan. As of 2009, over seven thousand of these people continued to live in Cooper's Camp in West Bengal near the border with Bangladesh . Unfortunately, the politics of this new province carved out of Partition continue to be coloured by the fortunes of their independent neighbour as well as the promising of various convoluted solutions to the province's poor. Also, in 1966 parts of India stretching across its provinces from Hyderabad all the way to West Bengal have been engulfed in the Maoist Naxalite insurgency.
For these reasons West Bengal after 1977 shifted from being controlled by the mainstream left Indian National Congress and its local affiliates to the Communist Party of India (Marxist)/Left Front which embarked on an ambitious land reform policy throughout the 1980s. Jyoti Basu, the leader of the CPI(M) and Left Front ruled as Chief Minister for 23 years. But under the CPI (M) the Naxalite insurgency did not subside, indeed it only increased until by 2006 Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh of the Congress declared it the country's number one security threat. The CPI(M)'s populist economic policies never were able to appease the insurgency, and during this era the economy of the region took a turn for the worse. In 2000 Basu was replaced by Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee, a milder uncharismatic technocrat of the party.
Enter Mamata
West Bengal state Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee, once one of the Time 100 most influential people, has in many respects turned West Bengal from one of India's preeminent states into a bloated backwater plagued by illegal immigration, political corruption, and the silencing of the opposition.
A rallying point for the opposition under Bhattacharjee was the Tata Motors Singur deal which awarded 997 acres of farmland in West Bengal to the Tata Motors automotive conglomerate through an eminent domain enforcement that displaced local farmers. For many, this was a sign that the communist CPI(M) was now just a corporate puppet. In 2011 at the next provincial elections they received a total reversal at the polls losing 171 seats. This swept into power Bengal's first female chief minister, Mamata Banerjee. At the time many hailed it as an historic occasion for turning around the province. As is common in India, many left personal contact information on the news story asking Banerjee for intercession in order to find a job, have their electricity reconnected, or other personal favours. It was thought, similar to other symbolically transcendent world leaders that she could work miracles.
Banerjee was the head of the All-India Trinamool Congress (AITC) a faction of the India National Congress, and vowed to deal with the Naxalites and with the state's hemorrhaging economy. In 2017 she claimed to have made dramatic advances in mitigating the Naxalite insurgency. Unfortunately, in terms of public policy she would only deepen the province's troubles. In order to finance ambitious expansion of public services, Banerjee had the WB government apply for a loan from the Asian Development Bank (ADB) of $300 million that it received in 2017.
Meanwhile a further issue began to crop up that threatened to change West Bengal's social cohesion forever: illegal immigration from Bangladesh. By 2016 there were estimates that 20 million Bangladeshis were living in India illegally, up from 12 million in 2004. This number is overwhelmingly concentrated in West Bengal which has a total population of 90 million. Just two years into Banerjee's term as CM, Bengalis had soured not only on the province but on its capital Kolkata which has traditionally been called the "cultural capital of India". The rampant crime, suicides, and trafficking of children was cited as the cause for this depressed mood. Among artists the sentiment was very clear as revealed in an obscure but revealing documentary made by the local film-making group Dynt.
How has Mamata Banerjee dealt with this? In the next segment we will explore how just like the Communist Party before her, she has transformed a province blessed with some of India's most ambitious people and revered institutions into a kingdom of fear and corruption.