#Tragedy_of_Bengal Perhaps it required the horrors of first Sydney and then Peshawar to deflect West Bengal’s attention from the mess that the state appears to have landed itself in ~ notwithstanding the occasionally encouraging noises its Finance minister makes ~ although it must be said in tepid defence of Mr Amit Mitra that he appears to reel off numbers more to convince himself than anyone else. But as an utterly ineffectual government ~ rendered so in part by its inherent contradictions, and otherwise by the hostile stand it has taken vis-à-vis the Centre ~ grapples with existential questions, it is time to reflect on where the state is headed. Its finances are in a mess and it cannot pay its creditors. Its streets resonate with protest and its people grit their teeth in frustration. Once known as the fount of intellectualism, the quality of its discourse has sunk to the gutters. Its campuses seethe and its investors ~ those few who remain ~ scurry for cover. Welfare schemes flounder, for the Central assistance on which they were predicated has dried up. Its Chief Minister leads the state’s galloping charge to irrelevance and mouths vulgar inanities when faced by the need to defend those who are and have always been little more than her proxies. Linking these various catastrophes is the Saradha chit fund scam. Without question ~ and because that is the nature of the beast ~ there must be a partisan, political angle to the prosecution of the scam by the Central Bureau of Investigation as alleged by Miss Banerjee in Delhi. The fact that only leaders of the Trinamul Congress have so far been implicated, when it is well known the scam began during the days of the Left, is a giveaway. But there is a real risk of missing the wood for the trees, as the state government trades charges with the BJP dispensation at the Centre in an effort to suggest that its leaders named in the scam are victims of a political conspiracy. There is little doubt that this dispensation in Kolkata was as complicit as its predecessor in allowing Sudipta Sen the freedom to operate his criminal scheme to defraud small investors. Equally, there is little doubt that Trinamul politicians contributed to and benefited from Sen’s largesse. Finally it is now clear that the unprincipled toll Miss Mamata Banerjee paid on the highway to power in 2011 centred around the obsessive need of her party for Sen’s support in ways that perhaps the investigation will now reveal, coupled with the grubby manipulation of a media baron who saw in this confluence of vested interests an opportunity for himself. But lost in the fervid cacophony of manufactured angst is the unending scream of the victim, that poor, hapless subaltern who first reposed faith in Sen and then in Miss Banerjee. One failed him and the other is well on the path to doing so. That is the tragedy of Bengal...
Posted on: Sat, 20 Dec 2014 07:10:25 +0000
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