Was at a friend’s place a few days back. Booze, smoke, small talk, big talk, bragging, failed attempts at groping in the dark, loud gulps of laughter at atrocious sms jokes – symptoms of an upwardly mobile class (nouveau rich which is mostly rich on hired money, inherited money and stolen money) – were floating dense in the air. I get bored with people too soon. So I was concentrating on cutlets and fries – well done and well made.
Suddenly a discussion erupted on the Bengal elections. People were clearly taking bipolar stands. I was asked about my views. Frankly I didn’t want to talk. Unrelenting silence coupled with endless munching of snacks in these circles is perceived as snobbish display of greed. So I thought I must break my silence. What I ended up speaking was not something that I intended to blabber here. My endless speech went thus:
“I’m not a great votary of democracy. I find in its original idea an attempt to fog the powerful behind a veil of large institutions – parliaments, courts, universities, police, publishing houses, rights groups and museums etc. Democracy is good at furthering and legitimizing industrial, technological and consumerist wars and associated interests. In a way both feed on each other to a great extent in a classical sense. In fact democracy is a good cause to bomb sovereign nations. Democracy requires people to be interlinked and integrated among and between nation states. This is brilliant from the point of view of accessing labour and consumer markets. Democracy takes away governments out of the ambit of people by assigning supreme power to the state of law as against state of nature. People vote between given choices and they think they are electing MPs and MLAs whereas all of us know it is not what we think. Elections increasingly are like mega-carnivals and create tremendous opportunities for business and wheeling-dealing. The political left and right both believe in parliamentary democracy! Large corporations and commercial interests have taken over every aspect of our lives in modern times: very subtly and at times grossly they select the leaders for us who will be beneficial to them but not us who have been rendered absolutely powerless by the might of statehood. So it really does not matter to us who comes to power.”
I was rebuked: “Stop lecturing us! Will you? If you have anything to say about the Bengal elections, puke!”
I continued pretty shamelessly devouring a bouquet of fish fingers: “The CPI (M) has been blocking policies (many a time rightly so) at the Parliament, which in essence they have been following in the WB and Kerala Assemblies. Why this conflict? Simple silly, because when you are in power you hobnob with the powerful and when you are not you can run into long intellectual discourse (like what I am doing now). Tell me: how many economic movements has the CPI (M) organized or stood by in the last 30 years? Contrarily they have thwarted all rebellion of the industrial workers, peasants, the dispossessed and the students in the last 3 decades in Bengal. Like the Congress they have appeased the more backward sections of the religious minorities. They definitely redistributed land (doing away with the ruthless and embedded zamindars and almost erasing the landless) but ended up controlling the peasants with small land holdings like feudal lords would treat the landless. People who are ideologically against SEZs should not be grabbing land cheap from farmers on behalf of large corporations. They should not be in hands-in-gloves with the building mafia. They should not be interfering in our personal lives as if we were in a concentration camp. But if you do not do these things you do not earn pennies and amass power worth enough to participate and win in elections. The TMC is a rudderless pathetic hate machine; its sole agenda is to dislodge the Left Front; they have no belief structure or vision for the state. They will do anything to win and then ruin by repeating the worst practices of the Left Front with enhanced efficiency. The Congress is eyeing an opportunity to throw out the Left Front based on the general perception that Mamata Banerjee after all is an honest anti-establishment leader who is capable of bringing imaginative changes to WB politics (she is the failing Railway Minister at the Center notwithstanding!!!). The Congress I believe has plans to make life as difficult as possible for the TMC if the TMC-Congress wrests power. In such a situation the TMC will eventually be removed with the Congress gradually climbing up the ladder of power. The Maoists seemingly want a new regime to regroup and remobilize in the intervening period. As such their close proximity with the TMC can be explained. But the Maoists will receive improved sodomy at the hands of the TMC-Congress when compared against what they have received from the CPI (M). Another thing: see the display of wealth and manpower that the Left Front used to exhibit a few years back has shifted to the TMC-Congress today including the quantum of employed lumpens. I’ve seen North Indian traders in Kolkata voting for the BJP in Union Elections whereas they voted for the Left Front in Assembly Elections. Strange, no? But today they want a change. People who are positioning today as protectors of farm land would in due course of time, if they come to power, become the greatest land-grabbers; there is no doubt about that. In case of the Left, people have already experienced such turnaround. So you see I do not have a clear-cut choice. Hence I do not have a place in your democracy.”
I was breathless by now!
Somebody confronted me: “Hold on, hold on for a second! What are you saying – elections are no good to us; we should be returning to monarchy, autocracy and feudalism?”
Did I say: “I’m not sure: where we can go back to. I’m sure democracy serves the interests of corporations better than that of smaller communities and individuals as people. The worst part is you cannot complain because democracy has institutionalized prescriptions for every malaise, which you of course cannot access. Democracy does not do away with monarchy, autocracy and feudalism as ideas or even in practice; it refines and alters them into more ruthless institutions within the realms of statehood and the sad part is at some point in history mankind has given up the power of individuals to the idea of forming a state of law that today has rendered us utterly powerless. This process I believe has been irreversible.”
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