Reference Auto

So, after the murder of a CPM former MLA recently, the oust-Mamata cry may have got louder but is the West Bengal chief minister to blame entirely for the overall deterioration in the state?

There may be people arguing that she has not shown good performance and the CPM has said that she is yet to get a single industry after her inception as CM.

But with the Left Front being in the government for over 35 years in the state, we had seen a flight (out) of Indian industry from what was one of the most-prosperous states in India.

During the Left rule (especially at the time when Jyoti Basu was the chief minister), Bengal government offices, including the police department, became a labyrinth of corruption.

There was despair for the ambitious middle-class people, who had to venture out (outside India as well as in places like Mumbai, Delhi and upcoming cities like Bangalore) to escape the misery that engulfed Bengal. This has been happening for over three decades!

Also, the interiors of Bengal witnessed some of the worst violence along with a litany of killings and people who did not give their consent to the Left Front philosophy were brutally tortured and murdered.

These have had a knee-jerk effect on entire Bengal and even though Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee, as chief minister, tried to rectify some of the earlier blunders, he got little time to do so.

Also, his alliance, the Left Front, seemed to have become a stumbling block and did not want Bengal to industrialise (read allow multinationals and American companies to enter Bengal).

Now, with Mamata at the helm, people desperately want to come out of this abyss and want a quick-fix solution to the state’s miseries.

Mamata has been sucked into a few controversies already with a slew of baby deaths, rape cases and rising crime dogging her government. This has given credence to the fact that things are yet to be ironed out so far as law and order go.

Earlier, she had created a scare among industrialists by shooing away Tata Motors from Singur and this put to an end the Nano project in Bengal.

But before we put the blame on Mamata entirely for the current situation, we must ask ourselves that after going 35 years back how could we expect results in just a year or so.

Bengal has a bureaucracy that has become a den of corruption. Unless the bureaucracy cooperates with the new state government, not a single file is likely to move and all development work will hit a roadblock.

And with Mamata coming down heavily on corruption, she is unlikely to strike the right chord with the state bureaucracy. Moreover, the state is burdened with debt amounting to over Rs 2 lakh crore.

Also, Mamata has not struck the right chord with the Centre (with she being at loggerheads with the Central government over several issues like FDI in retail) and this would make it difficult for her to procure funds to put the state on the development engine. So, Bengal is stuck on another front that is likely to impede progress.

We all know that Mamata has the right attitude: She wants to see Bengal grow and there doesn’t seem to be an iota of corruption in her.

She is generally hated by the elite and the suave Bangali Babu because of her rustic ways to deal with things and this dislike by the elite towards her can be rightly termed as “elitist snobbery.”

So, what is the way forward for the Mamata Banerjee government?

Mamata, firstly, has to make peace with the Centre, and owing to her numbers in Parliament, this would help her procure mega funds for the development of the state.

Another issue she needs to deal with is the bureaucracy. Instead of coming down heavily on errant officers and clerks (which creates a fear psychosis as well as hatred towards her), she should slowly and steadily pave the way for discipline (rather than reprimand people).

These could to an extent help Mamata achieve the objective of putting Bengal back in the growth path, and once this happens, Bengal will no longer blame Mamata for underdevelopment.