New Delhi, Oct 11: Buddhadeb Bhattacharya is an unusual sort of a politician and it is not just because he smokes. Come to think of it though, how many senior politicians smoke in these health conscious times? Almost none in the central cabinet, probably no other chief minister. Bhattacharya doesn’t even smoke some old left-intellectual favourite like Charminar. He smokes State Express. He also speaks a language you wouldn’t expect from a Marxist veteran. His government has very recently put out advertisements inviting partners (an euphemism for buyers) for a whole list of its loss-making companies. But he is willing to defend this with greater conviction than most members of Vajpayee’s cabinet would justify the move to privatise HPCL. "Mistakes have been made in the past," he admits. "It was foolish for the government to take over, under workers’ pressure, private industries which had gone sick." Isn’t it interesting, considering the fact that no one in the Congress, despite its claims to be the original mover of economic reforms, is willing to say something similar about the nationalisation of banks because it might hurt "sentiments associated with Mrs (Indira) Gandhi."

Contradictions, however, remain. Just a week after he spoke to me so convincingly about the change of heart among the Left on such bread-and-butter issues as strikes and bandhs, his own party is now busy protesting the high court’s ban on rallies.
But it’s been some time since you heard an Indian Marxist speak so glowingly of the importance of enterprise. The state needs investments, he says, it must prevent the flight of capital and intellectual wealth. He speaks proudly of the foreign investmennts that have already come in, of how pleased Mitsubishi is with their projects in West Bengal and of how generously the British government is willing to contribute towards its development through its Department of Foreign and International Development (DFID). His only complaint is that while all of this Rs 1,150 crore is a grant, the Centre is insisting on treating nearly Rs 700 crore out of it as a loan and charging 12 per cent interest on it. "Now how can the Central government become a money-lender like this?" he asks.
And while he carries on fighting these new "money-lenders" of the reform age he is not shy of admitting the security problems his border state faces, not merely because of the influx of illegal migrants from Bangladesh but also from the terror camps along his borders. "This is no longer a problem of economic migration," he says. It is said sometimes that Advani must find him a friendlier chief minister than many of his own NDA allies. You can see why.
The question often asked in Kolkata, particularly among its predominantly Marwari entrepreneurial class, is this: is Buddhadeb speaking out of turn? How long will it be before the party purges him for daring to make such a break from the past? He doesn’t seem to have any such concerns. A day after our meeting, he addressed a big CII conclave, once again speaking the same language and businessmen from around the country applauded. At least half dozen of the most prominent Kolkata-based businessmen tell me quite emphatically the business climate in the state has never been better, that the unions are behaving, the appartachiks are staying out of their hair and that, most important of all, while some small-time payouts are obviously necessary, there isn’t any big-time political corruption of the kind you see even in India’s most entrepreneurial states. Media baron Aveek Sarkar sets my doubts at rest over a lunch of grilled beckty the following afternoon: "Nothing Buddha says does not have the endorsement of the party. He speaks fully the language of the party. Make no mistakes about it." Now, neither Aveek nor his papers are known particularly to be fans of the Left. So he must know what he is talking about.
It is early days yet, but you already see some evidence of the change in economic figures. Last year, for example, West Bengal was the second fastest growing state after Gujarat. When was the last time an EOK (East of Kanpur) state got that ranking in the past decade? West Bengal’s agricultural growth is the fastest in the country. Now if only some industry would begin to return.
But not everyone agrees with that and least of all the Marxists’ main challenger, Mamata Banerjee, who too is a politician almost as unusual as Buddhadeb. No, she certainly doesn’t smoke anything. But, like Buddhadeb, she is not an early morning person. Like him, she also travels only economy class. But in so many ways she is a more genuine, old-fashioned Marxist than any in the Left Front government.
Her house ("my home", she corrects me) is a mere 250-sq ft room with an asbestos roof on Harish Chatterjee Street in Kolkata’s Ballygunge. A couple of faded bedsheets of the kind you’d buy at a Haryana Handloom fair on a steep discount, stitched together, divide it into sleeping and working spaces. The working space is no more than ten feet by five. I have to sit on her desk to chat. Behind me are shelves stacked with "Collected Works of Mamata Banerjee", a whole range of books written by her in Bangla and English and also stacks full of audio-cassettes. "Cassette is my asset," she says when I ask her why she has collected so many. She likes her one-liners. In every rally of hers, she says, there is rain and of course she doesn’t know what this is, "history or mystery."
She has just become a minister but is in no hurry to go to Delhi. She has no portfolio and no work. To tell you the truth, she has no money either. When I push her, repeatedly, comparing her with other female mavericks in our politics, Mayawati, Jayalalithaa, Uma Bharati, and so on, she finally says, "Shekharda, how can you compare ice with ice cream? I have no money. My workers have no money." She cannot sleep at night, so she draws and she writes. Her only ambition is to drive out the Left. But she doesn’t know what to do with the state after that. Deep down, she is a very simple, very poor, very vulnerable and very straightforward girl driven by vengeance. If she gets hold of the state treasury she will not keep a paisa for herself. She will give it all away to the poor! But out of the Congress and never spiritually aligned with the BJP, she is still figuring out where she belongs. In her office she still has pictures of Rajiv Gandhi, she refuses to say a word against Sonia, but mention Priyaranjan Das Munshi’s name...
On the flight back from Kolkata I run into Buddhadeb again, accompanied by the other Left Front chief minister, Manik Sarkar from Tripura. True to form, they sit in economy class, but also sharing that working class space with them is CII’s Tarun Das and, on the way, we all talk enterprise and what’s changing in Bengal and with Bengalis.
We talk about how software companies, investment banks, stockmarket brokerages are all full of Bengalis. How the media and advertising are totally dominated by Bengalis, from Prannoy Roy to Peter Mukherjee to Pradip Guha to Kunal Dasgupta. So is the world of fashion and creativity. The Bengalis also own the babe department — some of the most glamorous women in mainstream cinema are Bengalis and new filmmakers from Kolkata are reclaiming lost ground. But within the state, while some of the economic indicators are improving, the mood is still that of stagnation rather than resurgence. If India’s east is to pull itself out of the hole, Kolkata and West Bengal must be the engine. For that to happen, somehow, the stalemate has to be broken in the state’s politics. No politics can remain so stagnant for so long, least of all one that involves so many Bengalis. Something will have to give, soon. And what happens will determine the fate, not just of Bengal, but of all of our fast declining east.