Bengal intellectuals take right turn

Back ‘real Left’ Trinamool and its candidate Kabir Suman  Is the Left being ditched by its most faithful supporters in West Bengal? This appears to be coming true for the CPI(M) which has for months been pilloried by the intellectual brigade for Nandigram and Singur.

Now, the intelligentsia is taking action —- throwing its weight behind Trinamool candidate from Jadavpur constituency, Kabir Suman. The slugfest here seems to be between the real “Left” and “pseudo-Left”.

Kabir Suman is a singer, a name Bengalis utter in the same breath as US folk musician Pete Seeger and music director Salil Chowdhury. For the first time, the Left Front is facing the wrath of its intellectuals in an organised manner. An indicator is the setting up of Sahanagorikder Mukta Mancha (fellow citizen’s forum) that has several luminaries on board — writer Mahashweta Devi, artist Shuvaprasanna, theatre personalities Bibhash Chakroborty, Bratya Basu, Koushik Sen, poet Joy Goswami … the list is long and the shade of red here, perhaps, can’t really get any deeper.

But why are they supporting Kabir Suman, a Trinamool candidate? “Suman is a Leftist. I am a Leftist. We are fighting against the pseudo-Lefts,” theatre personality Bibhash Chakroborty says vehemently.

Why back a candidate that is contesting for the Trinamool?  “What’s in a name? The party is incidental here,” Chakroborty concludes. Debrabrata Bandhopadhyaya, economist and ex-revenue secretary, and psephologist  Amiya Choudhury emphasise that the “distinction between Left and Right in Bengal has become blurred”.

Prasun Bhowmik, convener of Sahanagorikder Mukta Mancha, observes, “The Trinamool movement is a Left movement… We are fighting the ‘so-called Left’.”  Writer Mahashweta Devi, delivers the clincher: “We will have to defeat the CPI(M).”
The mancha was set up on March 14, 2007 to protest against the “CPI(M)’s atrocities against farmers and women in Nandigram”.

Kabir Suman himself has a history of fighting for the downtrodden. He threw in his lot with workers of the closed Kanoria jute mills in West Bengal in the early 1990s. He also opposes the special economic zones and the chemical hub slated to come up at Nayachar, Haldia. But his supporters cock-a-snook when the CPI(M) calls them anti-development.    

As educationist and Left sympathiser Subodh Sarkar says: “Those opposing industries on the plea that it’s against Left ideology have no right to call themselves intellectuals. Those who support industrial development are not pseudo-Leftists, it’s those who do not.”

Filmmaker Sharan Dutta adds: “We need to understand that Leftist ideology is based on reality and the reality is that industries are the need of the hour. And if you ask me to describe the intellectuals opposing this development, I will say they are no better than intellectual terrorists.”