People's Democracy

Vajpayee’s Exercise In Untruth In Kolkata

B Prasant

PRIME Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee, in Kolkata for one-and-a-half days, to attend a programme of a city chamber of commerce, fulminated along expected lines against the CPI(M) and the Left Front government.  Adopting the persona of a BJP leader beginning his election tour, the prime minister chose to launch an egregious attack on the people of Bengal by chiding them for having “brought in the Left Front to office” and for “allowing it to win one Assembly election after another by big margins ever since.”

Vajpayee started the ball rolling by declaring solemnly that “political dogmatism” had “pushed Bengal back several decades.”  A leader of a political party that had the most intimate ties with such viciously communal outfits as the RSS and the VHP was perhaps seeking to absolve himself and his political compatriots from the enormity of the crime that they had committed all over the country in the name of religion. 

Or was he making a feeble and self-conscious attempt to try to conceal his own intimate ties with rabid communal ideology?  A ripple of palpably embarrassed astonishment was seen to go through the ranks of the industrialists and businessmen at the chamber of commerce meeting as Vajpayee attempted, and failed, in desperate language (Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee has called the prime minister’s written speech as “wrongly advised as well as badly drafted”) to blackguard the ideology of the Left.

Forgetting for the moment that Bengal was part of India, Vajpayee singled the state out for “lowered economic performance.” Vajpayee would conveniently forget how the condition of the nation under the BJP-led NDA government has worsened over the past four years.  The UN Human Development Report notes how India, in the community of 195 nations of the globe, has slid to the 127th position worldwide (from its earlier 124th place) this year, falling behind such small nations as Botswana, the occupied territory of Palestine, and Namibia.

When the BJP had come to office, the gross domestic product or the GDP rate was over 6 per cent.  Vajpayee and his men and women had promised to lift up the GDP rate to “a minimum of 8 per cent in the space of one year.”  The current GDP rate stands at 4.3 per cent. In direct contrast, the State Domestic Product or SDP for Bengal currently stands at 7.1 per cent.

Vajpayee also allowed himself to be liberal with the truth when he accused the Bengal LF government of having “allowed the per capita income to fall by a big margin.”  The fact is that while the per capita income for the nation as such (according the report of the World Bank) stands at Rs 18,765, for Bengal, the current rate is Rs 19,416.23.

The prime minister also seemed unaware of the data available with the government he heads, in his haste to try to embarrass the LF government, that in Bengal, the number of people below the poverty line could be brought down from 52 per cent to 26 per cent over the past two decades.

Finally, prime minister Vajpayee’s point about the BJP government is “no longer anti-Bengal on the basis of politics and ideology” is easily met.  When the Bengal LF government had protested against the decision regarding the bifurcation of the Railways, especially the move to shift the head quarters of the eastern railways away from Kolkata, the prime minister had gravely pointed out, with the railway minister’s Bihar firmly in view, that it was a “political decision.”

Earlier, in the year 2000 when a devastating flood had overwhelmed the economy of Bengal, the Vajpayee government had asked the Bengal LF government to make do with the pittance they were wiling to release. No response has been forthcoming from the Vajpayee government about funds to tackle the erosion of riverbanks in Bengal.

However, credit must be given where it is due.  For all appearances, the prime ministerial speech was an exercise in electioneering.  As it is well known, political outfits of BJP’s ilk ensure that truth becomes the first casualty when they get going about ensuring an electoral success, by fair means or foul.  The lies have started. The bullying of the electorate will follow in due course as the polls approach, and as tremors are felt in the ranks of the NDA and the BJP about the kind of electoral response that waits their years of gross mis-rule.

In prime minister Vajpayee’s wake came defence minister George Fernandes, on July 21, and he was, as is his wont, much more reckless than Vajpayee.  And he did little that would encourage Mamata Banerjee and her band.  Addressing a Trinamul Congress rally in Kolkata (which, again, failed to draw the expected size of assemblage, much to Banerjee’s chagrin), Fernandes went on to humiliate Mamata publicly by cutting her rudely short when she started to fulminate about her long non-inclusion in the union ministry. 

That was enough to force Mamata to take up the pose of a supplicant in view of the public, hands folded, and pleading loudly with the NDA convener to “have some mercy” and get Art 356 clamped down in Bengal.  Fernandes surprisingly did little by way of hemming-and-hawing before curtly informing her that any such attempt would serve to “insult the dignity of the Indian Constitution.” 

When Fernandes had approached the microphone earlier to speak, Mamata Banerjee had cried shrilly: “We want Art 356!”  She fell strangely silent at the disappointing manner in which Fernandes chose to deal her a body blow on the issue and in a public rally, too.   Fernandes proceeded to mollify her feelings by making a vague threat to the elected Left Front government by threatening to invoke “extra-Constitutional means for its removal,” but would not go into the details of that projected misadventure.

Later addressing the thinning crowd, who had gathered principally, it seems, to hear the “good news” about Banerjee’s re-induction to the union cabinet, the Trinamul Congress chieftain dwelt sagely on the fact that it had taken “Abraham Lincoln 50 years and more before he became the president of the United States,” and called upon her dwindling flock to take heart ”‘from history.” She also liberally misquoted from Tagore’s poems and in a fluster sought to pass the lines off as “written by the immortal Netaji.” This caused a general titter around, infuriating her no end.