This is What We Get

I’ve just watched one hour of footage of the riots that broke out in Calcutta around 11 this morning and which are still going on. Words are insufficient to express my rage at the people who found it in themselves to do this to us. The government is bleating that they must be ‘outside elements’ because apparently we Calcuttans are too civilized to behave like this. Bullshit. This operation could not have been mounted unless significant numbers of Calcuttans were willing to cooperate. I suppose some idiot will say that the people responsible are ‘migrants’ from outside the state who have brought alien values with them. Anything, anything to avoid believing that today’s events are not a symptom of the rot we’ve been sitting on for more than thirty years.

I came to this state in 1979 and I’ve never known a Bengal that wasn’t under the Left Front. I’ve cordially hated most of what they’ve said and done in the meantime. But this tops everything: that they could let these people riot on the streets as if they owned them. No doubt the CPIM will protest that I’m blaming them for their enemies’ actions. But after so many years of dedicated Stalinism there are only two kinds of people left in Bengal: the CPIM and the Bikhhubdo (wannabe, couldn’t-be and resentfully-aren’t) CPIM. The CPIM has worked diligently for three decades to make sure that the only available alternative to itself is the cast-off remnants of its own failures. And this is what we get for playing the only game in town.

A while ago I had to explain to my six year old niece why she probably couldn’t come over to see me for the weekend. ‘There are bad people on the streets’ was the best I could do. Most of us haven’t got a better explanation for what’s going on. Even those who saw it with their own eyes are stunned and bereft of words. My Ph.D. scholar has been and gone; hope he makes it ok back home. Others are calling me from all over the city, reporting on their whereabouts. Today they’ve all reached their homes safely. Who knows about tomorrow? The rioters are following the medieval injunction against fighting in the dark: it’s messy, wasteful and makes for bad television. Will they be back tomorrow? I suspect they will. If not in 24 hours, then in a little while. They’re not done with the city yet.

Today I saw streets I’ve walked for years, deserted and strewn with the corpses of burning cars. I saw half naked men imitating Saurabh Ganguly’s shirt-semaphoring while lobbing teargas back at troopers. I saw RAF jawans beating people with knouts. I saw a child pop out of the shanties next to the Lohapool offramp to be confronted with a policeman holding an upraised rock. The child ducked and ran fearfully into the arms of a cameraman. I saw seven men advancing menacingly along the empty Lohapool while RAF jawans threatened them with automatic weapons. I saw the house where I lived for seven years standing next to a struggling mass of men trying to escape a teargas cloud. I saw Yasinbhai’s pan shop through the haze. I didn’t see Yasinbhai.

Someone or something must pay for this.