The World Economic Forum in Davos last week heard the Pope call for a redistribution of wealth. There is certainly a lot to take and to give. A paper published by Oxfam last Monday showed that the world’s richest 85 people have the same amount of wealth as the 3.5 billion people who comprise the poorer half of the world’s population. To quote Larry Elliott, you can fit 85 people on a double-decker bus. Redistribute the wealth of this busload and a population equivalent to that of Africa, India and China put together becomes twice as rich.
If the prevailing theory of global capitalism is to be believed that, above all else, people are motivated by money, then the poorer half of the word should, metaphorically speaking, be upending these 85 plutocrats by the ankles and shaking them down for every last cent of their 1.7 trillion. So why don’t the poor rise up? I am not necessarily advocating this turmoil is never an attractive prospect if you have a house, a family and a salary to defend, but surprisingly, few of the poor themselves seem to want to; and no political ideology, at least one that is potent and anywhere near popular, has emerged recently to encourage them.
On the same day that Oxfam published its report, I flew to Kolkata, from where I write this. Thanks to my host’s generosity, I flew business class. It was marvellous. Money buys comfort: Much more legroom, seats that turn into beds, hot towels, better food, white tablecloths. But money also buys you preference in the public realm, from the state as well as the airline, in the form of fast-tracking through immigration and security. Perhaps every country now feels bound to advertise itself as “business friendly” by pandering to self-importance in this way, but it still felt odd at Kolkata to use an immigration desk marked for use only by passengers who paid higher fares. The implication is that money can relieve the state of its obligation to treat citizens equally — that the state can be bought. It confirms a long-suspected reality.
When I first came to Kolkata in 1977, it was still called “Calcutta” and enjoyed a global reputation for poverty, slums and chaos that has since been overtaken by other cities and regions, such as Mumbai and the Horn of Africa. Raw statistics alone do not furnish reputations and Calcutta’s had grown partly because Mother Teresa’s mission to rescue dying pavement dwellers attracted the attention of so many TV crews and writers. But the facts were stark and visible. The Bangladesh war had filled slums with refugees, the city’s infrastructure was ruinous and its economy, tied to the old imperial trades in jute, coal and tea, looked to be in unstoppable decline. The Naxalite uprising, an attempted insurrection led by young middle-class Marxists, had been ruthlessly suppressed a few years before, but not before it red-flagged the city to investors as a place to avoid.
Thanks to a wonderful book by a Guardian writer, the late Geoffrey Moorhouse, I knew many of these facts before I arrived. First published in 1971 and titled simply Calcutta, it remains one of the best introductions to any great city in the way it combines historical research with contemporary observation and sympathy with amusement and rage. Crossing the bridge over the Hooghly that morning on the journey from the station, I saw the city as Moorhouse had seen it: The smoking river ferries, the trams, the broken pavements, the imperial history behind the blackened commercial buildings that would look at home in Victorian Leeds or Glasgow and of course the poor, washing at standpipes or stretched out asleep among exhausted dogs and the busy feet of passers-by.
Will such people ever find justice? After spending a lot of the book examining the miserable condition of the poor, Moorhouse in his last paragraph breaks out into a fantasy of bloody retribution, the night when “every poor man in the city rises from his pavement and his squalid bustee [slum] and at last dispossesses the rich with crazy ferocity”. At first they will pick off the rich in small handfuls, “hauling them out of their cars and butchering them on the spot”. Then the rickshaw men, who “like animals” have spent their lives pulling rich Calcuttans around their city, will signal a general slaughter by tinkling their rickshaw bells. “The time for compassion will be past.”
Nothing like that has happened in the 40 years since. Only 12 years later, Moorhouse was admitting in a new introduction to his book that his closing paragraph was “much less prophecy than speculation”, but that he was expressing as best he could “what Calcutta made me feel”. And the fact is that many people felt a similar thirst for or fear of an apocalypse and sometimes a mixture of both. Outsiders felt it especially. It seemed a quite logical outcome. You had a few people with cars and air-conditioned homes surrounded by a sea of people with much less and a significant minority with nothing at all. Why wouldn’t the second kill and rob the first? Yet, not only has the bloodlust failed to arrive, the political party that embodied both the angry hopes of the poor and the guilt-cum-fear-cum-idealism of the Calcutta bourgeoisie has also collapsed.
The CPM, the Communist Party of India (Marxist), ruled Bengal without interruption between 1977 and 2011 and for a long time seemed unassailable. As Amit Chaudhuri writes in Calcutta: Two Years in the City, its ideology was “embraced by almost every intellectual as well as moral person” in the streets of his youth. In the countryside, the party devised an energetic programme of agricultural reform that gave land rights to sharecroppers and encouraged the planting of high-yield crops. People said the CPM had the peasant vote absolutely sewn-up; its cadres were disciplined, its beliefs righteous, its corruption much less than in other parties. Things began to go wrong — arrogance, the brutal imposition of the party will, as well as the usual sloppiness of any party grown too used to power. A lost election was on the cards, clearly. What nobody expected was the CPM’s complete expunction, as though Marx and Lenin had never been painted on thousands of walls or been mentioned in millions of conversations: The long history of popular Marxism in Bengal vanished as though it had never been.
So now, on the way in from the airport, I saw no portraits of bald men with trim beards and longhaired men with bushy ones, no hammers and no sickles. A movement that for a time promised to make the poor richer now seems ghostlier than the Indian mythologies it wanted to replace. Its nemesis is a popular woman Chief Minister, Mamata Banerjee, who leads a simple life and likes the colour blue, in which much of official Kolkata has been painted. Blue isn’t red. Beyond that, it is hard to see an ideological programme, though that would hardly make Bengal unusual. The Pope may seek redistribution and Davos may announce it desirable, but the club-class traveller will be safe in his roomy seat for a long time yet.
— Guardian News & Media Ltd
