Dubai: Taking to her Instagram account on Friday, Bengali actress Rukmini Maitra commented: “To my dear Bangla ... Remember this song today and & remember it belongs to us for a reason ... ‘Jodi tor daak shuney keu na aashey tobey ekla cholo re!’ [If no one answers your call, then go it alone.] You are Destroyed but not Defeated. Strength, Power, Courage & Love Belongs Within. Rise.”
Earlier, on Thursday night, another popular name from the Bengali film industry and a member of parliament, Mimi Chakraborty, tweeted: “Bhese galo amar shohor … choley galo kato jibon ... r tomra bolle Koi kichu hoi nei toh.” [My city has been swept away ... so many lives have been lost ... and you said ‘so what’s the matter?’].”
Aerial survey
Both were reacting to the state of West Bengal still reeling under the aftermath of tropical cyclone Amphan that struck late on Wednesday evening and left a trail of destruction across large parts of the state, particularly the districts of North and South 24 Parganas. Mobile phone and internet connectivity were still down in large swathes of Kolkata until Saturday morning, while power had not been restored to several areas of the metropolis. The situation in the hinterlands was far worse. “I have not seen such devastation in my life,” said Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee on Friday, barely minutes before she accompanied Prime Minister Narendra Modi for an aerial survey of the affected areas.
Last available reports said Amphan had left 86 people dead, with overall losses pegged around Rs1 trillion (Dh47.54 billion). According to archival details made available by one leading Kolkata-based Bengali newspaper, this is the worst cyclone to have hit Bengal in 283 years! Yes, you read it right. 283 years. On October 11, 1737, a devastating cyclone, accompanied with a six-hour deluge, had left around 3,000 people dead in the city area alone.
So much for a quick fact-check and scale of the current disaster.
But coming back to Rukmini’s and Mimi’s impassioned Instagram and Twitter posts. These comments, with their unmistakable tinge of lament laced with anguish, took one by surprise. Curious to find out more about what some of the other ‘netizens’ had to say on the same issue, a cursory glance through various social media channels followed and several such comments were noticeable, with one Instagram post even saying: “If national media doesn’t cover us, social media will.”
Social identity
Having been born in Bengal in the 1970s and spent the entire school, college and early professional life under Leftist rule, ‘deprived-by-a step-motherly-Centre’ was as much a staple of the state’s political point-counterpoint ‘diet’ as it was a part of an adolescent and young-adult’s collective consciousness or social identity. For the uninitiated, with a Congress-ruled government in power at the Centre for most of those 34 years of Left rule in the state, ‘Centre-bashing’, as part of the Communist establishment’s strategy to raise the pitch against Delhi trying to subvert the federal structure in every conceivable manner, would perhaps have run a close second to the prevalence of maachh-bhaat (a fish-and-rice meal) as part of Bengal’s everyday culinary ritual! And make no mistake – there were indeed valid reasons for Bengal to feel slighted by a Congress-ruled Central Government that had its political identity firmly rooted in the Hindi heartland. As a result, states such as Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Haryana would have a far more potent ‘bargaining’ chip in the corridors of power in New Delhi and find greater traction with the national media as well.
Issuing an ultimatum
There was a point of time in the late-1980s, when premium state government projects in Bengal – namely the Bakreshwar thermal power plant, Salt Lake Electronics Complex and Haldia Petrochemicals – were stuck at various stages of completion owing to a flip-flop by the Congress government at the Centre. From street fights and voluntary blood donations to nuanced debates at chambers of commerce, these three projects turned out to be a major bone of contention and a political flashpoint in Centre-State conflict. Things came to such a pass that at one point of time, the then chief minister Jyoti Basu shot off a letter to prime minister Rajiv Gandhi, issuing an ultimatum that if Soviet aid for the Bakreshwar project was not passed on to the state in three months’ time, West Bengal would go it alone.
The moot point
So Rukmini’s allusion today to Rabindranath Tagore’s timeless composition ‘Ekla chalo re’ (go it alone) in exhorting people from Bengal to be self-relient in picking up the pieces in the aftermath of cyclone Amphan is a stark reminder of Basu’s threat to a prime minister to ‘go it alone’ some 32 summers ago. The only big difference is that while Rukmini or Mimi can make effective use of their socio-political outreach as youth icons through a gift of technological and ideational innovation called social media, Basu, the political doyen, had no such privilege. But the moot point still remains the same: Does Bengal’s plight even today not ring enough of an alarm bell for the rest of India, particularly in the corridors of power in the north? There is no denying the fact that national media in India has every reason to be preoccupied with a pandemic and the ensuing lockdown.
Times change, props change, stage changes and so do the dramatis personae, but some sentiments, or the lack of them, are endemic or so it seems. What could be construed as narcissism or even a persecution complex can also be interpreted as a nihilistic apathy towards the neighbour’s plight next door.
There is also no denying the fact that Prime Minister Narendra Modi made an aerial survey of the affected areas of Bengal on Friday and announced a fairly reasonable, advance aid package of Rs10 billion from Central funds. But ‘netizens’ were quick to point this out as well: It took the PM 23 hours since Amphan struck to send out the first tweet, sharing his concern! And it is also a fact that most national TV channels in India had relegated news about the cyclone to the second or third-lead slot even before Modi and Mamata could be airborne for an aerial survey of the damage.
Times change, props change, stage changes and so do the dramatis personae, but some sentiments, or the lack of them, are endemic or so it seems. What could be construed as narcissism or even a persecution complex can also be interpreted as a nihilistic apathy towards the neighbour’s plight next door. Matter of perception or which side of the fence one is in? Could be either. But the sum total of this dialectics doesn’t still take away the steam out of many a slugfest: State-vs-Centre, regionalism-vs-nationalism, ‘Us-and-Them’. And as long as ‘union of states’ exists in letter and not so much in spirit, ‘ekla chalo re’ is bound to have a resonance in national discourse.