The Left and Democratic Front celebrated the silver jubilee of its rule in West Bengal proclaiming aloud that they had brought prosperity to the state. But, the recently published Human Development Report (HDR) of the Planning Commission tells a different story. And, as if to confirm its findings, now comes news of infant deaths in a public hospital in Kolkata. According to HDR figures, West Bengal — the home state of Indian renaissance — is today an average or a below average state of the India Union. This is a pertinent piece of information for other states as they choose their route to development. Let us take human development index as worked out in the Report. West Bengal is ranked 20th in the list of 32 states and union territories! The figure is 0.472 for West Bengal, which puts the state far below Kerala (0.638), Tamil Nadu (0.531) and others. The low rank in HDI is corroborated by other figures in the Report. The state has 35.66 per cent of its population below the poverty line, which is not much different from the national average of 35.97 per cent. Punjab has only 11.77 per cent. Andhra Pradesh has 22.19 per cent and Kerala, 25.43 per cent. The Poverty Index of 40.48 per cent worked out for West Bengal is, as a result, high, against Kerala’s 19.93 and Punjab’s 25.06. In rural West Bengal around 85 per cent of the population do not have pucca houses, whereas the corresponding figure for Kerala is 49 per cent. Other findings are that the women and children are more underfed and anaemic than in many other states; that more of human births (55 per cent) are unattended by health professionals in West Bengal, unlike in TamilNadu, Kerala, and so on; that in infant mortality and longevity West Bengal’s achievement is lower than other states. In the key input of development, viz literacy, West Bengal (69.22 per cent in 2001) is only marginally better than the country (65.20 per cent) and trails far behind Kerala (90.92 per cent) and Goa (82.32 per cent) and other states. Land reforms and the three-tier local self-government are trumpeted as achievements of Left rule in West Bengal. There is no denying that these are progressive steps but the state had signally failed to implement follow up policies to bring about sustainable development. The result is a near total stagnation of its economy today. Although more than 50 per cent of the state budget is allocated to local self-government agencies, the welfare level of the people is low, indicating gross misuse or wastage of funds. About the time (1977) the LDF was elected to govern West Bengal, the Brezhnev era had begun in the Soviet Union. But in 14 years the Soviet Union itself was to collapse (1991), dismantling the belief that Marxism was the wave of the future. During the same period China discarded Marxist precepts to embrace the market economy (1979). An opposition MP from West Bengal recently labelled West Bengal as India’s Gulag Archipelago. He was referring to the use of terror as an instrument of policy during elections and other times in rural Bengal. This explains the CPM victory in the state, despite the relative impoverishment of the people as revealed in the HDR. A comparison between West Bengal with Kerala, a state ruled intermittently by Marxists from 1957, is called for here. Kerala’s achievement in human development, celebrated the world over, should now be ascribed to other factors (literacy and social reform movements), rather than its wayward Marxism. A view that is gaining ground today is that but for the Marxist stance against modernisation of production and the militant opposition to the growth of industry, Kerala would have achieved its goals in the economic sphere as it had done in that of human development. So, what is the lesson we learn from the 25-year rule of CPM in West Bengal? Is it not that the Parliamentary Marxism (Soviet model in a parliamentary frame) is a failure, like Proletarian Marxism in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe and Peasant Marxism in China, Vietnam and Cambodia?
