With Buddhadeb Bhattacharya’s passing away in 2024, not only was the Left era in West Bengal over, but also gone was the last hope of reviving West Bengal as a modern, functional state, which he had kindled in the hearts of middle-class Bengalis. His misplaced gamble of turning a deeply entrenched, archaic political machine rooted in an 19th century ideology into a high-tech engine for employment in 21st century India proved to be a disastrous political and economic miscalculation, scaring and driving industries away from the state for how long no one knows.

Caught between an elite ruling class bent upon preserving its privileges that was averse to change and the concomitant risks, and a local coercion system that thrived on taking a “cut” from every brick laid, that dream had to die its natural death. Out of its ashes emerged the new brand of leaders that would choose a path to nowhere, replacing the dignity of hard work with a culture of rent seeking and extortion. It took no time for them to perfect this culture into an unassailable institutional machinery ~ the ‘Syndicate’ that reaches everyone and spares no one.

It was not that the Syndicate was their invention; in the violent political landscape of Bengal, it had always existed, but the speed at which the machinery was transformed into an all-embracing extortion apparatus was unmatched. It now functions with ruthless efficiency, like a well-run corporate business. It isn’t just a group of local toughs anymore ~ there is an SOP (standard Operating Procedure) that spans all economic activities in the state, from the smallest neighbourhood to the largest cities. Whether one is building a home or starting a small factory, the system demands a “cut.”

This has spread to the very grassroots, creating a “Parallel State” that is much more efficient at extracting people’s money than the government is at collecting taxes. If the Left had turned West Bengal into a “Party State”, the new rulers have turned it into an “Extortion State” which makes it impossible for big factories to breathe, or small factories to grow. Bengal now increasingly resembles the Bihar of yore, which survived on remittances of its labourers, who sought jobs anywhere outside Bihar.

At the other end of the political spectrum in Bengal is the “Salon”, the small circle of elite intellectuals ~ journalists, artists, poets, theatre personalities and academics ~ the self-proclaimed “progressive” Bhadroloks who continue to engage in intellectual discourses creating, critiquing and amplifying political narratives that serve the interests of the rulers by influencing the opinions of ordinary folks.

The Salon and the Syndicate are united by one common strand: preservation of the........

© The Statesman