The Good Earth and Metaphysical Materialism

I read an article about a professor from the Chemistry department of Jadavpur University who has been recently arrested for posting a certain cartoon that apparently defames the new lady Chief Minister of West Bengal. He was also assaulted by the land mafia and political thugs at this residence in a manner that's not unheard of in our glorious country, punched and kicked around by a group of cowards for whom it might be a special privilege to do so every time they get a chance.

It's easy to see it's all about "mati" (earth/land). It has been that since the last government became too ambitious and tried to sell off land in large parcels to people like "Salim". That name, a few years ago well known in West Bengal, and is now almost being forgotten anyway, is behind a lot of real estate wealth in Indonesia. The Salim Group is a huge conglomerate, perhaps the largest in that region, and if you have ever been to Jakarta, you will find the sprawling Lippo satellite townships, malls, water parks, golf courses, et al. Lippo banks, Indofood, most everything, and the family behind it were once collaborators of the dictatorial regime of Suharto, who ironically cleansed that nation of leftists for the US, and used popular xenophobia against the "Chunkwoh"(street slang for ethnic Chinese) to hold on to power till the last desperate days of his regime. Chinese Indonesian by ethnicity, the Salim group owners were once supposed to have been involved with the fathers of the modern Indonesian nation, Soekarno and Hatta, smuggling arms for the revolutionaries in their final, brief struggle against the Dutch shortly after WW2, when the country had just been liberated from the short and brutal Japanese occupation after it's long colonized past.

During the Suharto regime, while ethnic Chinese were openly oppressed, it wasn't just a pure racial hatred that manifested, and the elite and rich Sino-Indonesians never had it bad, and I daresay they had enough connections with the top military brass of the Suharto regime. Indonesia is a country you do not have any "MRP" a friend once pointed out to me. In short, a capitalist paradise. American and western-style businesses rule along with the local creamy layer composed of ethnic Chinese, and the usual band of local politicians of all variety,... except the left. Leftists are banned in that country. The repression against leftists during the 60s-70s was much more brutal there, even worse than S. S. Ray's regime anti-Naxalite phase. Any small protest in workplaces to this day is brutally suppressed and even telecast on TV.

It's all about land. Fertile or not, people do not seek spices, milk or honey anymore. Local politicians are just neo-fascists who usually come up from the ranks of land sharks and land grabbers. It's a culture we have lived with for a long time now, ever since we got down from the trees and started to cultivate the land, in the social and political life. In the past, the land was coveted for its yield. Now we know how to make box-like monstrosities called apartments, or simply 'flats', and that can yield huge profits. Except that is going to be the death of our planet sooner or later, if this goes on. The only ideology, if there is one left for politics of ethics, is perhaps environmentalism.

All said and done, what did we expect? Some kind of great sea change under a leader whose party is composed of more or less the same land sharks. The bigwigs in CPI-M (Communist Party of India -  Marxist) tried to sell off agricultural land in large tracts to make a final killing. A little investigative journalism would have unearthed the condos in Singapore and undisclosed foreign bank accounts our top leaders were getting as rewards for their 'positive' role. The previous power group was ruled by terror. Their cadre had almost full control of the streets and the villages. But quietly they also used the state's machinery for personal benefit. And I am just talking about building contracts like the Gariahat flyover or Dumdum metro extension. Those in the know will know, but it's too late, many of the leaders are dead and gone while others have lost their mass appeal. Then there is the opportunist group who have joined the ranks of the present ruling party shedding all their leftist pretensions one fine morning.

All the time, during the 80s and 90s, and 2000s, both parties fought small battles,  and sometimes even co-operated wherever they could to get the ill-gotten gains from land grabbing. There were intrigues. Sometimes some more ambitious local councillor or politician higher up in the corruption food chain got quietly murdered, and even the top brass of whichever party they belonged never made any sounds. If it made news, they made the same old speeches full of political rhetoric but justice never prevailed. The assassins were never found out. The story lost its front-page coverage in a few days.

They lasted in power so long for just two things: terror and generally letting small-time farmers keep their piece of "mati" (land). At the height of the Singur movement, almost at the onset, I visited the village and heard the proverbial voice of the people. For 30 years they voted for the party faithfully and what had they got for that? A tube-well for each over-populated neighbourhood. And finally, land grab by the authorities to sell to the Tatas to build their microcar factory at prices which are best described as next to nothing. They did not have money, social security, jobs, education, but they had a piece, usually a tiny piece of land that yielded a crop three times a year, and with that, at least you did not have to take the begging bowl to the city streets to earn your square meal.

The party cadre towards the bottom of the ladder are usually composed of thugs and petty middlemen running after land sale commission percentages and such. It's their ethos: their beliefs and their culture that is on has been on the rise, and that, sadly is the dominant culture of Bengal today, so much for our intellectual heritage. More university students aspire for a career overseas or professorship in some obscure department of the academia, and others are content to look for any government job - primary school teacher, postal clerk, fire brigade official - and so on; with such glorious aspirations of our middle class, and constant exploitation of workers, knowledge or otherwise, how far this society will get ahead in any field of life, it is an open question. And I don't think there's anything to be optimistic about the changes we are seeing and will continue to see.

In a way it is class war, I would tend to agree, the divide between the literate and "cultured", educated and elite may not be so clear. That is primarily because of the sheer burden of hypocrisy that our traditions impose on our sensibilities, but departing from a strict Marxist (and perhaps unfashionable) analysis, what we may safely predict is worse than war: its oppression. Of the fascist kind. In technique. But unsupported by any ideology. The only common denominator among the class of political arrivistes that we have let ourselves be ruled by is their sheer, unmoving, relentless desire to make good out of the land, their "shubh laabh" (holy or pure profit).

 In doing so, they twist the logic of the supreme command of the Gitas:

Therefore without attachment, do thou always perform action which should be done; for by performing action without attachment man reaches the Supreme

an excuse for detachment in professional, social and political life that allows them to ignore the humanitarian ideas. Metaphysical materialism, if you ask me.