Bengal’s business dilemma: whom to kowtow to

West Bengal’s industry finds itself in a right royal mess. It doesn’t know if the state is going (towards Trinamool) or coming (away from the Left Front). Its reputation is spiralling down and its policies seem wobbly after thousands of crores of assets owned or controlled by it till the seventies vanished, taking along tens of thousands of jobs.

Three contemporary examples: Braithwaite, Burn Standard, Jessop — along with other names, were the hallowed anchors of West Bengal’s heavy engineering industry till the seventies, when the state led the country’s industrial scene in several sectors.

Enter the Left Front in 1977, bringing along words like gherao into the lexicon and stoking anti-capitalist ire amongst labour. Each hoisting of the red flag on gates forcibly pulled shut, marked a triumph for the proletariat. Never mind even if some companies were in the public sector, owned collectively by the people themselves.

It is a predictable story one has narrated so far. Now comes the fun part. Common sense suggests West Bengal’s political leadership of the day and the industrialist class would be enemies. But that is not how the story unfolds beyond 1977. Curiously, business comfortably cosied up to the Left Front, and it did so quite fast.  

That is why it did not take too long for a familiar, even gooey, friendship to develop. For example, this dialogue happened on a public platform in Kolkata where this writer was present.
Scion of a business house to Left Front bigwig: Sir, I want to ask you a secret.

LF bigwig: Secret? I have no secrets…
Scion: Sir, I just wanted to know how do you keep such good law and order in West Bengal?
LF bigwig (relaxed, smiling): Oh well, blah, blah, blah (utter banalities).

Ideologues they might be, but communists love flattery. This key lesson was imbibed early on by the state’s business fraternity and became industry’s survival mantra in an otherwise
hostile regime. For instance, chambers of commerce press releases carried not a word of criticism. Criticise the Centre, ran the mantra, never the state government. Shutdowns, lockouts, closures elicited no harsh reprimands. The LF loved the flattery. Industry loved to lay it on thick because it was talismanic magic guaranteeing permanent survival.

Nothing in politics, of course, is permanent. One cannot be sure, but it seems quite possible that the LF will not be ruling West Bengal mid-2011 onwards. Should this happen it would leave West Bengal’s cosy-with-LF industry orphaned, metaphorically speaking. Why?

Because the survival mantra will not work with Trinamool. By all accounts, flattery is not what it takes to set the adrenalin racing through Mamata’s veins. West Bengal industry’s crisis is deepened because while the LF ran to a rigidly and publicly defined ideology, Trinamool does not have one yet. Industry simply does not know if there is a posture it can safely take to keep the New Power satisfied.

Mamata is not against chambers; she has addressed a chamber hosted seminar. The scion I quoted above tried to rub shoulders (not literally, obviously) with her there and the next day’s papers showed him next to Mamata with a beaming face. Clearly, these tentative gestures of admiration for Mamata signal that payment of premium on insurance for self-survival has begun for industry in West Bengal!

Stakes are high, uncertainties many, the crisis utterly acute.