It has always been said with some black humour that what West Bengal does today India does tomorrow. Thus, it was West Bengal that "pioneered" the concept of "load-shedding" or those endless hours of power cuts that eventually drove investment out of the state, partly contributing to its inexorable decline. Power cuts are now endemic in India today, though industry compensates for it with an increasing reliance on captive sources.
Strikes were another Bengal speciality that other states imported -- notably Maharashtra, with disastrous consequences for the textiles industry. The joke in those days was that you could always identify a Bengali labour leader from his muscular right arm, developed over endless days of raising it in a clenched fist in time to chants of "cholbe na, cholbe na".
For reporters covering the labour beat, the staple fare was to write about the mandays lost owing to strikes, lockouts, and so on. In the state-wise comparisons, Bengal always topped, frequently surpassing its earlier records like Sergei Bubka on the pole vault. Today, however, industry's increasing reliance on the unorganised labour market has tamed the trade union movement like nothing else could.
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Till recently, the "bandh" or political curfew was something to which India in general proved more resilient. North India introduced a variant called the "chakka jaam", which disrupted life occasionally but nothing was organised on quite such a majestic scale of debilitating efficiency as the West Bengal bandh.
This was the political equivalent of an annual tantrum by the Left parties against various central iniquities (real and imagined) and they were usually considerate enough to schedule it ahead of a weekend or a public holiday. That way Writers' Buildings' seriously underworked staff and those operating the state's under-functioning public services could enjoy an extended holiday gratis.
The Left-sponsored bandhs were truly a fine art. Even Mamata Banerjee's energetic attempts to emulate them never achieved quite the same level of total closure. Depending on your perspective, bandhs were considered a huge nuisance or great fun. In the days before laptops, cellphones and Blackberrys gave executives unparalleled mobility, a bandh could leave anyone chasing a deadline fretting and fuming. For children, it facilitated gloriously empty roads for undisturbed one-day cricket tournaments.
For those of us in the media business bandhs meant a day when you were collected from and dropped home by office transport because media was deemed an "essential service" and therefore exempt from the enforced inactivity of the bandh. Not that we were particularly grateful. I always found it irritating, if a little touching, that Business Standard, then an eight-page one-edition daily with a modest circulation, was considered an essential service.
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But the quaint custom of the ABP group, then owners of the paper, to give every employee who attended that day Rs 5, five glucose biscuits, a cup of tea and a vast meal of rice and fish on the house made the day worthwhile eventually. All in all, with little work to do, it was possible to wrap up early after a day of peaceful fun. The next day's lead edits usually ran virtuously solemn comments on the national loss to which such bandhs contributed.
When I was transferred to Delhi, I thought (slightly regretfully, I must admit) I had put bandhs behind me. So it was with a sense of déjà vu that I heard about the bandh call by the Left parties in Gurgaon in response to alleged police atrocities on alleged workers at the Honda factory late last month. Since public relations is not deemed an essential service and therefore not subject to police protection, our management decided to keep the office closed as a matter of abundant caution.
Evidently, the Left does not consider the thousands of multinationals who have their offices and headquarters in this city essential services, either, so all of them downed their shutters for the day. But copying a concession to modernity established by their West Bengal brethren, they allowed ITES/BPO services to be exempted from this curfew.
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Nobody is quite sure what this bandh achieved. Most executives, whether in Indian or multinational firms, worked from home on laptops and it was pretty much business as usual. JNU students, that bottom-less talent pool for the Left, practised their skill at demonstration and protest. All was forgiven at the Honda factory, leaving its Japanese parent bemused and frightened. But yet, in some indefinable way, the bandh has set an uncomfortable precedent.
Gurgaon represents the contradictions of today's liberalising India. Its impressive glass-and-concrete high rises, neon signs flashing some of the world's biggest global names, and malls are all symbols of the thrusting ambitions of Indian business and society, even as the potholed roads, unreliable power supply and general paucity of urban infrastructure represent the rank failure of the government. In fact, absent the glitz and the determined energy of the private sector, and Gurgaon is not unlike Kolkata was in the eighties. The bandh just added another ominous point of similarity.
The views expressed are personal