It will remain the unspoken angst of the Left ideologues that not one of them could create an organised body of thought to develop a mass movement in India. Their splendid isolation was made even more stark by the tsunami-like mass movement crafted either by socialist leaders like Jaiprakash Narain or even right wingers like Lal Krishna Advani. Mass movements require a clear feel for what the people want. Gour Kishore Ghosh?s magnum opus Sagina Mahato brought this duality out where even a correct labour leader falls foul of the sneering cynicism of Left ideologues and fails to guide a mass movement in any direction.
It is not that democracies do not fall prey to those but they recover fast. The US for instance, erred terribly in Vietnam yet, despite the lurid stories of repression of dissent, allowed its own citizens to force the government to change course. The Russian misadventure in Afghanistan was another episode where the government of the proletariat was not exactly benign on anyone caught questioning the draft. Nearer home, it was the inability of the Marxist state of West Bengal that blew the lid on Nandigram and forced them to backtrack.
These of course do not find any resonance in Dr Ashok Mitra?s The Starkness of It, the collection of his essays culled from the Calcutta Diary column in the Economic and Political Weekly. The essays cover the period from 1986 to 1993. But despite getting a ring side view of the churn, his notes on the era offer few insights. Instead there is a na?ve yearning for all uprisings against a supposedly imperial New Delhi, from Kashmir and Punjab extremism to Tamil violence in Sri Lanka, and obviously Naxalites. In a Nirad Choudhury-like indictment of Bengalis in The Beginning was the End, he lashes out at them for their torpor ?The Naxalite ferment thus demurely dies down. Nature?s symmetry asserts itself, everything fits with every other thing?.
That angst against Delhi shows in the piece ?The Distant Centre?. Writing in November 1991, after three changes in government at the centre in less than two years, the classic BoP crisis and the turbulence of Punjab on the wane, Mitra yet conceives the centre as a monolith entity. ?The recognised opposition parties are tickled no end that the government has been forced to consult with them?, he writes. According to him, the National Integration Council should have jettisoned Punjab terrorism and Ram Janambhoomi issues from their agenda to discuss why Dr Manmohan Singh has been elected to the Rajya Sabha from Assam. The other pearl, ?The manner the ministry of finance has been functioning of late is itself a major threat to national integration?.
For a formidable scholar, that sort of observation makes it apparent that the set of comments can hardly hope to offer any insight to the India of today. Writing about the contours of Tamil Nadu polls of 1993, he says ?Chief election commissioners assume their role to be that of major league players. They are actually minor hacks. The decisions and non-decisions are taken 10,000 miles away?. Mitra has surely earned the right to be called original.