Terms of Trade | Why “reformers” end up on the wrong side of history

This week saw the political and physical demise of two very influential politicians from two Bengals.

Sheikh Hasina, who ruled Bangladesh with an iron hand for 15 years, found her world and political power under siege on Monday after the army refused to use force on hundreds of thousands of protestors who had gathered in Dhaka to overthrow her regime. It was Hasina who was asked to pack her bags and leave. Hasina, as of now, has sought refuge in India and is staring at an uncertain future, both personally and politically. Her party and its leaders are under a violent siege back home.
As a politician, Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee’s — he passed away after a prolonged illness on Thursday in Kolkata — persona was very different from Hasina’s. Even his biggest critics would not accuse him of having made even a rupee in corruption or espousing violence barring the unfortunate events in Nandigram.
Even when he was the chief minister of West Bengal, he stayed in an austere two-room apartment, a place he did not have to desert in fear after a crushing political defeat in 2011 despite widespread allegations of political violence and oppression against his party.
Not everything is dissimilar between Hasina and Buddhadeb though. Almost the entire mainstream press, especially in West Bengal, has paid its tributes to the latter as a man who wanted to rescue the state from the economic destruction his own party had unleashed. Of course, there is a footnote that his zeal to bring back the big capital in Bengal got a bit out of hand and took democratic consensus for granted. This mistake would send him and his party into political oblivion.
Hasina, on the other hand, successfully achieved what a lot of fellow travellers of the left had wanted Buddhadeb and his party to do: Pursue a labour-intensive industry rather than go after big-business controlled capital-intensive behemoths like Tata and Salim groups. Bangladesh, under Hasina’s watch, became one of the biggest success stories of export-led growth in the world and lifted a lot of people out of poverty during this process. That Hasina had to suffer what she has in politics despite achieving an economic transformation is being posed as a puzzle of sorts by a lot of commentators, especially in India. To be sure, Bangladesh has deep-rooted economic problems despite this success, as was pointed out in these pages earlier this week.
It is nobody’s case that West Bengal and Bangladesh are entirely similar. But the so-called progressive economic thought of these two leaders and their political decimation is tempting enough to ask a question. Is the relationship between politics and economics driven by a damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-do-n’t dictum?
The CPI (M) did fine under Jyoti Basu who (supposedly) did not upset the apple cart of ideological and political “correctness” to revive the state’s economic fortunes. Buddhadeb is the proverbial road to hell paved with good intentions and character for the communists in West Bengal and India.
Hasina’s major battles always seemed to be in the realm of politics rather than economics. They can roughly be summarised as an effort to exorcise the ghosts of her country’s bloodied political past. Economics never really mattered in Bangladesh except in the aftermath of the pandemic-generated macroeconomic insecurity. Even the recent reservation controversy, most commentators agree, was more a catalyst than the cause of the outburst.
It would be a mistake to fall for such mechanical binaries. Major political pivots, when they happen are not the result of either the political or the economic. They are best described by using the analogy of how earthquakes happen when gradually deforming tectonic plates eventually see a rupture leading to sudden movements. In other words, they are often the result of historical dialectics between the economic and the political.
Politicians who are at the suffering end of these movements usually make the mistake of being obsessed with one side of the picture while taking the other for granted. Buddhadeb was so preoccupied with correcting his party’s so-called anti-capital bias that he became blinded to its gradual transformation into an oppressive and asphyxiating machinery vis-à-vis the poor.
He made the cardinal mistake of relying on the ex-ante assurance of this discredited machinery that land acquisition would not trigger such a backlash.
Hasina’s Awami League offered a country with a 90% Muslim Majority a choice between secularism and democracy. The economic rewards of her reforms; the impressive macro picture notwithstanding, were just not enough to take care of this democratic discontent.
In both these cases, the leaders did not see what was coming because the political apparatus they were heading was more invested in virtualizing the increasingly untenable status quo than transforming itself in line with the realities on the ground. Could these pitfalls have been averted? Historians are best placed to answer these questions in specific cases, whether it is West Bengal, Bangladesh or some other place. But there is a more generic question to be asked.
Does electoral democracy under capitalism offer in-built guardrails against steps which can potentially destabilise the entire political economy of a state? Political coups such as the one in Bangladesh or the downfall of a 34-year-old communist regime in West Bengal are extreme cases. Let us take a seemingly more benign example of the widespread tendency to offer short-term benefits (what are pejoratively called freebies) at the cost of long-term economic productivity and fiscal sustainability.
The dangerous game of deepening or creating more and more fault lines along caste or religious lines; the former is not necessarily a preserve of the Hindu right, in India is another such example. How tempting is it for a politician to seek destructive, destabilising and sectarian politics when the noble ways are unlikely to yield the desired results?
To ask these questions is not to offer a perpetual alibi for the dark side that political praxis often takes. It is merely acknowledging the fact that individuals in key positions do have a big role in shaping history for good or bad depending on whether or not they appreciate all and not just a part of political economy contradictions facing them in moments of political power. To be sure, one can always argue whether it is hubris or genuine asymmetry in information which leads to cataclysmic events when they come.
This column likes quoting Karl Marx and his ideological descendants in lieu of a conclusion. This week it is more appropriate to end with Marc Antony’s famous lines from Julius Caesar. “Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears; I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him. The evil that men do lives after them; The good is oft interred with their bones”. The legacy of both Hasina and Buddhadeb is best captured by these lines.
Roshan Kishore, HT’s Data and Political Economy Editor, writes a weekly column on the state of the country’s economy and its political fall out, and vice-versa
 
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