What India thinks today, will Bengal think tomorrow? 

File image of West Bengal Chief Minister and Trinamool Congress leader Mamata Banerjee

Come the elections, the rhetoric in West Bengal veers round to ‘poriborton’ or change. Mamata Banerjee promised it 10 years ago, when she unseated a doddering and ossified Left regime. The BJP, keen to distinguish its offering from Didi’s, is calling for ‘real poriborton’, which doesn’t really differentiate it much from the original. For, what is needed in Bengal is not just change, but a radical transformation.

Simply put, after more than three decades of the Communist rule and another 10 years of unadulterated populism, the state needs to shed old habits and attitudes, it needs root and branch reforms, it needs a sea change, a metamorphosis.

It was the Left’s militant trade unionism that led to capital fleeing the state en masse, as the Communist government persisted in its demented programme of ‘socialism in one state’, even more delusional than the Soviet Union’s ‘socialism in one country’. Keen to save the worker from capitalist exploitation, the Left forgot the sage advice of one of its own luminaries, the economist Joan Robinson, who said, "The misery of being exploited by capitalists is nothing compared to the misery of not being exploited at all".

The upshot was the conversion of a once thriving economy into an industrial wasteland. The proletariat in the state turned into a lumpenproletariat, ready and willing to sell themselves to any political party at the right price. The result is the endemic political violence and the extortion raj we see in the state today. After all, it is the Communist goons who shifted to the Trinamool and who are now shifting to the BJP.

True, Buddhadeb Bhattacharya realised the wrong turn his party had made and tried, too late, to make amends by inviting the Tatas to Singur. Seeing himself as Bengal’s Deng Xiao Ping, he was fond of the quote, "Seek truth from facts". He probably also realised the truth of another Deng aphorism: "Poverty is not socialism".

But Mamata cared little for Deng and instead saw Singur as an opportunity to ride to power on a wave of populist support. Given such an inauspicious beginning, it’s hardly a surprise that her attempts to attract industry to the state have been a miserable flop. Industrialists are understandably reluctant to invest in a state ruled by a maverick and mercurial chief minister, presiding over an anarchic party whose lumpen followers’ primary purpose seems to be petty extortion.

Government statistics show that the state has, in recent years, done better than the national average in GDP growth and growth in per capita income. The urban employment numbers also show a better picture than the national average. But these figures have been the subject of much controversy. If the state is indeed doing so well, how is it that its best and brightest flock abroad and to other parts of the country? If employment opportunities are so good, why do workers from Bengal make a beeline for other parts of India to eke out a precarious existence there as housemaids and waiters?

To be sure, agriculture has done well. Kolkata continues to be an important trading centre. But the real productivity gains come from large-scale industry. It is the most dynamic, the most technologically advanced, the most productive part of the economy. West Bengal’s economy of petty producers and small farmers may allow the masses to keep their heads above water for some time, but they cannot serve as engines of capital accumulation, so necessary for growth. Petty producers lack the capacity to invest in technology, in R&D and lack efficiencies of scale. They offer no hope for the future. That road is a blind alley.

This is the nub of the issue. The principal contradiction in the country today is between the forces of capitalism and those of populism. The electoral contest in West Bengal will be played out on many fronts -- on religious and caste divides, on regionalism versus the Centre, on the charisma of political leaders and on the strength of the muscle power employed by the contestants. But the hard economic issue is the fight between a resurgent capitalism on the one hand and a mish-mash of populism and identity politics on the other.

The central government has been doing its best to reform the economy. It is getting rid of the socialist baggage of the past. It is trying its best to make India a manufacturing powerhouse. Its challenging task is to convert an economy of petty producers and small farmers into a modern capitalist one. Many states, some of them ruled by non-BJP parties, have bought that vision. But West Bengal sticks out like a sore thumb. It is a textbook case of premature deindustrialisation.

True, changing course will not be easy. Attitudes towards wealth creators must change. Just as the post-communist regimes took years to retool their economies, the process will also take time in West Bengal. Many of the leaders in the state BJP today have not covered themselves in glory as ministers in the Trinamool government. But who knows, maybe the cliché ‘Cometh the hour, cometh the man’ could prove to be true.

It is time for West Bengal to return to the Indian mainstream. A beginning can be made by electing a business-friendly government.