Experiments of urban India and the politics of change: Phase 5 Report

“The price of fish has never been this cheap since the partition of Bengal!” was the common refrain on the streets of Kolkata. Fish, as you know, is one of the staples of Bengali diet. It was the year of the fish for the households in Bengal, after a long decade of struggle. Local folklore goes that the Bengali families had never celebrated their daily meals as much as they did that year, even as the price of fish kept crashing in the market. Happy with their dietary success, a whole generation of Bengalis had suddenly turned positive. The morale was supposedly so high that an industrial truce was achieved and long standing disputes between trade unions and employers had seemingly been solved overnight!

This was the winter of 1971, a far cry from the previous decade of grave instability, political violence, spread of Naxalism and pitched battles on the streets. In just the previous 2 years, Bengal had seen 4 sets of assembly elections and none had provided any political direction. So the winter of 1971 was a total anomaly to the prevailing atmosphere in the state. Who could have thought that all one had to do was provide them with enough fish and the wayward Bengalis would fall into line? Can you think about a more fishy morale booster than this… well? Think hard.

1971 was a year of hope. A year like this had not been witnessed since the dawn of independence in 1947. A year when the opposition leader Vajpayee with his unparalleled oratory skills had declared Indira Gandhi as “Maa Durga”. It was as if all those promises made long ago about the “new dawn of India when the world was asleep” were about to come true after all. India had liberated Bangladesh from West Pakistan and delivered it to the doorstep of Kolkata. Probably no one had anticipated the consequences of such a move. The opening of borders between West Bengal and Bangladesh had meant that Bangladeshi fishermen, long looking for a market, had suddenly found hundreds of thousands of households as a readymade market in Kolkata and all across West Bengal who had been deprived of “easy fishing” since the partition of Bengal. It was a symbiotic relationship. Pakistan had run a totally lopsided industrial policy, keeping East Pakistan completely dependent on West Pakistan for all manufactured goods. So, after the Bangladeshi independence, immediately, there was a massive demand of daily goods like Cigarettes, Match Box, Cooking oil etc. from the industries of West Bengal, particularly the Kolkata suburbs.

It is said that being in Kolkata in 1971-72 was an experience in itself. “There was so much hope in the air” explains a former industrialist at his home, a stone’s throw away from the commercial district of Park Street. “We were drawing plans to expand our factories everywhere, we wanted to diversify into everything… there was talk about the war ravaged Bangladesh requiring their entire rail network to be rehauled, think of all the opportunities it would throw up to Indian Railways contractors, the locomotives, the tracks and so many associated industries.” He reminisced. It is said that the Jute Industry which was the mainstay of Kolkata had virtually doubled overnight in terms of size “because a whole country was getting added as a client state to the industry”.