Calcutta

by Moorhouse, Geoffrey

  This was not a document produced by dreamers. It was in the first place an exact measurement of every problem in sight. It calculated to the last half gallon just how much unfiltered water the slum dwellers of Cossipore were getting in 1961 compared with 1931. It was the CMPO plan which produced the famous projection of twelve million people living here by 1986. At the outset it stated that ‘The extreme urgency of the present situation of Calcutta and its region is such … that the search for new ideas and new techniques must be tempered by the need for immediate action. Calcutta cannot wait for a perfect plan.’ So the CMPO produced a strategy to be put into action by stages over two decades, well aware of the fact that towards the end of any twenty-year period in Calcutta a great number of early calculations would be demonstrably unrealistic. Its emphasis from start to finish was on flexibility, making no large assumptions about what any government would or would not do, but developing a machinery for application in, the field under any political philosophy. It was rigid only in its selection of early priorities. And, overwhelming as some of the earliest tasks would appear to anybody preparing to tackle them, the planners were confident enough to suggest that with the combined and concentrated efforts of Government, private industry and commerce, and of voluntary organizations, a steady progressive improvement in the situation can be accomplished, leading to cumulative and dramatic change in the urban environment of Calcutta within a generation.’

  The very first priority was to stop things getting even worse than they were when the CMPO was devised. The planners pointed out that it would be completely unrealistic to assume that the bustee dwellers could be rehoused in decent, safe and sanitary pukka buildings within a decade, except in very limited numbers. Before they could be rehoused, there would have to be space in which to rehouse them, and space is the rarest thing of all in Calcutta. The first step must therefore be reform of land-use, beginning with the compulsory purchase of all bustee lands. Once the civic authorities or the government took possession of the bustees, the slum improvement agency would then move in and provide the minimally acceptable requirements in the way of water supply, drainage and lighting. And there the bustee dwellers would remain for quite a while longer, still shockingly over-crowded but at least living in approximately healthy conditions for the first time since they were born. The planners proposed that simultaneously the authorities should seize any vacant land that became available and merely furnish it with a network of services; after that, they should allow people to move in and build their own makeshift dwellings as so many of them have had to do ever since they came to the city, without benefit of any services at all. The CMPO plan estimated that if these suggestions were promptly carried out in 1966, half a million people in Calcutta and Howrah would by 1971 be provided with paving, lighting, sewerage, safe water points and communal bathhouses for one sixteenth of what it would cost to mount an orthodox slum clearance programme. Meanwhile, the authorities could spend the bulk of their available funds where they were most needed, in the improvement of the existing water supply for the entire community to a tolerable safety level, in the beginning of three new townships to siphon some of the population from the most congested areas, in the conversion of the ghastly service privies to sanitary latrines, in the first steps towards a rapid transit system to prevent Calcutta from choking itself with its own traffic.

  Scarcely a brick has been shifted. The bustees remain more or less as they were when the CMPO plan was composed. There was a time in 1962 when it took a thousand men of the National Volunteer Force, together with a hundred five-ton lorries a month to help the regular Corporation cleansing staff remove accumulated garbage from the streets of Calcutta; in November 1970, it took a hundred and sixty five-ton lorries the whole of one night, from dusk to breakfast, to remove the accumulated garbage from just one stretch of Strand Road by the Old Mint. That is a measurement of progress in Calcutta. At the beginning of 1969 the men of the CMPO were convinced that at last some of their plans might shortly be put into practice. It had just been announced that a new budget had been concocted, producing Rs 800 millions from the combined resources of the Central Government, the West Bengal Government and the local business community, who were prepared to advance one quarter of the total sum at the unprecedented interest rate of a mere five per cent. Nothing ever came of it, partly because the businessmen took fright at the election of a chiefly Communist West Bengal Government and withdrew their offer. There was subsequently much talk of a start being made on the CMPO’s rapid transit plan for a circular railway round the centre of the city. A few months later, it was announced that this plan had been abandoned once and for all, and that instead Calcutta was going to have an Underground railway. This idea had been toyed with once before. In 1949 a French firm had investigated the possibility and decided that it was impracticable, largely because of Calcutta’s notoriously soggy foundations. Finnish engineers, however, had now advised that an Underground was possible, a contract had been signed with a team of Russian experts to render further assistance and it was promised that soon there would be Underground stations at Kalighat, at Sealdah railway terminus and in Dalhousie Square. Moreover, tenders might soon be called for the construction of another crossing of the Hooghly not far from the Howrah Bridge.

  None of this has been in accordance with the priorities of a development plan which produced some credible solutions to an incredible situation. The planners have continued to draft their more detailed steering orders for Calcutta. They have flown to Delhi every few months to lobby the authorities there; they have returned to lobby authorities in the Writers’ Building or in the Raj Bhavan almost every other day. They have devised simplified equipment that peasant workmen might use effectively to rebuild this city, they have demonstrated it to the people in whose hands the rebuilding really lies; and these people have sat in rows in bleak sheds on blazing days, nodding gravely, murmuring encouragement, applauding warmly, departing calmly with fresh sheaves of documents which they will possibly never read. Nothing has really changed. No one who has seen what has not been accomplished since the CMPO was created can easily share its most splendidly visionary moments now. ‘The rebirth of Calcutta,’ wrote the authors of the plan some years ago, ‘and the emergence of a flourishing new river metropolis demand a heroic effort. But the potential reward is great, for this is a metropolis that can become one of the world’s foremost urban centres.’

  A kind of heroic effort, in fact, was just gaining momentum as the plan was being shuffled together. Men who had grown weary of waiting for Calcutta to become merely tolerable were even given an opportunity to accomplish the vision. They promoted fear more than anything else.

  Notes

  1 Quoted, inter alia, CMPO Plan, p. ix

  2 Guardian, 11 February 1967

  3 Valentia, vol 1, p. 236

  4 Quoted Roy, p. 44

  5 Ghosh, p. 202

  6 Quoted Roy, p. 48

  7 Quoted Woodruff, vol. 11, p. 39

  8 Ghosh, p. 202

  9 ibid., p. 452

  10 ibid., p. 543

  11 Kipling, p. 6

  12 Buckland, vol 11, p. 979

  13 Speech at 50th anniversary banquet of Bengal Chamber of Commerce 1903; Lord Curzon in India, A Selection of his Speeches, London 1906

  14 Cotton, p. 242

  15 Report to the Calcutta Improvement Trust 1914, by E. P. Richards MICE, Member of the Town Planning Institute, p. xiii

  16 ibid., p. xiv

  17 ibid., p. 77

  18 ibid., p. 29

  19 ibid., p. 31

  20 ibid., p. 21

  21 ibid., p. 35

  22 Ronaldshay, p. 23

  23 Calcutta Handbook, 1921 census, p. 5

  24 ibid., p. 7

  25 ibid., p. 11

  26 ibid., p. 15

  27 Report of Committee on Industrial Unrest, Bengal Govt 1921

  28 Report on an Enquiry into the Standard of Living of Jute Mill Workers in Bengal, Bengal Govt 1930

&nbs
p; 29 Casey, p. 183

  30 ibid, p. 196

  31 ibid., p. 205

  32 ibid., p. 210

  33 Report of the Corporation of Calcutta Investigation Commission, The Biswas Report, vol 11, Part 1, par. 24

  34 ibid., Chapter xxv, par. 2

  35 Irani, p. 48

  36 Bose, p. 66

  37 Statesman, 19 June 1970

  38 ibid., 7 May 1969

  39 Quoted Dasgupta, op. cit.

  40 Statesman, 2 May 1969

  41 Mr (later Chief) Justice Sinha in The High Court of Calcutta 1862–1962, a centenary monograph by himself and others

  42 Report on an Inquiry into the Sanitary Conditions of the Labouring Population of Great Britain, HMSO 1842 p. 17

  43 ibid., p. 45

  44 Assignment Report on Water Supply and Sewerage Disposal, Greater Calcutta WHO Project; India 170

  45 G. K. Bhagat, President of Indian Chamber of Commerce, at Calcutta conference on civic crisis, 11 December 1968

  46 Figure supplied by London Transport, October, 1970

  47 Statesman, 3 September 1969

  48 ibid., 15 March 1969

  49 ibid., 6 April 1969

  50 ibid., 4 December 1969

  51 ibid., 17 October 1970

  52 ibid.

  53 ibid., 13 March 1969

  54 ibid., 27 April 1969

  55 Co-workers of Mother Teresa Report 1969

  56 ibid.

  57 Assignment Report of World Bank, India 1960, p. 54

  58 ibid., p 152

  59 CMPO Basic Development Plan, p. 5

  60 ibid., p. 6

  61 Statesman, 12 April 1970

  62 CMPO Basic Development Plan.p. 58

  * This excluded the population of Howrah across the river which, except for purely municipal purposes, is usually included as part of Calcutta in every count. All figures in the table are for the fiscal year 1911–12.

  10

  THE ROAD TO REVOLUTION

  THE origins of Communism in India are scarcely more than a quarter of a century behind those of Europe. At least one commentator has seen a strike of Bombay textile workers in 1908 as deriving from the doctrines of Karl Marx, though it was not for another decade that the British could be absolutely certain that this pernicious new philosophy had spread to their Indian Empire. The Communist Party of India was founded in Tashkent in 1920 by expatriates who had usually struggled on foot across some of the bleakest country on earth to get away from the strictures of British rule. One of the early leaders, Muzzafar Ahmad – ancient, ailing, almost bedbound in Ballygunge, and clearly en route to his place in the great Bengali pantheon – remembers one such group slogging over the Hindu Kush mountains to Tirmiz in Soviet Tadzhikistan, where a military band of the Red Army played them aboard a train for Tashkent and its new Indian Military School, which specialized in teaching political philosophy and the mechanics of the machine gun. At home that year, the All India Trade Union Congress was founded with a strong and militant left wing, and from then on Communism became a very active ingredient in the turbulence of British India. Within twelve months it had inspired an industrial strike. In 1927 it brought the Bombay textile workers out for eight months. In 1930 it produced a serious riot in Calcutta after a railway strike there. It was seen to be at the bottom of the Meerut conspiracy case, which sent twenty-two men to prison after a long trial. By 1933 the exasperated British had decided to outlaw the CPI and it remained underground until 1942, when its leaders were released from gaol after agreeing to make common cause against fascism.

  What they did next partly explains why Communism has made comparatively little headway in India, which many outsiders find remarkable in view of the country’s appalling and endemic poverty alongside its grotesque and overwhelming examples of wealth. The British had sent Stafford Cripps to India in 1942 to parley with its Congress leaders in an effort to get the country wholly behind the war effort against the Japanese. Cripps, who was virtually repeating an offer made a couple of years previously, proposed greater Indian representation on the Viceroy’s executive council after the war, together with a local voice in the organization of the war effort. Congress, bent on post-war independence and nothing less, turned it down. The CPI leaders not only supported Cripps and refused to touch the Quit India campaign of Congress, but had the satisfaction of watching Mr Gandhi and his colleagues restored to prison cells which they themselves had only just vacated.

  They were to pay for this treachery. From the moment of Independence they began to fight the new Indian Government for pandering to Anglo-American imperialism, and they were responsible for outbreaks of terrorism in West Bengal, in Madras, in Uttar Pradesh and in Bombay. In February 1948, they played host in Calcutta to what was described as a South-East Asia Youth Conference under the auspices of such bodies as the World Federation of Democratic Youth, which turned out to be nothing less than the final and joint planning operation for the Communist uprisings shortly to begin in Burma, Malaya, and Indonesia. By April, the CPI was outlawed for a second time and its leaders remained in totally Indian prisons until 1950 at least, though the detainees in Bengal were not released until the following year, after a ruling by the Calcutta High Court. With terrorism added to treachery and with leaders cut off from their supporters, the party membership throughout India fell from ninety thousand in 1948 to twenty thousand a couple of years later. Yet by 1957 the CPI had revived enough to win an election in Kerala; twenty months later its government was dismissed by Delhi, in accordance with the Indian Constitution, for being unable to maintain law and order in the state. Given the all-Indian factors weighted against the success of Communism, even a fairly short reign was a triumph.

  No other land and people can offer such difficult ground as this one for anyone demanding unity and solidarity of effort from his supporters. Always, and however you examine India and its people, there are infinite conflicts of loyalty, of belief, of life style, of regional and self-interest; they all go very deep and they all run fiercely strong. Nothing could be more discouraging or shocking to a good international Communist than the effect of Indian Linguistic antagonisms, for example, on the communications of Indian Communism. When the CPI organized its national peasant congress at Barasat, in 1970, every speech made by delegates from Bihar, Bombay, Rajasthan, Kerala, the Punjab and all other corners of the republic, was made first of all in English which, according to the literature of the congress, was the language of notorious despots and merchant-pirates. The speech was then translated several times over. When asked why the first version was not delivered in Hindi, which a majority of delegates would have understood as well as they understand English, and possibly better, shrewd party men said that if Hindi had been made the official language of the congress, the South Indian delegates would have walked out in protest against the implicit insult offered their own Tamil.

  The fact that India has always been fundamentally a peasant society and is still predominantly a peasant nation, is yet another counterpoise to the advance of Communism which, until fairly recently, concentrated its efforts among industrial workers. Yet in Calcutta, the party made much slower progress than anyone with a knowledge of conditions there would think possible. It suffered, paradoxically, because its local leaders were Bengalis and inevitably conducted themselves as such. Not only did they fight against the partition of their province at Independence on the traditional grounds of Bengali nationalism, but they rooted their organization within the local trade unions among Bengalis, which meant that they were basing themselves upon a minority of the labour force; only one sixth of the dock workers in Calcutta, for example, are Bengalis. Apart from disbanding, they could not have done very much more to help Congress to rule without a break for the first two decades of Independence.

  First there was the Government of B. C. Roy, once a brilliant surgeon who entered politics under the patronage of C. R. Das and his Swaraj Party in the 1920s; then there was the Government of P. C. Sen, who once advised people to eat
green bananas if they could not obtain rice, which would have been rather less helpful to them than Marie Antoinette’s cake. But throughout those twenty years there was, above all, always in the background the lurking figure of Atulya Ghosh, a Bengali Tammany boss with a picturesque black eyepatch (legacy of a disease contracted in a British Indian prison) who, when not manipulating people and politics in city and state, was frequently to be found camouflaged behind his current subscription copy of the Times Literary Supplement. Between them, these three Congress leaders and their henchmen gradually made it inevitable that Communism, its own enormous handicaps notwithstanding, would run Calcutta and West Bengal according to any prescriptions it cared to offer.

  Apart from the hopeless poverty and the nauseating wealth, together with a certain incompetence in administration, there was the corruption. Governor Casey had confessed himself ‘appalled by the hold which bribery and corruption had taken on the public, and on the subordinate ranks of the administration’, not long before the British left. There was an occasion in 1945 when the Government of Bengal was beaten by a snap vote during a budget debate ‘by reason of twenty Government supporters crossing the floor, a manoeuvre engineered by a Muslim with ambitions to get into the Ministry. A lot of money was said to have passed and it was clear beyond doubt that it had. The individual who engineered it was frank enough to let it be known that he would repeat the performance the next day unless he were told that he would be given a place in the Ministry.’