More than a hundred years back, two great minds of Bengal once engaged in a moral debate. The occasion was provided by a simple story. A sanyasi sitting by the road saw a man running for his life. Soon enough, a bunch of thugs in pursuit came to him and threatened that they would chop his head off unless he told them which way their quarry had gone. The question was: what should the sanyasi do? Should he tell them the truth, thereby upholding a moral principle at the cost of an innocent life? Should he refuse to tell them anything and risk his own life? Or should he tell them a lie and hope for the best? Rabindranath favoured the second and most difficult alternative but Bankimchandra thought that the third alternative, although unsatisfactory, would be the best under the difficult circumstances.

Bankim was a bureaucrat. Bureaucracy is a profession which teaches you the art of survival. It is a profession that shows you the limitations of morality in the abstract and tells you that small compromises here and there can help you to survive long enough and to do good things in the future. Following Professor Patnaik, one might say that Bankim’s morality was grounded in sound practice whereas the stand taken by Tagore was idealistic and detached from reality. Much to the embarrassment of the organised left, the Bengali middle class continues to be swayed largely by the Tagore-Gandhi-Nehru lineage on questions of morality. The praxis of sponging on the party in power may have brought a small group of intellectuals onto the correct theoretical line, but the larger fraction remains difficult to handle.

Such is the grip of ‘culture’ on the Bengali mind that the Party can ignore these intellectuals only at its own peril. So when these intellectuals attack the Party on Nandigram, the Party has to take the trouble to defend itself. Since it is ‘dirty politics’ that has to be defended, only a clean person can do it—and who better than a university professor? So long as he was not required to defend either neo-liberalism or corporate industrialisation, there was no doubt that Professor Patnaik would do a good job of it. That is precisely what he has done.

Dirty politics comprises violence in its several manifestations:

An opposition to violence in all these forms is indeed a hallmark of the misguided middle class intellectual. The demystification of violence attempted by Georges Sorel and others never had any success with this class. Globalisation, with its promise of class collaboration, seems to render violence unnecessary. The intellectual is easily deceived and she or he withdraws from politics.

Comrades Tapan Ghosh and Sukur Ali have no such problems. They pick their way unerringly through the constellation of class forces and instinctively find the camps of the people, including the camps opened by Trinamul. Surprisingly, they do it without ever reading a line of either “On Contradiction” or “Dialectics of Nature”. The traditional objection to agents of violence was that these people had no ‘politics’ and would change their loyalty as soon as the Party lost power. This objection has lost much of its force. What if the Party never loses power?

The Professor has noted that the intellectuals were not always against the Party. They were friendly towards the Party till recently. What made this co-habitation possible, and why this rift? The intellectual had a mental model of the Party. In this model, the popularity of the Party and its electoral success reflected the correctness of the stand taken by the Party on issues that agitated the people, especially the dispossessed, the landless, the jobless and so on. Only marginally and temporarily did the Party have to rely on muscle power to win or hold its constituencies. As the years went by, the Party would find more and more genuine support in the people and the role played by muscle power would become even more unnecessary. It is only when the Party submitted meekly to its own muscle power, after winning seven elections and running the Government for thirty years, that the intellectual woke up to reality and started making a noise.
Professor Patnaik has now dealt a body blow to this model. It is muscle power, he seems to be saying, that is the stuff and essence of Party ideology. The day the Party shrinks from violence, the Party ideology would become smug, self satisfied and empty. Tapan-Sukur do not just provide logistical support to the party leadership, they are the roots of its fearless foreign policy, the source of its nuclear wisdom.

There were other meeting points between the Party and these so-called intellectuals. They seemed to agree on the need to resist both communalism and imperialism. The moral impulse leads straight to such opposition. Killing on grounds of religion is wrong because killing is wrong. The US invasion of Iraq is wrong because invasions are wrong. The Party must have arrived at the same conclusions on much more practical grounds, avoiding moral shortcuts. Could these conclusions change, if the context changes? If the Party were to seriously try to create a base in Modi’s Gujarat rather than Tagore’s Bengal, would it utilise the readymade apparatus of communalism, if it could? Would it draft the services of Babu Bajrangi, if he was on offer? Would it use Ramanand Sagar in Gujarat the way it uses Vidyasagar in Bengal? If it does not, we may be sure that the self-denial is based on solid political calculations and not on some abstract concept of morality.

If it does, as it well might, we may confidently expect another round of tamasha by the moralists of Bengal.
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