by VIJAY PRASHAD
Harvard Professor Sugata Bose (left) and former Member of the State Assembly Arabul Islam at the MC rally in Bhangar.
How is a Harvard Professor of history to makes sense of the grammar of Indian electoral politics? There is the retail end of things, the door-to-door campaigns, the street meetings, the processions through congested streets and the back-door deals cut with this or that power-broker. Harvard Yard might be a den of conspiratorial faculty deal making, but it is a far cry from the hustle and bustle of Indian electioneering. Nonetheless, Gardiner Chair of Oceanic History Sugata Bose is now the Lok Sabha (parliament) candidate for the Trinamul Congress (TMC). He will run to win the Jadavpur constituency in West Bengal. A previous Harvard professor and US Ambassador to India, John Kenneth Galbraith, wrote in 1958 that Indian society is “the world’s greatest example of functioning anarchy.” How is Professor Bose to navigate this chaos?
Professor Bose is no stranger to Jadavpur, the home of one of West Bengal’s most important universities. His mother has been the Member of Parliament for the district three previous times. When he arrived from Cambridge, Massachusetts to take up the cudgels for the TMC, the party workers greeted him with the slogan, Netaji-er gharer chhele ke vote din, vote din (Vote for the boy who is from Netaji’s family). They referred to Bose’s granduncle, Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose, who is a beloved nationalist leader. Netaji, as he is called, oscillated from bourgeois nationalism (he was the president of the Indian National Congress) to socialism (he founded his own Forward Bloc party). The Forward Bloc party is now in the Left Front alliance, the adversary of Professor Bose’s TMC. Sugata Bose and his mother, Krishna Bose, are both authors of books about Netaji, with Sugata Bose’s His Majesty’s Opponent: Subhas Chandra Bose and India’s Struggle for Independence arriving with the imprimatur of Harvard University Press in 2011. Professor Bose is aware of the power of his inheritance. “You elected my mother from here three times,” he says in the middle-class neighbourhood of Garfa, “I’m hoping that you will bless me in the same way.” In his biography of Netaji, Professor Bose sneered at the Congress for being “under dynastic control” of the Nehru-Gandhi family. Nothing so bad when one is advantaged by a legacy.
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Everyday political corruption is insufficient for the campaign of Professor Bose. He is of course aware of the cesspool that the TMC has created. At a campaign stop he said he wanted to change the face of a part of his constituency “which often makes headlines in newspapers for incidents like clashes and murder.” What he did not say is that the culprits in this violence are frequently the TMC political muscle, and they are often people led by a former Member of the State Assembly, Arabul Islam. Mr. Islam represented Bhangar, a part of the Jadavpur Lok Sabha constituency.
Arabul Islam’s name is itself threatening. The charge sheet against Mr. Islam is so long that it would take up more than this space to explore each of his alleged violations. The word “alleged” will come up a lot in what comes below because few of his acts of violence and intimidation have reached a courthouse – let alone a judge or a jury. Mr. Islam is protected by a political safety net that is inviolable. Professor Bose welcomed Mr. Islam to one of his rallies, saying cryptically, “Arabul has a history of struggle.” Might be worth considering the nature of Mr. Islam’s struggles. Professor Bose is an educator, so it would be sufficient to list some of Mr. Islam’s interventions in the educational business.
Arabul Islam is the President of the government-run Bhangar Mahavidyalaya. Over the past three years, Mr. Islam has sought to excise the teaching establishment of any CPI-M member or sympathizer. His adversaries, however, need not have any link to the Left. They are simply people whom he does not like. Here are three examples over the past three years of his behavior toward teachers:
* (April 2012). Mr. Islam accosts Debjani Dey, a geography teacher at Bhangar Mahavidyalaya, in the staff room. Dey and her colleagues complained about the management at the college. “He walked into the staff room,” Dey said, “and started rebuking us in filthy language. When we protested, he hit me with a jug and hurt my chin.” Dey’s outspokenness vanished in a day. Mr. Islam filed a defamation suit against her. A teacher at the college says that Mr. Islam’s men threatened them to be quiet. The West Bengal College and Universities Teachers’ Association stepped in. But they could not make a mark.
* (August 2013). Mr. Islam removed Luna Kanyal from her post as teacher-in-charge at Bhangar Mahavidyalaya. Kanyal was accused of all kinds of mid-deeds, but the rumor in the college is that she was ousted because Mr. Islam said she was a “CPI-M cadre.” She was not given the chance to defend herself. Mr. Islam replaced her with Nanda Ghosh, whom other teachers say is close to Mr. Islam. Kanyal moved the High Court on the issue, since there was “no serious charge against her.”
* (March 14, 2014). Mr. Islam barged into the examination hall at the Narayanpur High School with a group of his associates. They went floor-to-floor telling the invigilators to help students who were doing their examinations. The teacher-in-charge, Gopa Roy, was rattled by the incident. When she asked Arabul Islam why he had come into the examination hall, he “verbally abused and threatened me before leaving.”