The Buddhadev Bhattacharya Govt. has jumped at the opportunity offered by a judge of the Calcutta High Court to curb democratic expression. In doing so, it has once again demonstrated the role of revisionism (especially for those who hate to believe it) – to serve the ruling classes better than other parties.

In a widely condemned order, a single judge of the Kolkata High Court had decreed that processions and rallies in Calcutta can only take place on holidays, or before 8 a.m. and after 8 p.m. Not only this, no matter what their purpose, they can proceed along one of only three routes. The Court then proceeded to even prescribe these routes – leave alone the jurisdiction of the Executive, even the local traffic police or authorities have no say in the matter. The protesters’ point of view is, of course, not to count at all; whether they protest against WTO or against West Bengal police repression, or for wages from a particular establishment – they walk the same routes at a time when offices are closed.

A notorious aspect of the order is that political and struggle processions and rallies have been clubbed together with religious processions. The ‘crowning glory’ is an attack on the very concept of a right to protest – the organizers will have to deposit money with the police to compensate those people inconvenienced by the rally! Not the least reprehensible aspect of the order is that it was apparently provoked by the judge himself being struck in a traffic jam for some time.

‘Left’ Front Responds

Oh, the sound and the fury of the responses of constituents of the ‘Left’ Front Govt. to this order. The Chairman of the ‘Left’ Front and polit-bureau member of CPM, Biman Bose, demanded that the judge should ‘leave West Bengal’. ‘Left’ Front members began saying that they would hold rallies and defy the ban – meanwhile they made a somersault and the West Bengal Govt. went back to the High Court for a stay, scheduling the said ‘ban breaking rallies’ for afterwards.

A day before the appeal for stay was heard in the High Court several other organizations defied the order and organized protest rallies in Calcutta. Eventually, the High Court stayed the order – as subsequent events show, why push for a confrontation when the ‘Left’ Front Govt. itself is so willing to oblige!

Now the ‘Left’ Front Govt. has come forward with its own proposal. Public meetings (left alone by the judge) will be allowed to take place only at two sites in the city. There will be extension of the areas covered under Sec. 144 in the city, especially those areas that constitute its political hub. Eventually public meetings will be pushed to a fringe of the city where a new ‘maidan’ is under construction. These proposals will be placed by the ‘Left’ Front Govt. before the High Court of West Bengal on 12^th November, 2003, when the stay is due for consideration.

So a whimper is to replace the bang! The ‘Left’ Front Govt. will steal a leaf out of the books of all other ruling class parties’ governments, both at the Centre and the state, and ensure an order all other governments are wondering how to smuggle in. They do smuggle them in partly, sometimes as part of POTA or some other repressive law, but this full blown service to the ruling classes is something the revisionists will steal a march on.

This then is the CPM whose trade unions will ‘defy’ the Supreme Court ruling on strikes! One wonders if Mr. Bose would like to extend the applicability of ‘leave Bengal’ to the comrades of his government?

Serious Issues

The coupled attack of the judiciary and the government in West Bengal must be seen in all its seriousness. The first issue begins with the order of the Court itself. How far is the take over by the judiciary of executive functions – both clearly separated by the Constitution – going to go? The direction of this take over is very clear from the Supreme Court downwards. It is towards more curbs on struggles, towards enforcement of anti-people policies, towards infringement of people’s rights. In an imperious manner the Supreme Court takes note of a falling bus in the capital and decrees that all school buses will henceforth be yellow. It is not matched by similar activism on large-scale brutal murder of minority children in Gujarat. Nor on sequential blindings in Bihar. Seen in this context, the judgement is clearly an infringement of Constitutional demarcations, and hence unconstitutional and unmaintainable.

Secondly, the anti-people bias of the judiciary is clearly on display here, their blinkered view of society and who has a right to have ‘rights’. Does the court find it equally violative of people’s rights when traffic is deliberately held up for ministers’ convoys and VIPs’ cars? While demonstrations derive from people’s fundamental right to protest, do ministers have a constitutional right to isolation from the people or to ‘security’ from them? Why then has the court not bothered to include these sections too in its judgement? Why has it not decreed that the ministers will deposit compensatory amounts in advance to compensate the people inconvenienced by them? Why should people’s rights be attacked, when the real guilty are the traffic police, the administrators, who should handle arrangements to ensure flow of traffic?

Thirdly, the post-NEP years have brought to light a conscious attempt by high flying NGOs, upper echelons of judiciary and bureaucracy, an elitist English media, to trivialize political opinions, political programmes, represent them as ‘nuisances’. All the time evoking a hypothetical ‘people’, their actual intention is to trample under foot the rights of these very people. They are the spokespersons of a very remote upper class who have full stakes in the status quo, and a rapidly burgeoning upper middle class with easy money and elitist aspirations. The very same spectre lurked in the anti-pollution judgements of the Supreme Court (read anti-poor), in the Supreme Court pronouncements against strikes, and the same is visible in this judgement.

In this context, the coupling of religious and political processions is doubly dangerous and significant. Political protests spring from constitutional rights; it cannot be equated with religious activities.

Fourthly, Mr. Bose’s outcry notwithstanding, the judgement tells us what has been happening within the ‘Left Fort’ in almost three decades of rule of ‘Left’ Front. The revisionists have successfully bred an elitist upper middle class like in the rest of the country. They have hatred for the people’s rights, oppose the right of people’s dissent, and want poor-free beautiful cities. They have a government like themselves – the ‘Left’ Front Govt. emptied out various ‘scabs’ on the city, and now is going to proceed along the lines shown by the High Court. Not all Mr. Bose’s howling is going to detract from the CPM’s rapid emergence as a party of good value for opposing the people and curbing their rights.

Earlier reports that various political and democratic organizations in Calcutta were planning to hold rallies in Calcutta city to assert their right, were greeted with fury and criticism from spokesmen of the ‘polished sections’ including the English media of course. The anxiety of the ruling elite, themselves contemptuous of laws and rules, for the ‘people’ to bow before courts, is amusing. It shows their deep-seated fear of the ‘people’ and their impatience with even the limited constitutional rights that stand in the way of unfettered MNCization, unbridled loot, and allow protest rather than submission.