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Thinking Home

 In his book Imaging India, Nilekani says "Voters, especially the poorest ones, see their votes in these states as a trade for safeguarding their basic rights." This largely squares with what I have known to be true from back in my time which feels like history now. But trying to map this to West Bengal, my home state is a bit harder. Its decline seems never-ending and its not clear what rock-bottom looks like. Every time I return to Kolkata, things seem significantly worse. Literacy or lack thereof is a culprit but there are many others

..West Bengal is second only to Kerala in terms of literacy of people over the age of 80, suggesting that the state was a high performer back when it was prosperous. But now it has fallen far behind states such as Maharashtra, Gujarat, and Tamil Nadu when it comes to the literacy of the age group 10-14 year-olds, kids who are supposed to be in school now. West Bengal has a large negative residual when one plots the literacy rates of these two age groups across states — suggesting its new peers are Uttar Pradesh, Orissa, and Jharkhand.

In the case of West Bengal, the decline in literacy tracks lower levels of awareness of what is going on around the country and the world even among those who are literate and educated. The modern day understanding of what it means to be Bengali is a mere pantomime of what it once meant. To that end folks are hosting any number of literary and cultural gatherings, singing, dancing, performing theater and the like but the point of it all is a bit lost as these activities are entirely untethered from their way of life. It is celebration for the sake of it - just another excuse to escape from rather unescapable realities of their life in this place that can't seem to pull itself from sliding to the very bottom wherever that is.

The politics of West Bengal are not driven on caste lines even though the poor and underprivileged have few if any basic rights. The strategy used there is hardly any different from those by populist leaders around the world "use of resentment, spreading falsehoods and manipulating media". For West Bengal, it seems like the rise of illiteracy and education in name only has created a path for such leadership to rise and thrive even if caste is not such a big deal in the state. 

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