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By:

Kiran D. Tare

21 August 2024 at 11:23:13 am

Bengal’s Ludwig Erhard

For decades, Swapan Dasgupta made a career of diagnosing India’s political ailments. As a columnist, editor, author and public intellectual, the erudite and scintillating Dasgupta dissected challenged orthodoxies and defended the intellectual traditions of the Indian Right. However, following his new appointment as the new Finance Minister of a West Bengal in economic doldrums, he perhaps faces the most demanding assignment of his career. His supporters however are confident that if there is...

Bengal’s Ludwig Erhard

For decades, Swapan Dasgupta made a career of diagnosing India’s political ailments. As a columnist, editor, author and public intellectual, the erudite and scintillating Dasgupta dissected challenged orthodoxies and defended the intellectual traditions of the Indian Right. However, following his new appointment as the new Finance Minister of a West Bengal in economic doldrums, he perhaps faces the most demanding assignment of his career. His supporters however are confident that if there is anyone most suited to sort out Bengal’s messy economy, it is Dasgupta. His appointment following the Bharatiya Janata Party’s ascent to power in Bengal after overthrowing Mamata Banerjee’s TMC regime is among the more intriguing political transitions in recent Indian political memory. India has seen journalists cross into politics before. M.J. Akbar moved from the newsroom to the Ministry of External Affairs. Arun Shourie, one of India’s most formidable investigative journalists, became a reform-minded minister in Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s government. Others, from Manish Sisodia to Priya Ranjan Dasmunsi and Chandan Mitra, have made similar journeys. Yet Dasgupta’s case is distinctive. Unlike many journalists-turned-politicians, he was never merely a ‘reporter.’ Whether in debate or through his prolific and trenchant writings, he has always been an intellectual combatant, a scholar of political ideas with a sweeping knowledge of world history by which he leavens those ideas. Dasgupta has always been one of the most articulate exponents of modern Indian conservatism. Educated at La Martiniere College in Kolkata, St Stephen’s College in Delhi and later the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, where he earned a doctorate, Dasgupta cultivated a reputation for formidable scholarship. His books, including Awakening Bharat Mata: The Political Beliefs of the Indian Right and The Ayodhya Reference, revealed an uncommon ability to place contemporary political disputes within a broader historical and ideological framework. For his supporters, he was among the few intellectuals capable of articulating conservative ideas in a language usually dominated by the Left. To critics, he was a sophisticated polemicist. Yet, even his opponents seldom questioned the breadth of his reading or the sharpness of his arguments. However, the challenge facing Dasgupta now is no longer intellectual but administrative. The Bengal he inherits bears little resemblance to the state that once led India in industry, commerce and scientific innovation. As he himself quipped in trademark fashion with a sharp historical analogy, the state’s economy resembled postwar Germany. The figures are sobering. West Bengal’s state debt has ballooned to around Rs. 8 lakh crore during the TMC regime. Thousands of companies have relocated or curtailed operations over the years amid a hostile investment climate. The new BJP government has inherited not merely a fiscal challenge but a crisis of confidence. “We are left with a near-bankrupt treasury,” Dasgupta said. Equally troubling, in his view, is the erosion of trust among investors and entrepreneurs. Bengal’s relationship with business has been uneasy to say the least. First the long night of the Left, followed by the TMC’s anti-business, appeasement brand of politics has ensured that the scars of industrial disputes and land controversies remain fresh. In this dire situation, reviving private investment will require convincing businesses that Bengal has changed. In this respect, Dasgupta’s strengths may prove unexpectedly useful. Throughout his career he displayed an ability to engage with ideas, institutions and stakeholders across ideological divides. His early moves hint at a broader vision. Rather than confining pre-budget consultations to Kolkata, Dasgupta shifted the Finance Department’s attention to Siliguri in a moved suffused with deliberate symbolism. North Bengal has long complained of neglect by governments centred on the state’s southern districts. By engaging tea producers, agricultural interests, tourism operators and local business groups, the newly-minted finance minister appears eager to demonstrate that economic revival will not just be a Kolkata-centric project. That said, debt servicing consumes a substantial portion of state revenues. Welfare commitments are politically difficult to unwind and infrastructure deficits remain significant. While public intellectuals excel at identifying problems, governing demands compromises and the acceptance of imperfect solutions. Still, Bengal’s new finance minister possesses as fine an appreciation of history than any Indian politician around. He knows that states decline not just because economic mistakes but because they lose faith in their future. Restoring that confidence may be the central task of his tenure. For years Swapan Dasgupta chronicled India’s political story from the sidelines. Now he finds himself at the centre of one of its most consequential state-level experiments. Whatever the outcome of his tenure, few would deny that Bengal’s finances have acquired perhaps their most learned custodian in decades.

Asha Bhosle was once almost hit by a train

Mumbai: The legendary singer Asha Bhosle - who passed away here aged 92 on April 12 - once lived far from the arc lights of fame, in the distant north-west suburb of Borivali, in the early 1950s, when she was still a struggling artist finding her voice.

 

In those difficult days, she developed an enduring affection for the humble trains. When buses and taxis were beyond her means, Asha-tai relied on the Western Railway’s suburban locals, travelling across the city for her recording assignments.

 

Reaching the Borivali station itself was no small task. Faced with a long detour, she often chose a shortcut - a risky trudge across the railway tracks and it was this ‘trespassing’ that once almost cost her life.

 

Recalling the terrifying episode at a public function nearly 25 years ago, Asha-tai shuddered: “It was monsoon season and pouring. I had covered my head with a rain-coat and was walking on the tracks. Because of the heavy rains, I could barely hear anything. A steam engine of an Ahmedabad-bound train was coming from behind, whistling desperately - but I remained oblivious. I was almost a goner… Suddenly, there was either a push or I myself stumbled and fell off the tracks. Seconds later, the train rushed past me at full speed, still whistling furiously.”

 

She later described her survival from the brush with death as nothing short of a miracle – probably, an act of divine intervention. “Perhaps, the Almighty wanted me to sing more for all of you, so I survived…” she said, with her trademark mischievous laughter, reflecting on that little-known chapter of her early life.

 

Love for Trains

Despite the dangers, her love for trains only deepened. The multi-faceted crooner delightfully mimicked the “cooing” whistles of the old steam engines - “very pleasing,” she would say - and contrasted them with the “ghonn-ghonn” honks of modern-day trains, which she found far less charming.

 

Asha-tai vividly recreated the hustle-bustle of a typical Indian railway platform: “There are vendors chanting, ‘Garrram Batata Vada, Chaiiii…!’ The taste on railway platforms - you won’t find it even in big hotels. If you want to experience that ‘chatpata’ flavour on the move, then you must travel by trains,” she urged, breaking into imitations that left audiences in splits.

 

Emphasizing her love for the monsters on the railway tracks, she even sang a few lines from her own popular Marathi folk song, “Mamachya Gavala Jauya…” (1963), bringing alive the romantic spirit of India’s train journeys.

 

Asha-tai, an avid train traveller, said trains were more than transport - they were a window to India. “To know India, you must travel by trains. They are a melting pot of cultures, you meet people of different religions and from multiple states, they are full of love and teach us a lot in life. A person who has not travelled by trains has seen nothing,” she said.

“I have travelled all over India - starting in Third Class, then Second Class, and as I progressed, First Class. I made my children travel also in trains everywhere,” on her own romance with train journeys.

 

When admirers likened her voice to that of Goddess Saraswati, she gently nudged and corrected them: “There is no comparison. Where Goddess Saraswati sets her foot, perhaps a little dust has fallen on me…”

 

 

A Fragmented Past, A Family Reunited

Acclaimed singer Usha Mangeshkar, 90, retains only hazy memories of her elder sister Asha Bhosle’s Borivali years - a period that followed her elopement and marriage to Ganpatrao Bhosle in 1949. The couple lived through a difficult phase, cut off from the Mangeshkar family and it was in Borivali that their first son, Hemant, was born.

 

“Asha and Ganpat spent a few years there, but it was never really discussed openly in the family… I was too small to remember much,” Usha told ‘The Perfect Voice’.

 

Years later, Asha returned to the family fold, first to their Dadar home, where her daughter Varsha was born and her ‘naamkaran’ (naming) ceremony was celebrated with great joy by all. As her marriage with Ganpatro floundered on the rocks, Asha reached out to her elder estranged eldest sister, Lata Mangeshkar, leading to a reconciliation.

 

Around 1953, Asha-tai eventually moved back to the family residence in Walkeshwar, where her third son Anand was born. Usha Mangeshkar remembers that phase with warmth. By then, Lata Mangeshkar had become a towering figure in music, supported the entire family, and magnanimously purchased separate homes for her siblings in south Mumbai.

 

“Even Ganpatrao (died 1966) was also a very nice person. His children - Hemant, Varsha and Anand - were raised very well. Gradually, all of us began living together again as a happy family,” Usha said in an emotional voice.

 

 

 

 

 

 


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