Food Movement of 1959- Documenting a Turning Point in the History of West Bengal (An Old and Rare Book)

Email

Whatsapp

Facebook

Pinterest

Twitter

Copy link

This is not a research publication in the conventional sense of the term. It is a collection of available documents on the historic 1959 Food Movement, which proved to be a turning point in the political history of West Bengal. On the one hand, it exposed the fallacy of the Food Policy pursued by the post-1947 Congress government in the province. At the same time, the popular upsurge occasioned an unprecedented unity of left and democratic forces that proved to be a precursor to the Left Front, which has been the ruling coalition in West Bengal for the last 26 years. Hopefully, this volume would serve as an important source-material for scholars working on the politics and culture of contemporary West Bengal.

1. The Context of the Movement

Famines had struck Bengal a number of times during the colonial period. If 1769-70 witnessed the first major famine in colonial Bengal, the 1943-44 catastrophe was the last in the series of such tragedies that struck pre-independent Bengal. The 'man-made famine that it was, the 1943-44 disaster took a toll of three million lives when the streets of Kolkata were littered with dead bodies and crowded with famished destitutes, Even before the people of Bengal could recover from this brutalisation of human consciousness, the province was afflicted by an orgy of Hindu-Muslim communal violence, starting with the Great Calcutta Killing of August 1946 and ending with the Noakhali outbreak almost a year later. Although the communal prelude to the country's independence was interspersed with doses of secular outbreaks like the Post-War upsurge and the Tebhaga Movement, the truncated settlement of 15 August 1947, which led to a massive influx of Hindu refugees from East Bengal, generated new social tensions in West Bengal. Already a congested city, Kolkata was plagued by an acute housing shortage, rising price-level, food scarcity, unemployment and epidemics. In social relationship between the inhabitants of West Bengal and the refugees from across the border, the 'us" and "they" syndrome was clearly manifest. Fortunately, however, unlike what happened in the Punjab, this fragmentation of social identity in West Bengal did not result in communalism gaining an entrenched space in post-1947 politics. This was largely possible because of the strength of left and democratic forces in the province. Not unnaturally, the temporary hegemony of communalism over ideology and politics in 1946-47 was substituted by a dialectical relationship between community and class in West Bengal, as was apparent from a series of Left-led successive protest upsurges - the three most significant ones being the Anti-Tram Fare Increase Movement of 1953, the movement against Bengal-Bihar merger of 1956 and the Teachers' Movement of 1957. The Food Movement of 1959 needs to be viewed in the context of this particular trend in protest politics.

During the decade following the Transfer of Power the people in West Bengal reeled under shortage of food and other essential commodities. The B. C. Roy-led Congress government in Bengal preferred to retain the War-time stringent restrictions on inter-state and inter-district movement of food grain without reformatting the feeble Public Distribution System. The total food output in West Bengal in 1948 was officially estimated to be 36 lakh tons, of which 31% was earmarked to be sold through Public Distribution System. But the government procurement figure of 4,67,000 tons was simply inadequate to maintain the rationing system. The situation rapidly deteriorated in the coming years, only 1,35,000, 1,70,000 and 2,70,000 tons of food grains having being distributed through the Public Distribution System respectively in 1950,1951 and 1952. Although a skeleton rationing system could be maintained in Kolkata and its neighbourhood, the people in the rural sector was largely left at the mercy of hoarders and blackmarketeers for access to food. The year 1953-54 recorded a good harvest. But the government did not utilise the opportunity to build up a public stock of rice. Instead, the government control on supply and distribution of food grain was abolished. This paved the way for a free play by hoarders to create an artificial scarcity of rice in the open market, enabling the blackmarketeers to reap enormous profit. Consequently, the price index of rice rose from 382 in December 1955 to 532 in December 1956. Returning from an extensive tour of the rural areas, Jyoti Basu of the then Communist Party of India (hereafter CPI) and leader of the Opposition in the Bengal Legislative Assembly, warned the Government of near-famine conditions in villages and demanded supply of rice at a subsidised price and gratuitous relief in worst-affected areas. The government adopted a rearguard action by enacting Anti-Profiteering Act and directed the rice mill owners to sell 25% of its stock and 25% of their regular product to the government at a fixed price to maintain supplies for ration shops. But in reality the government did not prove itself to be serious in procuring food from Bengal's approximately 550 rice mills on Government account. Consequently, the price fixation order for rice proved to be a farce, and what followed was a total withdrawal of stock from the open market in Kolkata and the rural areas by the beginning of January 1959." Accusing the Food Minister P.C. Sen for creating the food crisis in Bengal, Shri Snehangshu Kanta Acharya of the CPI described him in the Assembly as: (the) touch of death. Whatever he has touched, rice, cloth or kerosene has disappeared from the market"

By February 1959 rice was sold between Rs.28 and Rs.30 per maund in Kolkata, Howrah, Murshidabad, Hooghly, 24 Parganas and Midnapur. Blackmarketeering had become the order of the day. On 9 February the West Bengal Government admitted in a press note the "unsatisfactory supply of rice in the open market." The Food Minister even confessed difficulties in prosecuting the hoarders and black marketeers since they had allegedly issued cash memos quoting the price fixed by the government. But this was a mere technical point to explain the government's failure in implementing the price control mechanism. Instead, the artificial scarcity of rice was widely believed to be due to a nexus between the government and jotedars (rich peasants), rice mill owners and traders on whom the Congress was believed to be dependent for financial support." Inside the Legislative Assembly Jyoti Basu (CPI) in a hard-hitting speech exposed the government's failure to meet the food procurement target and check the unscrupulous practice of blackmarketeers. Interestingly, he prefaced his submission with a comparison between China and India, demonstrating how during the past decade while China had attained remarkable progress in agricultural productivity, Bengal was nowhere near agricultural self-sufficiency despite public investment in this realm.