President of India -Somnath Chatterjee !!!

I have tried to steer away from politics in this blog (though I do have a strong views on the same )....barring some posts on reservations ...this blog has been apolitical. However when I came back from work today , an article in the Mumbai mirror provoked me to write this post .....which has political content and lashes out at Somnath Chatterje's candidature for the President of India .

The Context

In order to understand this post in its true spirit it is imperative for the reader to have a context of West Bengal and its polity. I was brought up in Kolkata ,.....we migrated to the city in 1977 and I lived there till 1995 . In these 18 long years , I have many experiences with the politics of the state -the good ones being :

caste free society

empowerment of villagers

the implementation of the land ceiling

However with this came trade union aggression , lock outs , strikes , depletion of employment opportunities ,scientific rigging , an aggressive and arrogant CPI(M) cadre etc . It did not take the Left many years to decimate the economic fabric of the state .When I qualified as a CA in 1995 , I found it very difficult to find a reasonable job in Kolkata and soon had to migrate out of the city.....today as an expat Bengali (Probasi Bangali) and with the current state of economic progress , I reckon the doors of the city are closed to me for ever ....

The CPI(M) and Somnath

Somnath Chatterjee, the MP from Bolpur was the Chairman of the West Bengal Industrial Development Corporation (WBIDC) during the tenure of Jyoti Basu. I will never forget those days , when almost everyday, leading Kolkata based newspapers would carry stories of innumerable overseas trips that Mr Chatterjee made to promote FDI in West Bengal. His penchant for signing Memorandum of Understanding (MOU's), many of which never came to fruition earned him the nickname Mou-da. The industrial climate was so despondent that industries closed down ............Dunlop, ICI , Bharat Metal Box, Hind Motor ...could not withstand the rage of the communist labor unions . It would be fair to say that our Presidential candidate was a one of the key facilitators of this regressive process , West Bengal once a leading industrial state was converted seamlessly to an industrial waste land courtesy people like Jyoti Basu , Pramode Dasgupta and of course Mr Chatterjee included . It is ironical that the current Chief Minister says that the process of industrialization of the state is irreversible .......building a few shopping malls in Kolkata is not exactly industrialization.

Here is why according to me Somnath does not qualify for the job at Rastrapati Bhavan

a) He represents a political interest group which has always worked against the development of this nation , in the garb of inclusive development the Indian Left has been a show stopper to the nation's development and neither have they been able to deliver as is evident in West Bengal , a state that they have been in power for about 3 decades now .Can we have a President from a political party which is not exactly buoyant with the 8%+ growth that we hope to achieve as a nation

b) His track record as WBIDC Chief is appalling and if that man could replicate the same performance as a President , our national anthem can well be " God Save India" !!

c) His views on Judiciary ,post the Supreme Court's stay on the OBC reservation issue , mirror the myopia of his party's top boss Sitaram Yechury , the least said about it is better......It truly amazes me that a lawyer by profession, Somnath has not learnt to value the independence of the judiciary.

d) In 2005, our pompous Mr Chatterjee was caught in a controversy over his statement on the Supreme Court orders related to the vote of confidence in the Jharkhand Assembly. He accused the Supreme Court of encroaching on the rights of the legislature

e) On a lighter note , as a President he would only go down well only with a Bangladeshi audience (courtesy his English with a thick Bengali accent ..) , I fear that his global trips ,(given his love for international travel -as displayed during his stint in the WBIDC) would be great occasions to erode the growing brand India

In conclusion

Have there been Presidents who have been worse than Somnath -the answer is a resounding yes , but the larger question to ask "can we afford a person like Somnath as the Head of State at a juncture of our history when the nation is poised for unprecedented growth" ...definitely not ..what say you ?