Bengal seems to have lost another chance to emerge from the national backwaters. The ambitious project of building a south Asian university for the SAARC countries has been grabbed, yet again, by Delhi. The prime minister had proposed to set up such a centre of excellence at the 2005 Dhaka summit of the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation. A committee — based in New Delhi, of course — was formed after this and it has now decided that 250 acres of land a little outside Delhi will be made ready for the university, which will be in operation from July 2009. Strangely enough, the initial idea was to build it somewhere near Santiniketan in Bengal. But, apparently, Debendranath Tagore’s trust for Santiniketan has some sort of a technical problem with another university coming up close to Visva-Bharati. Nobody in Bengal seemed to care about, or know what to do with, such centuries-old red tape. So Delhi won again.

This is lamentable for two reasons. First, why should Delhi invariably stand in for India in every international forum? It happens in sports, as Mani Shankar Aiyar has recently pointed out after Delhi lost the bid for the Commonwealth Games. Mr Aiyar was one of the few people to be critical of Delhi’s self-importance in these matters, and put down India’s losing to its inability to project any other city as a prospective host. Nowhere else in the civilized world are capital cities inevitably singled out for plum projects or initiatives that lead to overall improvement for the host city. West Bengal’s passiveness in this matter is perhaps equally unfortunate. Whether one puts this to a fear of being perceived as parochial or sheer lassitude (leading to a potentially lethal provincialism) depends on the degree of one’s scepticism regarding Bengal’s ability in these matters. It might even be argued that Bengal’s management of its existing institutions of higher education is not particularly confidence-inspiring. The chief minister has his own lopsided and often clueless vision of development, confined mainly to the more superficial aspects of information technology. His political opponent is too busy squabbling and being contrary to think of higher education — or even to think at all. So turning up one’s nose at being ‘grabby’ becomes a priggish cover-up for a lack of initiative and enterprise the depths of which are dispiriting.