India is looking east again with Calcutta the spearhead of a thrusting new drive. That is gratifying for a city that consoles itself for the loss of its capital role with the myth that Lenin placed it on the global revolutionary trail between Peking and Paris. All the more reason for saving the burst of energy from the inertia and worse that have destroyed Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee’s brave new ventures.

Last weekend’s Bimstec seminar — organized by the external affairs ministry, the Centre for Studies in International Relations and Development and the Indian Chamber of Commerce — was a curtain-raiser to this week’s summit in New Delhi. It was also intended to press Calcutta’s claim to host the seven-nation organization’s proposed permanent secretariat. A secretariat is life insurance because civil servants tenaciously protect their jobs: a wobbly Commonwealth was thought to have been rescued from extinction in 1965 when Arnold Smith was appointed the first secretary-general. But it did not pass unnoticed at the Bimstec seminar that the seat reserved in the centre of the dais for Sabyasachi Sen, West Bengal’s principal secretary, commerce and industries department, who was scheduled to deliver a “Special Address”, remained empty. Pranab Mukherjee came; so did Bhattacharjee. The principal secretary’s non-appearance was not explained. His “Special Address” was not read out by someone else or circulated, as is usual when a speaker is unavoidably absent.

A brilliant splash of acrobatic dancing two days later, followed by a superb Chinese dinner, was marred only by the tedious ramblings of West Bengal dignitaries. “The Evening of Colourful Yunnan”, as it was called, celebrated by Yunnan’s provincial governor, Qin Guangrong, and a team of performers and trade and tourist officials, recalled another peculiarly Calcutta hazard. One of the three memoranda signed that evening was for Kolkata-Kunming cooperation that Ma Siwei, China’s quietly pushing consul-general, expects to blossom into a “sister city” relationship. One hopes this will mean more than our political and bureaucratic luminaries whizzing off every so often at the taxpayer’s expense to disport themselves among the lakes and hills of Yunnan. This is not a wild charge. A former mayor suggested to the American consul-general that Calcutta should be twinned with San Francisco. When the surprised American replied that Calcutta already had a twin in Odessa (not that it’s ever done any good to anybody), the mayor explained that he needed a reason to go officially to California where his son lived.

The two other memoranda signed that evening between tourism authorities in Yunnan, India and West Bengal may yield more. Travellers from all over India may not flock to Dum Dum to catch the China Eastern Airlines. Nor will its three weekly flights immediately disgorge hordes of Chinese tourists. But Singapore, now Calcutta’s favourite foreign destination, can expect tough competition as Calcuttans discover the novelty of a Chinese holiday and business houses make Kunming the prize for promising salesmen.

An August seminar on Indian and Chinese planning exposed another anomaly as speakers gushed about restoring Chinatown with gates and statues, fantasies that were repeated during the Yunnan evening. Those who remember Chinatown’s glory and Henry Au of the Nanking restaurant with his annual tributes to Bhaiya (Maharaja Jagaddipendra Narayan) of Cooch Behar (I caught only the tail end of that era) know there can be no return along history’s one-way street. Chinatown has nothing left to restore. Having watched Chinatowns emerge from nothing in Manchester and London, I know that physical extravaganza is an expression of the hard work and success of a growing and increasingly prosperous Chinese population with the surplus wealth to create a gaudy new environment. Calcutta has travelled in the opposite direction with its 50,000 Chinese dwindling to perhaps 3,000, and those banished to Tangra.

The exuberance of the August seminar recalled 1962 when not a single Chinese hairdresser would willingly participate in an AIR documentary on Chinatown. Eventually, Special Branch lined up a beauty-salon owner in its headquarters! AIR then complained that my interviews and music from Tangra’s Chinese schools would feed enemy propaganda because the teachers were Taiwan-educated. The purpose was to show that though Calcutta’s Japanese businessmen plastered JAPAN stickers on car windscreens for safety, no one was more happily content here than mainland Chinese expatriates.

Too many Indians and Chinese visit one another’s country now for such games. Business is booming. Mao Siwei is exultant that Sino-Indian trade will exceed US-India trade whether or not India buys Boeing aircraft. India’s burgeoning middle class provides a bottomless market for inexpensive Chinese consumer goods. Even our gods — attractive and affordable plastic figures of Ganesa or Lakshmi — and rakshabandhan bracelets are manufactured in China. Trade will continue to forge ahead without (or despite) West Bengal and in spite also of the background rumblings of the last few days. That’s mainly for the record, to establish what a great concession the Chinese are making if and when Zhou Enlai’s old proposal to exchange Arunachal Pradesh for Aksai Chin materializes. Mukherjee’s reference to the “challenge” of “a new China” that “seeks to further her interests more aggressively than in the past” is more — but not all that much more — significant. It is less warning of a hard new line at the expense of commercial bridge-building than articulation of the underlying rationale of strategies like closer ties with the US, Japan and the Association of South-east Asian Nations and its extended family, which includes Australia and New Zealand.

Bimstec, “a poor man’s club” to quote Jayanta Sarkar at the seminar, is the problem and not only because its “economies are not totally immune to the spillovers of the ongoing global meltdown”, to repeat the CSIRD/ICC’s Bimstec cooperation report’s massive understatement. Bimstec countries have little sense of community and trade more with countries outside the region. Connectivity is extraordinarily poor. There were hopes that the highly popular 2004 India-Asean car rally, when 60 cars covered 8,000 kilometres in six countries under the slogan “Networking People and Economies”, would become a regular event, but it proved a flash in the pan. Jaswant Singh’s Mekong-Ganga plan is another unfulfilled promise.

Ranjit Gupta, India’s ambassador in Bangkok, tells how New Delhi poured cold water on his proposal for an association of countries fringing the Bay of Bengal to develop the Northeast, which was bristling with rebel movements, and facilitate cooperation with Bangladesh under a multilateral umbrella. Later, Thailand’s deputy prime minister, Supachai Panitchpakdi, a respected economist who became director-general of the World Trade Organization, took up the idea that in 1997 became the Bangladesh, India, Myanmar, Sri Lanka and Thailand Economic Cooperation forum. When Nepal and Bhutan joined, the name was cleverly changed to Bay of Bengal Initiative for Multi-Sectoral Technical and Economic Cooperation so as to retain the old acronym.

The CSIRD/ICC’s report talks of a customs union, free-trade agreement and economic union. Mukherjee says Bimstec should create a “regional architecture”. Bhattacharjee expects much from the Asian Development Bank. With membership overlapping, Bimstec can link the moribund South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation and the somewhat more active Asean. There is need for a concerted effort to counter terrorism, tsunami and narcotics trafficking. Bhattacharjee calls for a kind of South-South cooperation against hunger, disease and illiteracy, manifestations of the poverty that is the most daunting challenge of all.

Sounding like Lee Kuan Yew, he thunders that “globalization is a must.” Industrialization certainly is, for a poor man’s club can be only a transitional description. Prosperity alone can breathe life into dead Chinatown. It might bring back the Jews, Armenians, Greeks, Anglo-Indians and others who fled to escape Calcutta’s suffocating poverty. Industry would justify expectations of a dynamic role in respect of both China and Bimstec. But as Singur highlighted, the hapless chief minister is not his own master. He cannot fight his political opponents if his own mayors and secretaries serve him so badly.