What West Bengal missed yesterday, it gets back tomorrow. Contrast this with the famous declaration of Gopal Krishna Gokhale — what Bengal thinks today, India thinks tomorrow — and there is a measure of the decline the state and the region have suffered. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, West Bengal set the agenda for the entire country. After 1947, even when West Bengal was given the opportunity of participating in the process of setting the national agenda, it spurned it. In 1957, an offer was made to transform what is now SSKM Hospital into an institute similar to the All India Institute of Medical Sciences in New Delhi. The then chief minister of West Bengal, Bidhan Chandra Roy, turned down the offer. He wanted to build a medical research institute in Calcutta on the state’s own resources rather than with Central sponsorship. The rest, as the saying goes, is history, since West Bengal got nothing. This bit of the past comes back to haunt the people of West Bengal when they read the announcement that an AIIMS-like institute will be established in Raiganj. West Bengal is cast in the role of a laggard, trying to catch up with New Delhi.

Another example of West Bengal rejecting with vehemence something that was offered to the state on a silver platter is the Nano project of the Tatas. After a long drought the Nano project had come as a welcome burst of investment in manufacturing with the promise of many ancillary fruits. But a mindless opposition by a political party forced the Tatas to move the project from West Bengal to Gujarat. It would be falsifying history if the responsibility for this loss were to be laid solely at the door of the concerned political party. Events preceding and following the withdrawal of the Tatas revealed a substantial body of educated opinion in West Bengal to be opposed to, or suspicious of, the transfer of agricultural land to industry. The net result of this was to make West Bengal an observer in the race for industrialization which is being won by other states. West Bengal gasps in the race and looks back to the past.

It is possible that the past, especially statements like the one made by Gokhale, has made the people of West Bengal smug. They think the rest of India owes them something. Perhaps, there is a psychological propensity among the people of West Bengal to destroy themselves and their history. What else would explain the rejection in 1957 of an AIIMS-like institute or the Nano project in 2008? What else would explain the steady erosion of work culture under the aegis of irresponsible trade unionism? What else would explain the ruin of health services and educational institutions under the red flag? History will ask these questions of the people of this state, and all that they will say, without a hint of shame or embarrassment, is that they will get it all back in the distant future.