Every Day St. Valentine's Day

Nowhere in India is poverty more painfully evident than in Calcutta, a begrimed slut of a city where 200,000 people sleep in the streets at night and an unskilled worker earns a pitiful two rupees (260) a day. India's largest metropolis (pop. 7,900,000), the capital of teeming West Bengal State, is also a place where artists and intellectuals thrive. Not surprisingly, in view of the intense pressures upon them, the all-consuming passion for this gifted and volatile people is politics. Put two Bengalis in a room and inevitably there is a heated political argument.

This week, as all of India goes to the polls to elect a new Lok Sabha (lower house of Parliament), 18 parties in West Bengal are also contesting 280 seats in the state legislature. Political infighting has reached a murderous frenzy, especially in Calcutta. In "the packed and pestilential town," as Rudyard Kipling described it, every day is St. Valentine's Day and every side street as potentially lethal as the Chicago garage where seven gangsters were slaughtered by rival hoods in a Feb. 14, 1929, massacre. Since March of last year, when Bengal's coalition government collapsed and presidential rule was imposed by New Delhi, nearly 1,500 political murders have been committed.

Labyrinthine Lanes. Territories are staked out like turf in gang wars. Hoodlums have hired out as political killers. Even police dare not venture into many of Calcutta's labyrinthine lanes. On any given day, the newspapers may list half a dozen murders. One of the most vicious was that of Hermanta Basu, 75, a veteran leader of the All-India Forward Bloc, who had his throat cut last month as he was getting into a taxi.

The most bitter feuding is between the Marxist Communist Party of India, abbreviated as the CPI (M), and a breakaway pro-Peking faction, the Marxist-Leninist Communist Party, or Naxalites. Their quarrel began in 1967 over land reform. The government had imposed a limit of 25 acres per person on rural land holdings, but many feudal aristocrats had got around the measure by parceling out land to armies of relatives. After court attempts to untangle the land-reform problem failed. Charu Mazumdar, a member of the Marxist group, instigated a peasant revolt in the Naxalbari region of West Bengal. The leaders of Mazumdar's own party, fearful that the peasant revolt would spread, sent in armed police to put down the uprising. At least eleven women and children were killed. "After that," as a Naxalite spokesman said, "nobody could stop the movement."

Since then, the Naxalites have moved into urban areas, establishing a large following among university students disenchanted with slim opportunities for employment. A guerrilla-type action group, they first moved to shut down schools and frequently attacked police. They denounced the current election as "treachery," put up no nominees of their own, and vowed to halt the balloting by knocking off candidates of other parties. So far, three have been killed, and the voting in their constituencies has been postponed.

One Ballot, One Bullet. To ensure orderly elections in West Bengal, the Delhi government has dispatched 30,000 army troops to supplement 70,000 police. Even so, one Marxist Communist Party member estimates that as many as 200 of his party may be killed on polling day. "They have written them off as expendable," explains another Bengali. Opponents of the Marxist Communists warn: "A ballot for the CP1 (M) is a bullet for you." Marxist Communist Chief Jyoti Basu, meanwhile, has promised that if his party is returned to power it will crush the Naxalites. Anticipating a bloodbath, the Naxalites have been gathering arms and ammunition and have organized their own underground hospitals to care for their wounded. Whoever wins, Calcutta looks like a loser.

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