The Cloud

South Calcutta is an urban jungle of plaster, stone and faded palms, where reeking slums shelter ten people in a room, and ugly Victorian buildings rise beside modern terraced tenements. It is also a political jungle, inhabited by a million restive refugees, students, clerks, stevedores, mill hands, shopkeepers, petty bankers and lawyers. The lords of this jungle have been the three Bose brothers.

Most prominent of the three was fiery chauvinist Subhas Chandra Bose. He came out of South Calcutta's anti-British underground to go to the presidency of the Indian National Congress in 1938; then he broke with Gandhi, joined the Japanese to fight the British, met death in a Japanese plane in 1945.

His elder brother, Satish Chandra Bose, a quieter and steadier Congressman, was South Calcutta's delegate to the West Bengal Assembly until his death last year.

The third brother, Sarat Chandra Bose, now 60, fat and moonfaced, was Minister of Works, Mines and Power until the Congress in 1946 gave his cabinet job to a Moslem Leaguer. In a huff, Sarat Bose quit the Congress, organized his own Socialist Republican Party. He was in Switzerland, recuperating from a mild heart attack, when a by-election was scheduled for his brother Satish's legislative seat. Promptly he declared himself a candidate. Onto his bandwagon leaped opportunist Communists, disgruntled Socialists and rabid Hindu Communalists--all united against an old Congress Party warhorse, Suresh Das.

Bombs & Bombast. The campaign began just before the monsoon. Dhoti-clad Calcuttans left their steaming houses, clustered in the streets to drink lime squash, chew pan (made from the betel nut), and talk politics until tempers gave way and fists flew. Hoodlum gangs raced through the city, pasting posters, tearing down opposition signs, breaking up each other's soapbox meetings with shoes, brickbats, incendiary oil bombs, bursting bottles of nitric acid. A city ordinance banned loudspeakers, so electioneers shouted instead through megaphones, day & night.

Through all the sound & fury, Candidate Bose remained in Switzerland, rallying his supporters with long-distance statements: "Black-marketeering, profiteering, corruption, favoritism and nepotism stalk the land. There is resort to police terrorism on the slightest pretext. The Congress' name today is mud." Congress was split by petty quarrels, weakened by a 10% rise in food prices during the past year, and harassed by a Communist gang-up with Bose.

The West Bengal government had outlawed the Communists, but it could not outmaneuver them. "At a Bose rally I attended," reported TIME Correspondent Robert Lubar last week, "no party emblems were displayed and no one as much as whispered the word Communist. But the tenor of the meeting was clear. It was dominated by a huge, crude painting ridiculing Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru. It showed him wearing a jeweled crown and a uniform with exaggerated epaulets. Under the portrait was scrawled: 'Down with British imperialism!'

"When I wandered up, a crowd encircled me. One bespectacled youth poked a pugnacious finger in my collar and said: 'Will you tell your American friends that we reject the plans of murderer Truman and American imperialists to start another war so they can use cheap soldiers of India to crush Soviet democracy?' Breathlessly he spun out the usual cliches, and wound up: 'Nehru is a Fascist reactionary who smokes cigarettes with Churchill and offers British warmongers the sweet mangoes and sweet tongues of India,' "

Bullets & Ballots. The party line reached Calcutta's jails. Several hundred Communist prisoners staged hunger strikes and other demonstrations, built barricades of furniture, hurled brickbats at police, drew gunfire in return. Four prisoners were killed, 33 prisoners and 67 policemen injured.

The jail riots brought up Congress big guns. Prime Minister Nehru, who seldom intervenes in local elections, sent a message endorsing faithful Suresh Das, decrying Bose's tactics: "I fail to see how unbalanced attacks on Congress and destructive criticism can help the country in any way." Deputy Prime Minister Sardarj Patel was blunter: "China, Malaya and Burma have all a lesson to teach us. If we fail to learn it, Bengal would be the first to suffer."

Last week the election returns were in. Remote-control Rabble-Rouser Bose, still in Switzerland, had won hands down--19,030 votes to 5,780 for Das. Congress leaders were plainly worried. Nehru blamed Congressmen for losing their fervor and for self-seeking--"If we cannot revitalize Congress we must dissolve it in a dignified manner rather than allow it to disintegrate by stages." A Red cloud, though not yet bigger than a man's hand, had appeared on the Congress horizon.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.