Poverty and Harsh Critics Surround Calcutta’s Island of Communism : India: Even the party’s enemies admit it will continue to rule West Bengal state for some time. Its strength is an ability to maintain law and order.

Along Calcutta’s main north-south boulevard, long since renamed Lenin Street, maimed beggars live beside open sewers on sidewalks crumbling from neglect. Corpses often lie for days before they’re collected, and the smell of rotting trash is everywhere.

These are street-level images in Calcutta, an urban nightmare of 15 million people with a worldwide reputation for poverty. Just above them, on the gritty walls of storefronts and office buildings of Lenin Street, are other, lesser known symbols of this enigmatic metropolis: hundreds of hammer-and-sickle emblems, hand-painted in black and red.

A large statue of Karl Marx adorns a nearby neighborhood. A bronzed Friedrich Engels stands on the other side of town. V.I. Lenin’s bust stands at the end of the street named in his memory. And in a prominent park in the heart of downtown, a life-size bust of Ho Chi Minh, Vietnam’s revolutionary hero, is the most recent emblem of a phenomenon becoming increasingly rare: an island of Communist political rule.

Unveiled in January by Indian Prime Minister Chandra Shekhar in a major state ceremony attended by Vietnamese war hero Gen. Vo Nguyen Giap, the white-marble bust officially commemorates Ho Chi Minh’s 100th birthday anniversary.

In a world where Communist regimes have fallen like ideological dominoes during the past year or so, the new statue is a reminder of the staying power of Marx, Engels, Lenin and even Ho Chi Minh in this, one of the world’s last bastions of largely satisfied Communist politics.

Despite growing challenges and popular criticism in the wake of communism’s fall in Eastern Europe, the Marxist-Leninists who have run Calcutta and the surrounding Indian state of West Bengal for the past 13 years apparently have resisted the political influence of events elsewhere in the world.

Even its harshest critics say that the Communist Party of India-Marxist, which has won three consecutive state elections since 1977 at the head of a Marxist-Leninist coalition, say it is not likely to lose in the next state balloting, scheduled for 1992.

“Unless they mess up things very badly, there’s no way you can vote the Communists out of here,” said Tarun Ganguly, a journalistic specialist on the political left for the Telegraph, Calcutta’s English-language daily newspaper.

“First, there is a basic difference between a Communist government having come to power through revolution and a Communist Party coming to power through elections,” Ganguly said. “Also, it is only the state government that is Communist. They have never ruled at the center (national level), and it’s unlikely they ever will. This attracts the Bengali, who traditionally is anti-New Delhi (the nation’s capital).

“And basically, this is not a Communist Party at all,” Ganguly continued. “It’s largely a middle-class party dominated by well-to-do intellectuals. We call them the Bengali Babus. “

Members of the party’s Central Committee differed sharply with Ganguly, at least on some points.

Anil Biswas, a Central Committee member and editor of the party’s slick, Bengali-language newspaper that boasts a daily circulation of 117,000, does not dispute the economic backgrounds of the party’s leaders.

“Yes, we have come from middle-class families,” he said. “But we are trying our best to become real Communists.”

Biswas added that the party also is trying desperately to minimize local repercussions from what he called “the catastrophic situation of socialism in the world today.”

“The Indian Communists want to take a lesson from Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, from a negative point of view, and we want to avoid their mistakes,” he said, conceding that the party has not emerged unscathed from the anti-Communist backlash elsewhere in the world.

“For example, there have been some rumors here that the party has been alienated from the people and that it has taken certain favors from the government--just like in Eastern Europe,” Biswas admitted.

Among the most articulate and potentially influential critics of the Communists to emerge in recent months is Jatin Chakraborty, until recently a Cabinet minister in the state government and one of the founding members of India’s Revolutionary Socialist Party, a Marxist party belonging to the ruling Communist-led coalition in West Bengal.

Chakraborty, 79, was expelled from the Revolutionary Socialists and forced to resign as state minister of public works after leveling unprecedented public charges of corruption against the family of the Communists’ charismatic leader, Jyoti Basu, West Bengal’s chief minister. Chakraborty charged that Basu had helped push through official concessions for the business of Basu’s son.

In recent weeks, though, Chakraborty has selected a more symbolic focus for his criticism: the same emblem that the Communist leadership is now using to bolster its image--the new Ho Chi Minh statue.

“The Communist Party has no moral right to install this statue,” he declared in an interview. “This government is corrupt to the core. There are (electric) power cuts every day. Prices are going up. Nepotism is rampant.

“They are using this Ho Chi Minh statue simply to divert the attention of the people from the more pressing problems of the day. Ho Chi Minh is a hero to us all, no doubt. He is a champion of the cause of the oppressed over the colonialists and neocolonialists. But Ho Chi Minh was a simple and honest man, who even chose to sleep on the floor of the state palace when he visited Calcutta years ago. This is no longer the image of our corrupt party leadership here.”

Chakraborty, who had suggested erecting a statue of Indian leftist leader Jai Prakash Narayan on the spot now occupied by Ho’s bust, is trying to organize all the dissident forces within the state’s Communist ranks into what he calls a “third front” to challenge the party Establishment in next year’s elections. At the heart of the campaign are the same objections to Communist rule voiced by dissidents in Eastern Europe and the Soviet republics.

Chakraborty has had a large and increasingly sympathetic audience for his campaign, especially in metropolitan Calcutta, where the Communists have never been as strong as they are among West Bengal’s rural masses, who make up 80% of the state’s voting population.

A maze of urban blight and frustration even in the best of times, this former capital of British colonial India grew haphazardly into what now ranks high among the world’s most populous cities. On top of everything else, it has been beset by a series of debilitating trade union strikes in recent months, making Calcutta virtually uninhabitable to the outsider.

Work stopped three months ago, for example, on a modern subway system that was billed as a panacea for the city’s mind-boggling crush of traffic--a chaotic array of ancient streetcars, battered buses, taxis, rickshaws, cows, goats, pigs and hundreds of thousands of pedestrians that hopelessly clog Calcutta’s narrow streets on a daily basis.

Subway workers walked off the job after having dug 12 miles of the subway system’s path through the heart of the city and suburbs but before covering up the 10-foot-deep, 30-foot-wide swath. Now, after monsoon rains, that path is like a giant open sewer. Water from it seeps into the foundations of hundreds of buildings, threatening them with collapse, and it furnishes a massive breeding ground for malaria-carrying mosquitoes.

Bread lines have formed every day for several weeks since bakery workers walked off the job in a pay dispute. Dairy workers also are on strike.

And the Communist government, which built its power base by creating and backing the unions now on strike, cannot effectively intervene: to break a strike would betray the party’s staunchest members.

These crises have produced a lot of anti-Communist grumbling, particularly among harried commuters, who suffer most, and during evenings in the pubs, where members of the public seek a momentary refuge from the chaos.

“I hear many people saying, especially since the fall of the governments of Eastern Europe: ‘My God, all these years, and now I feel like I’ve just been mouthing empty (Marxist) slogans,’ ” journalist Ganguly said.

Not everything is negative for the Communists, however. The Communists earn praise, for example, for somehow maintaining a remarkable degree of law and order against this city’s seemingly anarchistic backdrop. While much of the rest of India was witnessing Hindu-Muslim religious violence that claimed well over 1,000 lives during the past several months, not one life was lost in such clashes in Calcutta or West Bengal.

“The one thing everyone respects here is their (the Communists’) ability to avert communal (religious) clashes,” Ganguly said. “In a melting pot like Calcutta, where Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs and Christians all live on top of each other, this really is one of the most crucial issues. In this way, the Communists are the only ones who have succeeded.”

And that success, bolstered by the Bengalis’ abiding attitude of opposition toward whomever is ruling in the national capital of New Delhi, stands as perhaps the most important reason for the Communists’ continued longevity.

“Bengal is nothing at all like the outside world, and the Bengali is like no one else anywhere in the world,” Ganguly said. “So, on the surface, I would say the party is all right and that they’ll be around for a long time to come.

“But anything can happen. It may just be that the same pattern is developing here that happened elsewhere, but that it, like everything else here, is just taking much, much more time.”

Fineman, who is based in India, is now on assignment in Jordan.