7 min read May 7, 2026 07:08 PM IST First published on: May 7, 2026 at 07:08 PM IST Howrah was once called the Sheffield of Asia. The jute mills along the Hooghly were the largest concentration of organised industry in the subcontinent. Calcutta was India’s commercial capital. In 1950-51, Bengal produced roughly 27 per cent of the country’s manufacturing output. I knew that Calcutta. Before I joined the foreign service, one of my first jobs was at Hindustan Lever in the city, and a young man arriving in Calcutta could be sure he had come to where the country’s commerce was conducted. The lights stayed on. The trams ran. The companies hired. What had taken a century to build was dismantled by something more deliberate than economic mismanagement. The Left Front took office in 1977 and held it for 34 years. Beneath the rhetoric of the working class, an organised shadow state took root.…