From the Grand to the Taj and the Great Eastern thrown in between, not to mention the journalist-friendly Park and the sundry guesthouses of central Kolkata, all are at full capacity. Not one room is available; the world seems to have descended on the megapolis by the Hooghly to catch a last glimpse of West Bengal at the crossroads. Either way, it’s history in the making, whether the 34-year-old Guinness recordworthy Left rule gets an eighth extension, or if the people finally throw the Red yoke away after decades of use (and misuse), as is being widely expected.
May 13 will be a red letter day for the state.
They’re coming in by the droves to watch this mother of an election— political analysts, academics, awardwinning writers, perennial electionwatchers, freeloaders, activists, advertising gurus, middle-rung entrepreneurs (waiting to cut the big deal), market surveyors and downright moneybags.
From writers Ruchir Joshi, Taslima Nasreen and Aatish Taseer to more businesslike types, they’re all on the streets of poll-bound Bengal.
For the outsider who’s come for the thrill, there’s a mela ambience (like fashion shows on the sly; a top Trinamool Congress politician was to walk the ramp but pulled out at the last minute as Mamata Banerjee felt it would be an inappropriate association at election time). An ad filmmaker who’s put together an animation film for the TMC chuckled: “They didn’t have much of a political vision, no clear idea of what they want.” So with some new age Rabindrasangeet and a dash of Mamata’s rhymes, he and his composer hurriedly put together a concoction, making a neat packet for themselves in the process! For the insider, therefore, there’s a kind of cynical anticipation of an unknown, untested and even a turbulent near-future. In fact, a sense of inevitability makes the air heavy. Poet-novelist Nabarun Bhattacharya, who’s had a long association with everything ‘Left’, says he’s somewhat horrified by the “spectacle” that is being created for an outcome from which he has “no expectation”. Describing the 34-year Left rule as a “colossal waste”, he says, with resignation, that the “people may go for change”. The only son of litterateurs Mahasweta Devi and Bijon Bhattacharjee, Nabarun grew up in a Left milieu where his father virtually provided the cultural matrix for the undivided Communist party in Bengal before being ejected from it. His mother, of course, after dabbling in far-Left politics in the 70s, has turned out to be one of the biggest icons behind the Mamata phenomenon since the Singur-Nandigram struggle.
At the grassroots level too, there’s almost an underlying pathos and circumspection—a folk-level ideation on where the Left went wrong. Brij Bhushan Bhawal, a tea-shop owner near Diamond Harbour, said just minutes before a Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee meeting, “Even if Mamata’s able to run the government for only two years, people are going for her, for change. It’s time to give the Left a jolt.
The voter always retains the right to bring them back—and probably will.” Everyone intuitively understands what happened in the last 34 years, but academics have coined succinct metaphors that capture it. One key idea is “partycracy”, minted by social scientist Partha Chatterjee, who’s written the two most incisive books on Bengal’s politics. He zooms in on the two path-breaking initiatives the Left Front took in the early years of its rule—under Jyoti Basu’s chief ministership and Promode Dasgupta- Harekrishna Konar’s joint stewardship of the CPI(M)—which sustained it for the next three decades and, ironically, had the script of its decline written into it.
The twin pillars on which the Left built an edifice that came to be known as ‘the impregnable red fort’ were land reform and panchayati raj. According to Chatterjee, these would have been truly socially revolutionary policies but were subverted from the beginning by a kind of party stranglehold that developed around them. The implementer was not so much the government, but the party structure, striking roots deep into the villages. It became like a cartel that controlled all aspects of Bengal life, from birth to death, and everything in between. As one CPI(M) old-timer admitted, Basu allowed the party to dictate policies and run away with the implementation as well.
The late Konar (1915-74), one of the most respected CPI(M) leaders of the old stock, has been credited with the blueprint of Operation Barga—the redistribution of land among landless, small and marginal farmers. Along with its implementation in the early 80s, the Left decided to rid the state of all its elitism by doing away with English education and the congregation of frontline academics in Kolkata’s few colleges. This was to give students from the rural belt a leg-up—“equal opportunity” and the vernacular-dependent an extra edge in the state’s competitive exams. (In subsequent years, the toppers in school board exams suddenly featured more rural faces than from Kolkata’s elite schools.) It was despite Basu’s misgiving that Dasgupta rammed through the ‘no- English-till-middle-school’ policy.
This move marked the middle-class Bengali’s first disillusionment with the Left Front (which they’d valued till then for delivering them from the Congress’s police-goonda-raj).
But things would get worse. In its blueprint-dominated thinking, the government soon rejected the whole urban Bengali class as “expendable bourgeois baggage” and obsessed over the rural belt. Interestingly, Mamata Banerjee’s Trinamool began its slow rise to power from the urban belt; Kolkata and its suburbs continue to be her stronghold.
Empowered by land reform and panchayati raj (one of the first states to actually do it), rural Bengal became the CPI(M)’s monopoly vote-bank which brought it back to power year after year. Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee’s hurriedly initiated neo-industrialisation policy—a virtual reversal of its own old focus on the agrarian economy exemplified by Singur- Nandigram-Nayachar—breached its own rural fortress. Among middle and small peasantry, which turned against the CPI(M) in fear of losing their land, were Muslim farmers who too had benefited from land distribution. It’s the rural Muslims who had sustained the Left all these years, and it’s their disaffection that gave momentum to the decline. (The Sachar report, an eye-opener, happened in between.) With the Congress having abdicated the opposition space long ago, Mamata filled the vacuum—and became the successful entrepreneur of the anti-Left dissent. It’s a curious reversal.
As Bhattacharjee candidly admits, Mamata, who fashions herself as the “real left”, actually treads the path that was abandoned by the Left in its quest for power. The Left had long given up its militant-disruptive (often termed negative) politics of pre-1977—it became the parliamentary Left, became the establishment, and lost something essential of its old character.
The rural angst wasn’t fuelled by the fear of land loss alone. The CPI(M)’s absolute monopoly (the “Alimuddin raj”) was itself an issue. Says Bishwanath Mandol in Maoist-affected Garbeta, Midnapore, “The party took over all our lives. It became the village elder, the village court and the superpanchayat, all rolled into one. Without the permission of the party and its local office-bearer, you couldn’t organise a community festival. A villager couldn’t build an extension of his house without paying the party tax.” The consolidation of power in the hands of a few party supporters created an unequal society, a parallel equation of haves and have-nots. Says Kabir Suman, the rebel TMC MP and lyrist-singer, “Those who were with the Left prospered visibly—one who had a cycle would progress to a motorcycle, those on bikes moved to cars. The rest of the village continued to inhabit mud houses, but the CPI(M) rank and file built pucca houses.” This first turned the villagers against each other and then against the local CPI(M) toughie.
It was a new kind of erosion of natural democratic interaction at the village level. Literacy did improve, but the farm economy was insufficient to sustain the growing population.
Years on, Buddhadeb was left with a bankrupt exchequer and no option but to knock on the doors of big industry to create jobs for the neo-literate new generation. Ashok Mitra, economist and former finance minister, says: “The Left made many mistakes, lost many opportunities, especially the one that was offered to them in 2004 when the 62 Left MPs became crucial to the formation of a government in New Delhi. But there’s no alternative to the Left in Bengal—only lumpen raj.” A culture czar and public intellectual, Samik Bandyopadhyay, whom Buddhadeb once referred to as his political mentor in his Presidency College days, says what is happening now is a reflection of CPI(M)’s failure “to instil among the people any sense of political sensibility and education.
The party made quick payments to the people and in the process created huts of vested interests.” All it needed was a concerted media backlash for the edifice to develop cracks.
Leading Kolkata lawyer and one of the founder-members of the RSP, Prithwas Bagchi, agrees but adds, “The law of civilisation is ‘nothing succeeds like success’. If Mamata manages to come out a giant-killer, that momentum may carry her through—policy or no policy.”