WEST BENGAL: Between the binary of a ladaku neta (the war-like Mamata Banerjee) and the PM’s fort-destroyer act, complete with taunts and slogans, there’s another figure who’s also in the contest quite strangely, in his absence. He is Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee.
The 77-year-old former West Bengal CM’s failing health especially respiratory trouble in this Covid season has kept him away from the public stage. All that has come from him by way of intervention in this election season is a statement. He shot a single arrow, talking of “the unravelling of the Singur-Nandigram conspiracy”, and the irony of “the conspirators now fighting each other” in the silence of the graveyard.
Where did he find ‘silence’ in this deafeningly high-decibel contest? What he refers to is the silence the lack of any discussion, amidst this very personalised campaign on what he believes to be the real issue. That is, the derailed industrialisation of Bengal.
His own attempt to reverse that, beginning from Singur-Nandigram, was a dark and fated one: it had cost Buddhadeb his government and led to his ignominious exit from electoral politics. He had even lost the Jadavpur seat to his former chief secretary, Manish Gupta, by a margin of over 16,000 votes. That was in 2011, when Mamata swept into power on what was called a mandate for paribartan (change).
Ten years down the line, the BJP is riding on the idea of asol paribartan (real change). If that sounds like an echo, there are reasons why it resonates. They are the same reasons from a decade ago. Jobless youth are the most common sight everywhere in the state even though Bengal’s unemployment, if CMIE data is to be believed, is less than that of Haryana, Rajasthan or Bihar. Indeed, at 17.4% as per the CMIE 2020 annual survey, Bengal’s unemployment is even less than the national average. But it’s nearly double compared to neighbouring Odisha and Assam’s 9.6%. Take the group of youth, all graduates, whiling away their time around a tea stall outside one of Bishnupur’s famous terracotta temples. None of them have jobs or any hope of getting one anytime soon. They debate over what ‘Buddhababu’ wanted to do for West Bengal and could not. “Nobody thought about it quite the same way. If he had succeeded, none of us would have been unemployed, more industry would have come...rajya kothai pouchhe jeto (what heights the state would have scaled!).” From the Nano factory shifting to Sanand, Gujarat, becoming part of the triumphal lore around Narendra Modi, to him now coming to wrest Bengal as PM, irony has come a full circle.
All in their mid and late 20s, Simanta Das, Arjun Ghosh, Sudip and Shankar Pal, must’ve been in high school or college when the Left Front lost power. But Buddhadeb and the Singur- Nandigram fiasco is still a discussion point in their casual afternoon conversations.
Does that mean the Sanjukta Morcha candidate has a winning chance? They’re not quite sure, except maybe in certain pockets. Buddhadeb, however, is a figure of underlying nostalgia, even though neither the Left nor the Morcha (Congress- Left-ISF alliance) is mining it.
In Bankura district, in South 24 Parganas, Burdwan or Howrah, as well as up north, the Morcha claims it will post surprising results, particularly in the rural seats. But nowhere have they been tapping that old sentiment. The CPI-M, the main Left constituent, has gone ahead with a ‘new experiment’. Just like in Kerala, it has fielded several young articulate faces here who can talk about the ‘real issues’ with passion — unemployment, livelihood, privatisation, rising prices, tumbling economy, farm laws, the perils of caste and communal politics in a state like Bengal which has known the nightmare of riots, particularly on the cusp of Independence.
They are quite a visible, audible presence. Start from Nandigram (Meenakshi Mukherjee), and go on to Singur (Srijan Bhattacharya), Bally (Dipsita Dhar), Jamuria (Aishe Ghosh), Kamarhati (Sayandip Mitra), Diamond Harbour (Pratikur Rehman), Rajarhat Newtown (Saptarshi Deb), Kasba (Shatarup Ghosh), Burdwan Dakshin (Pritha Tah) some of the seats already polled. There are those who feel, citing their youth, that they would need grooming to learn the ropes of electoral politics. “It’s a gamble that may pay off five-seven years down the line, when the levers of the state CPI(M) will have to pass on from the ageing leadership,” says a Left sympathiser, referring to the old warhorses Biman Bose and Surja Kanta Mishra.
The support for the Left in colleges and university campuses — from JNU to Jadavpur here — and among a section of the youth in general has come as a breather for that ageing Left leadership, often called the ‘geriatric club’ in jest.
“This one move is expected to sustain the party in the coming years, it’s a much-needed infusion of young blood,” says Nilanjan Dutta, who’s followed Left politics in the state with academic interest. Dipsita Dhar, CPI(M) candidate in Bally, Howrah (a district where BJP hopes to do well), affirms that: “Working for strengthening the organisation, standing by the people, the farmers in their struggle, is of prime importance.” When camp-switching is the sort of thing that makes headlines, that’s a kind of throwback line.
In Santiniketan, Birbhum, Subas Sen is no Left activist. He’s attached to the boutique business, and openly nurses a grouse against the TMC’s “autocratic local neta”, but yet is slightly uncomfortable with the BJP’s “Hindutva-cum pro-big business agenda”. Sen laments about Buddhadeb’s “failed industrialisation”. It has left many like him bitter. “Politics is no place for bhadralok. Buddhababu is an example of that. If he had acted like Amit Shah, the state’s industrialisation wouldn’t have been stalled. There would have been jobs for the youth, ancillary units, what not,” he says.
Miles away, in Deganga Assembly constituency of North 24 Parganas, the Forward Bloc’s party festoons surprise young driver Choton. So much so that he parks his sedan to find out which “new party” the symbol belongs to! The familiarity with the Forward Bloc flag has obviously waned in the last 10 years. “Oh! Left Front’s Forward Bloc,” he exclaims, a tad embarrassed. He hastens to cover up, and again that refrain: “Buddhababu is a good man, he tried to do something.”
In the minority-dominated areas of Deganga, they assert their “vote is for Didi” and “jamait (gathering) for Bhai Jaan”, that is, Abbas Siddiqui of the Indian Secular Front, part of the Left-Congress alliance. TMC candidate Rahima Mandol, who defeated the FB candidate in the previous election, is pitted against the BJP’s Dipika Chatterjee this time. The newly floated ISF of ‘Abbas Baba’ has fielded Karim Ali. Deganga is part of the Barasat Lok Sabha constituency, represented by the TMC’s rather popular MP, Kakoli Ghosh Dastidar.
The Left’s tie-up with the Furfura Sharif cleric Abbas Siddiqui is turning out to be a double- edged sword. The idea was to win back the atraf or azlaf votes — the Muslim peasantry — which went over to TMC in 2011, partly out of fear of Buddhadeb’s land acquisition policy. Traditional Left voters are reacting to the alliance with a Muslim cleric, they see it as a regressive, anti-secular step. The younger campus returnees, however, see it as extending support to a budding Muslim-Dalit politics. One of the Left leaders claimed, “With us, he’ll remain true to the ‘secular’ tag of his party.”
In Purbo Burdwan, once a Left bastion, the fight on the surface is only a TMC-BJP one. Here, a group of young Left supporters are holding an artisanal fair to create an ambience, and convince rural voters of the need to regain lost ground. Here again,‘Buddhada’ is remembered.
Even more surprisingly, top business leaders in Kolkata, in their private conversations, hark back to the ‘lost opportunity’ created by Buddhababu’s vision. “It’s unfortunate that neither his party nor his central leadership supported him. He was sabotaged from within and pilloried from outside,” one of them says.
None of them are ready to go on record with their political views, given the divisive tenor of the campaign. Sujan Chakraborty, the CPI(M)’s current legislative party leader who’s contesting from Jadavpur (Buddhadeb’s old seat), is candid enough to admit the former CM cannot be blamed for what went wrong. It was a “collective decision”. Chakraborty and his young comrades are creating quite a ripple, thanks to civil rights groups, musicians, and theatre and film artistes who’ve come out in direct or tangential support of the Left with jingles and viral videos. So is former MP, politburo member Mohammed Salim, contesting from Chanditala, Hoogly, also the face of the CPI(M) campaign this election. Or Ashok Bhattacharya in his home turf, Siliguri. It may not result in a big electoral victory in terms of seats, but the Left hopes to get back some of the 27 per cent vote that it, in a way, gifted to the BJP in the 2019 Lok Sabha polls. The correlation was as direct as it could get: the BJP got 28 per cent votes, the Left lost 27 per cent.
Little wonder, then, that the BJP’s latest song video circulating on social media platforms starring Babul Supriyo, Asansol MP and union minister who’s now contesting from Tollygunge constituency in Kolkata targets the Left, and not the TMC.