Bengal has lost its taste for the Left

Written off as recently as four years ago as a political featherweight, a euphoric Trinamool Congress has described Bengal’s civic poll results as “historic”. Some may explain the phenomenal outcome as a prelude to the ‘final march’ towards the real historic turnabout in next year’s assembly elections.

Bengal has restlessly awaited change for more than a decade. Its people have watched the largest Communist Party in India metamorphose from a radical entity to the ‘establishment’, which cared for little other than reproducing itself in power every five years. Through that ceaseless process of reproduction of power the party nurtured a monolithic establishment, which ruled through a careful mixture of clientilism and patronage.

In the aftermath of defeat in the Lok Sabha elections, CPM leaders launched a rectification drive to ‘purge’ the party of bourgeois lifestyles and corruption. But what the party has not and never will turn its attention to is the basic and flawed principle of a ‘party society’ wherein the Communist government now controls every aspect of socio-political existence in Bengal.

The discourse of paribartan or change dominant in Bengal today, often tends to circle around the eccentric and unpredictable personality of Mamata Banerjee. Will Bengal, which has, for 33 years, voted for the bhadralok Marxists at times willingly and grudgingly at others, repose confidence in a subaltern politician like Banerjee?
They may not have four years ago, before Singur-Nandigram wrenched out in the open the anger and frustration gnawing at the people of Bengal. This resistance was not simply a beginning but also a culmination of the process of decline that had set in at least a decade earlier.

It is convenient for some to project Singur-Nandigram as aberrations, ‘mistakes’ the party is now set to rectify. But the arrogance of a political culture that fed that resistance is too deeply ingrained to be addressed by exercises in rectification.

Notwithstanding disparaging remarks about Banerjee, the fact remains that people have voted not just against a CPM they no longer trust, but also for Trinamool Congress, which has emerged as a formidable opposition. Underlying the complexities of Bengal politics, its decades of unbroken hegemonic rule virtually by one party, feelings of betrayal and anger run deep. For now, the urge to punish is strong enough to help the volatile Trinamool Congress; though even before it has taken the reins, the party has imbibed some of the worst aspects of competitive political violence, now a hallmark of Bengal politics.

The CPM has admitted that ‘some sections’ in Bengal have turned their backs on the party. The truth is that it’s not just some sections. Large sections of peasants, tribals, workers and intellectuals — once staunchly loyal to the party — have moved away. Right now, Bengal’s intellectuals are engaged in a passionate debate over paribartan and their role in effecting transformation. Some intellectuals, despite their Left leanings, are now firmly aligned with the Trinamool Congress. Others, who have chosen to guard their independent status, are also openly advocating change.

The disenchantment and realignment of such large sections should have worried the CPM long before the ground started to heave. Left-wing artistes such as Kousik Sen, Saonli Mitra and Bratya Basu turned ‘renegade’ following cultural coercion. Recently, ration riots spread across rural Bengal and the public distribution system was found to be in total disarray. Lalgarh was born in a cradle of such continued deprivation. Health services across cities and villages went to seed long ago. Political violence — not merely ideological friction of the kind Bengal was intimate with before 1977, but murders and revenge killings on a daily basis as part of political life — has escalated under the Left Front government.

The poor who had hoped to find in the Left Front a government of their own are left wondering about their misplaced and betrayed faith. Party leaders now say they have to renew their bond with the people. But the rhetoric of commitment has lost the power to heal, if only because no party or government in the country has had so much time to prove itself and make good its commitment to the electorate.

The CPM ascended to power riding high on the expectations of precisely those sections that are now against it. Betrayal by a party which once pledged radicalism but turned out to be ‘one among the many’, even when it presided over a solid organization and stable administrative machinery, is difficult to forgive.

At the moment, the return of the Left in West Bengal seems like the longings of a poet who has lost the power to summon words.