AFTER 34 long years, West Bengal is readying itself for regime change, albeit through the ballot. For the last three years, it has been evident that popular support for the left, in power for more than three decades, has been on the decline. Ever since the Left Front government decided on large scale acquisition of farmland for setting up of new industries, the small and middle peasants who form the backbone of its support base in rural Bengal, have been protesting. The opposition, led by Mamata Banerjee’s TMC, seized the opportunity and joined ranks with the peasants. Some minor left parties like the SUCI and a few Naxalite factions also teamed up with Mamata and helped her build a popular movement with all the familiar nuances of the left peasant movement.

Once the political parties joined in, the revolt – initially spontaneous, unorganized and localized – gradually evolved into a state-wide peasant movement against the Left Front, eventually becoming an iconic struggle – a peoples’ resistance against the state-corporate combine’s aggressive acquisition bid for farmland in India. The Left Front, which had won 235 of a total of 294 seats in the last assembly election in 2006, suddenly looked vulnerable and fragile in the face of the peasants’ resistance movement and started wilting under pressure.

From 2008 onwards, the CPI(M) led front has suffered one electoral setback after another. In the 2009 Lok Sabha election, its share of votes came down to 43.30 per cent, a drop of seven per cent from what it got in the 2004 Lok Sabha election. The 2009 election results showed that out of the 294 assembly segments within the 42 parliamentary constituencies, the Left Front managed a majority in only 99. Facing a strong possibility of being ousted from power, the Left Front is now fighting a desperate battle for survival.

The decline of left influence in Bengal took many by surprise. Yet, even as the left accepts the failure of its government in implementing the pro-poor programmes and the arrogance and corrupt practices of some leaders, both resulting in an alienation of its supporters, perhaps there is more to it. We will examine that in greater detail.

In 1977, when the Left Front assumed power in West Bengal, the morale of the Congress party in the state was at its lowest, its image tarnished by its role in the Emergency days. The left parties, in contrast, were viewed as champions of democratic values and for upholding the cause of the poor. Nevertheless, the left leaders, drawing from their past experience in Kerala and West Bengal, remained apprehensive that they would not be allowed to complete their term in office, convinced that sooner or later the Congress led by Indira Gandhi would topple their government by resorting to Article 356. So they took upon themselves the task of consolidating their position among the rural poor. They arranged distribution of surplus land among the landless and enacted laws to protect the rights of the share croppers.

 

Till 1977, the left’s organizational strength was mostly concentrated in industrial belts like Durgapur-Asansol, Hoogly, Barrackpore and Garden Reach. While the CPI(M) and CPI had their respective support bases among the peasants in Burdwan, Midnapore, Hoogly, Howrah, undivided 24 Parganas and Nadia, their presence in the rest of rural Bengal was minimal. With land reform and Operation Barga and the introduction of a three-tier panchayat system with elected representatives to run the local self government in 1978, the Left Front made a conscious move to expand its base in rural Bengal.

The first ten years of Left Front rule in Bengal, 1977 to 1987 was in political terms perhaps its most pristine period. The Jyoti Basu led state government, however, did not have the requisite funds at its disposal to drive a development agenda. The state was suffering from a serious cash crunch and the Reserve Bank appeared reluctant about stretching the overdraft limit of the state government to meet even its wage and means requirements. As no new capacity had been added in the preceding years, electricity was in short supply and regular power cuts caused widespread discontent among the urban and semi-urban populace.

 

In the industrial sector, the workers started feeling the heat as many more traditional industries became sick. The Freight Equalisation Policy adopted by the Centre on coal and iron ore had already resulted in West Bengal losing much of its natural advantage. The problem was further compounded by the Congress government at the Centre actively pursuing a policy of discrimination against communist-ruled West Bengal and denying it industrial licences for a host of new projects. The Left Front in Bengal thus faced a deep crisis.

Pushed to the wall, the Left Front then evolved a brilliant political strategy, the deprivation of the state and its neglect by the central government into a popular political issue. The left started demanding and agitating for restructuring centre-state relations, ensuring greater devolution of resources to the states, and restricting the role of the Governor in determining the fate of the incumbent government in periods of political crisis.

It was in 1967 that non-Congress parties or alliances first came to power in as many as 11 states; subsequently, regional parties like the DMK and AIDMK in Tamilnadu, Telugu Desam in Andhra Pradesh, Akali Dal in Punjab and National Conference in Jammu and Kashmir, among others, started ruling the states. Each of them had faced step-motherly treatment by the Congress government at the Centre. So, they all eagerly closed ranks with the left on the issue of centre-state relations. Jyoti Basu and his Left Front government successfully led them through a series of opposition conclaves, finally forcing Indira Gandhi to yield ground and agreeing to institute a judicial commission (headed by Justice R.S. Sarkaria) to examine the various aspects of centre-state relations and recommend corrective measures.

Throughout the period of the eighties, the left was thus both able to set the political agenda for the state, as also consolidate its pro-poor image. Though the land reform movement had been initiated by the Congress government as early as 1954 by abolishing the zamindari system, it was not actively pursued and implemented by the successive Congress governments. On the other hand, the undivided Communist Party had, from the late ’40s, been agitating to ensure a two-third share of crops for the sharecroppers (Tebhaga), thus building a support base among the poor peasants in the state.

 

After coming to power in 1977, the left aggressively pursued the programme of giving rights to the sharecroppers by amending laws and distributing vested land to landless peasants. In West Bengal, where the bulk of the peasantry is constituted by small and marginal farmers and the landless, this served a dual purpose: (a) it made the sharecroppers and the landless peasants stakeholders in the left government’s land reform initiatives; and (b) it successfully hijacked the political agenda from the Congress.

Alongside, in its first term in office, the Left Front government took some bold steps to spread school education in the rural areas. A number of primary and middle schools were upgraded and new schools established in the distant villages to attract students from poor families. Also, the government assumed the responsibility of paying the teachers’ salary from the state exchequer. Even though the urban middle class was deeply upset by the left government imposed ban on the teaching of English, even as a language at the primary school level, and not permitting new private schools to come up in the state all these initiatives went down well among the rural poor and helped create a solid support base for the left which has sustained them through the last three decades.

 

The late ’80s and early ’90s, however, saw fresh challenges. First the collapse of Soviet Union and East European socialist bloc depleted much of the moral sheen from the ideological armour of the Indian left. More significant were the economic reform process initiated by the Narasimha Rao government which did away with the ‘licence-permit raj’ and ‘freight equalisation policy’, creating a level playing ground for the states and enabling, if not encouraging, them to compete for foreign and domestic investments. Finally, since the minority Rao government needed the support of other regional parties, including the left, in Parliament, the period also saw a marked improvement in the federal character of our polity.

All this contributed to a more favourable climate for investment in the eastern part of the country. In 1994, the Jyoti Basu government adopted a new industrial policy to attract investment in the state. Taking a cue from liberalization and the new industrial policy of the central government, the Left Front, for the first time, welcomed foreign technology and investment in the state. It also recognized ‘the importance and key role of private sector in providing accelerated growth.’¹ Unfortunately, this major shift in policy was neither adequately discussed in the party, nor was its approval taken before it was announced in the state assembly. All this had serious consequences, as we later argue.

 

Here on, West Bengal would vie with Gujarat, Maharashtra, Tamilnadu and other states to attract both foreign and indigenous capital in their respective areas. While continuing with the rhetoric of an alternative development model, the CPI(M) led state government began to emulate the same model of development that it otherwise criticized. This contradiction was further sharpened as Buddhadev Bhattacharjee became the chief minister after Jyoti Basu retired from active politics in 2000. Bhattacharjee, in his bid to attract private capital, even started assuring investors that he was opposed to militant trade unionism, the practice of calling bandhs, and so on.

The chief minister’s overtly anti-labour stance did win him support from investors, both domestic and foreign. In addition to the Salim group from Indonesia, the Tatas and other Indian houses were roped in for a number of projects. Soon, however, both the Tata Nano car project in Singur and the chemical complex and Nandigram got embroiled in serious protest. The ham-handed manner in which the government tried to take over land for industry, using the party cadre to derail the opposition and even guard the industrial complexes not only shocked its ideological supporters but also alienated its peasant base. Most analysts traced this to the Stalinist legacy and style of functioning of the main party in the Left Front, the CPI(M).

 

Paradoxically, the same Stalinist legacy which made the CPI(M) such an effective force in opposition street politics, reduced its efficacy as a parliamentary party. Possibly this may explain why the party even let go the opportunity of making Jyoti Basu the prime minister of the country in 1996. Its basic approach towards the pluralistic political system appeared opportunistic. Once in power, the party tried to establish itself as the sole arbitrator between the masses and the state, leaving little space for the panchayat and other organs of self-government to work, far less for opposition and civil society forces.

Thus, over time, a ‘patron-client’ relationship developed between the ruling CPI(M) and a sizeable section of the people. Governance, especially over the implementation of the pro-poor programmes, became a casualty. Consequently, rural society in Bengal gradually split into ‘us and them’, creating a great divide among the rural poor since only the party faithful got any benefits.

Once the party started to meddle in every aspect of government functioning, its partisan character had a demoralizing effect on the performance of both the local self-government and the state administration, further debilitating its already weak delivery mechanisms as also reducing its ability to read trends on the ground. When the 2008 Rural Household Survey pointed out that even after two decades under left rule, the problem of chronic hunger still afflicted around 10 million² rural people in West Bengal, the political leadership remained unperturbed. Like any other authoritarian party in power, it too tried to suppress the facts and ignore the reality. The Left Front government by its own volition rapidly erased the line demarcating it and other non-left state governments.

 

In 1977, when the Left Front first came to power, Jyoti Basu had hoped that the party would be able to expand its reach in the neighbouring states by projecting the Left Front government as a role model of good governance. The reality turned out to be very different. There are around 638 assembly seats in the five states of Bihar, Jharkhand, Orissa, Sikkim and Assam. In 1978, the left parties had 17 MLAs [CPI(M)-12, CPI-2, RCPI-1, SUCI-1 and CPI(ML)-1] in the 128 strong state assembly in Assam. In 1980, the CPI had 23 members in the 325 strong Bihar state assembly. Today, despite having a left government in West Bengal for more than three decades, instead of gaining in strength, all these left parties together have only six MLAs in these five states.

The failure to grapple with the two phenomena – the fall of the Soviet Union and introduction of economic reform in India – resulted in political initiatives steadily slipping away from the grip of the left. In the mid ’90s, the emergence of Mamata Banerjee as a major political opponent to the left, introduced a qualitative change in Bengal’s otherwise stolid political scene. For a start her presence itself was a challenge to the age-old dominance of the social elite in Bengal politics. Till then the politics was dominated by Bengali bhadralok like Jyoti Basu, Siddhartha Shankar Ray, Ranen Sen, Indrajit Gupta, Somnath Chatterjee, Snehangshu Acharya and other members of the barristocracy.

The rise of Mamata, who comes from a very humble background, was appropriately dramatic. In her first electoral battle in 1984, she defeated CPI(M)’s heavyweight leader Somnath Chatterjee in the Lok Sabha election. While established Congress leaders, after being politically outmanoeuvred by the left, had reconciled to a sedentary political life in Bengal, Mamata from the very beginning chose a confrontational path with the ruling left. Her branding of state Congress leaders as ‘collaborators’ of the left went down well with the anti-left people in Bengal.

 

Mamata’ positioning herself as the sole opposition to the left in the state was established way back on 21 July 1993, when as the state president of the Youth Congress she organized a rally in the heart of Calcutta. As the crowd threatened to break the cordon and march towards Writers Building (the headquarters of the state administration), the police fired upon them, killing 13 people. Her appeal among the rural unemployed youth steadily grew, as she kept up her tirade against the left in the state, despite little encouragement from the coalition-entrapped Congress at the Centre.

Finally, on 9 August 1997, when the then Congress President Sitaram Kesari was holding the AICC plenary session in Calcutta’s Netaji Indoor Stadium, Mamata signalled a parting of ways with the Congress by holding a parallel rally just outside the venue. In January 1998, she officially launched her regional outfit, the Trinamul Congress. Realizing that her outfit would by itself not be able to take on the left in its stronghold, Mamata looked for an alliance at the national level and found a willing ally in the BJP. In 1998 and 1999, she fought the Lok Sabha elections in alliance with the BJP and joined the BJP-led NDA government at the Centre. In 2001, she left the NDA and fought the state assembly election after entering into a seat sharing arrangement with the Congress. The experiment, however, did not meet her expectations and she went back to the NDA during for the 2004 Lok Sabha election.

The outcome of the election, however, came as a rude shock. In the 1999 Lok Sabha election, riding on the post-Kargil war euphoria, her party (TMC) won nine seats and the BJP two seats in Bengal. In the aftermath of the Gujarat riots, her party’s strength in the 2004 Lok Sabha election came down to one seat. She realized that in a state like West Bengal with around 27 per cent of Muslim population, her association with the BJP would not go down well with voters. The 2006 assembly election hammered in the point further. While she continued with her search for a viable alliance with a national party against the left, an opportunity came her way when Singur exploded.

 

As mentioned earlier, peasants in land-starved Bengal spontaneously rose up against the left government. The farmers, mostly owners of small holdings, though not well-off, were forced to depend on agriculture for survival. Given the poor quality of state sponsored primary and secondary education system, they lacked the required skill set for employment in Tata’s Nano factory. Moreover, they were dissatisfied with the compensation offered for their lands, as the acquisition was being done under the Land Acquisition Act of 1894 which does not provide for rehabilitation. Not surprisingly, on the day the officials of Tata Motors went to visit Singur to see the land offered by the government, they were chased away by the local farmers.

In the initial phases, from May to November 2006, Mamata was not involved in their resistance movement, apart from issuing some supportive statements from Calcutta. She did , however, join their movement in December 2006 when a sizeable number of landowners declined to accept the compensation offered by the administration for their land. She went on a 26 day hunger strike but the movement petered out in the face of government’s determination. The land was forcibly acquired and Tata Motors went ahead with the construction work on the Nano plant.

 

Meanwhile farmers at Nandigram and Bhangar successfully stalled the government’s land acquisition bid for a chemical hub and an expressway (both were proposed to be built by the Salim Group of Indonesia). The state-wide panchayat election held in May 2008 showed that the peasants who had so far been supportive of the left had turned against them, especially in places like Singur, Nandigram and Bhangar (South 24 Parganas). The potential of this anti-left peasant movement did not escape Mamata’s attention. She went back to Singur and stepped up the movement, resulting eventually in the Tatas pulling out of the Singur project.

The success of the Singur and Nandigram movements led Mamata to change her strategy. The focus of her attention so far had been on unemployed youth and the middle class. The victory of Singur-Nandigram led her to coin the now famous slogan maa-mati-manus (the mother, the land and the people) and shifted her attention on mobilizing the peasantry. Towards this end, she took help from the leaders of the Naxalite factions who had joined the Singur-Nandigram movements against the left government. Gradually, Mamata started appropriating the style and symbolism of the left mass movements of the earlier days.

 

Mamata’s transition from a street fighting agitator to leader of a peasant movement also attracted a number of left artists and intellectuals, indicating her wider acceptance in Bengali society. She now justifies her stance by saying that though the present left party, CPI(M) is bad, leftism is good.

Perhaps the experience of watching the left from close proximity for a considerable period has induced Mamata into refashioning her politics into a mirror image of the erstwhile left. Thus the heavy use of populist rhetoric and a selective deployment of state largesse to win over the support of the poor. The use of the railway ministry to project her image as the harbinger of development in the state is a case in point. On the other hand, her silence on how to tackle Maoist violence in Junglemahal, on the land question and on the Gorkhaland agitation, has left her vulnerable.

Even as it is hazardous to predict the outcome of the forthcoming assembly elections, not the least because of the uneasy nature of the TMC-Congress alliance, most observers expect the Left Front to get a drubbing. Though the Left Front is making strenuous efforts to signal a change of image, choosing younger and less discredited candidates, as also waging fierce battles with opposition activists, it may well be a case of too little too late. Yet, even those who might welcome the change, remain sceptical about a genuine shift in the political culture of the state. Given the bloody turf war between the TMC and CPI(M) activists and supporters, the apprehension is perhaps justified. It does appear that the election, whatever the results, is only a transitional stage in the great churning underway.

 

Footnotes:

1. Policy Statement on Industrial Development, Government of West Bengal, 23 September 1994.

2. Rajat Roy, ‘Endemic Hunger in West Bengal’, Economic & Political Weekly 43(18), 03-09 May 2008.