The West Bengal poll results may well mark the beginning of the end for the Left. Even the most optimistic among its supporters can no longer expect the Communists to win next year’s assembly elections.
The series of setbacks for the comrades – from the panchayat polls of 2008 through last year’s parliamentary elections and the subsequent assembly by-elections to the latest municipal polls – have highlighted the deep popular disenchantment with the Communists.
Since West Bengal was the jewel in the Left’s crown, a defeat there will mean that the time has come to write its epitaph. Since Kerala slipped in and out of its grasp every five years, it was the Left’s three decades of reign in West Bengal which boosted its all-India image. Yet, as the outcome has shown, this reputation was not shared in the state.
However, it was not ‘scientific rigging’ which ensured the Left’s political longevity, as its opponents argued, but the absence of a credible alternative. The Congress’ decline from the 1960s meant that the Communists had no worthwhile adversaries from the point of view of either personal appeal or organisational strength.
Neither P.C. Sen and Atulya Ghosh, nor Siddhartha Shankar Ray nor Pranab Mukherjee could match Jyoti Basu’s charisma while the supporters of the Congress were unable to stand up to the aggressive cadres of the ruling Left Front parties.
The split in the Congress when Mamata Banerjee broke away also helped the comrades consolidate their position since the 40 percent non-Left vote was divided.
It was the uninterrupted rule of 30 years, however, which can be said to have spelt the Left’s doom. Guided by their dogma of violence and one-party hegemony, the Communists not only demolished West Bengal’s primacy of position as an industrial state via their militant trade unionism but also engineered a kind of coup by undermining the professionalism and autonomy of virtually every institution.
If the police and the bureaucracy became pliant instruments in their hands, the status of widely respected, centuries-old establishments like the Presidency College and the Calcutta Medical College and Hospital was diminished by political control.
To maintain their hold on these institutions, the Communists encouraged their trade unions to defy the authorities while their cadres, mostly comprising antisocials, browbeat their political opponents in Kolkata, the mofussil towns and the rural areas.
Trinamool Congress chief Mamata Banerjee’s achievement was that she was the first to stand up against these crude tactics, for which she was even physically targeted by Marxist supporters. But, curiously, it was the realisation among the leftists that they were leading the state downhill and, therefore, needed to change course which gave her the opportunity to gain.
As Alexis de Tocqueville said, ‘the most critical moment for bad governments is the one which witnesses their first steps towards reform’. Mamata Banerjee’s ascent to power began when Chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee blamed his party’s ‘rigid Marxism’ for the state’s plight and tried to change course by inviting the private sector to revive the economy.
The Left might have succeeded even then to stall her progress if it hadn’t followed its customary Stalinist instincts to help the corporate sector. But, by unleashing the armed Marxist militia on farmers protesting against the acquisition of their land for industrial projects, the Left gave Banerjee her chance to mobilise support.
The events in Singur and Nandigram also made the rest of India wake up to the Left’s high-handed ways, which were known till then only to the people of the state.
The Forward Bloc may now blame the ‘arrogance’ of Big Brother, the Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPI-M), for the setbacks. The Communist Party of India (CPI) had levelled the same charges earlier. But these acknowledgments have come 30 years too late.
Besides, neither Big Brother nor the younger siblings are capable of changing their way of functioning. Tied to their dogma, they still believe that a mythical proletarian solidarity, based on encouraging trade unions to act irresponsibly, is the path to redemption.
This doctrinnaire adherence to ‘scientific socialism’ is also sought to be boosted by opportunistic alliances with even a ‘communal’ outfit like the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) to unseat the government, as over the Indo-US nuclear deal. This mixture of Marxism and cynicism is unlikely to help the comrades at a time when the younger generation, which was earlier the Left’s main source of support, is no longer enthusiastic about the dogma.
The Left, therefore, has fallen between two stools. It can neither provide good governance, as West Bengal’s example shows, because of its own ideological roadblocks; nor can it garner influence by its routine diatribes against American ‘imperialism’.
The Communists can consider themselves lucky for having held on to power for so long in West Bengal because there was no one to challenge them. But now they know that their reverses in the state will make them an inconsequential force at the national level as well.
(04.06.2010 – Amulya Ganguli is a political analyst. He can be reached at aganguli@mail.com)
