The loud and clear mandate for change in a state that came to symbolise political stagnation and the status quo has been rightly seen as a repetition of 1977 in reverse. That year, the CPI(M) and its allies won an equally impressive victory against the Congress, which along with its offspring TMC has now turned the tables on the entrenched rulers. Then, as now, the winning impulse was democracy, which had a special appeal in a state that experienced more than six years of uninterrupted state-hooligan terror since the early 1970s presided over by Siddhartha Shankar Ray. Beyond this, however, Mandate 2011 has a very different perspective and holds out altogether different possibilities.
The First Spark and the Prairie Fire
An apparently insignificant peasant protest in Singur in late May, when the parliamentary left camp was still dizzy with success (with as much as 80% of total seats in its kitty, leaving a meagre 10% for the TMC) sent out a serious message to those who had ears to hear and eyes to see. Jyoti Basu immediately criticised the government (by implication, mainly the Chief Minister and his principal aide, Industries Minister Nirupam Sen) in front of the electronic media for rushing through such sensitive matters without proper political homework. And we in our very first analysis of the West Bengal poll results observed that the huge success carried “the ill omen of a systems failure that might not be too far away.” (When Success Becomes a Burden, Liberation, July 2006).
The state-people confrontation sharpened, and the CPI(ML) general secretary was even more categorical in his address to the fighting women and men who had assembled to hear him in Singur on 14 September 2006: “if blood flows in Singur, it will wash away the CPI(M)’s seat of power in Kolkata.” Blood did flow – in Singur, Nandigram, Lalgarh and other places – generating powerful waves of popular resistance that grew into a veritable tsunami as it crossed Nandigram. It washed away the ‘impregnable’ guard wall of panchayats in early 2008, the next line of defence fell in the parliamentary elections next year, followed by devastating defeats in municipal polls in Kolkata and other towns and cities and finally, the seat of power in the Writers’ Building is gone.
Not that the people’s disgruntlement stemmed from the state government’s repressive measures alone. There have been a hundred other grievances: one of the worst performances in the country on the NREGA front; neglect of irrigation, electrification, warehousing, transportation, marketing and the other concerns of farmers such as easy loans and remunerative prices; absence of a serious effort to tackle industrial sickness and the unemployment problem; total apathy and malfunctioning in areas like BPL cards and the public distribution system; the “party-state syndrome” or the nagging interference by the “natural rulers” in every aspect of public as well as private life of citizens; and so on and so forth. But the people of West Bengal bore with all these for years together, wise enough to understand that the available alternative – a government run by the TMC, whether alone or in league with the Congress or the BJP – would not perform any better. So willy-nilly, the electorate returned the Left Front to power again and again.
What the series of post-Singur developments (Nandigram, the brazen injustice meted out to Rizwanur Rahman and his family, police firing at Dinhata on rural poor demanding work under NREGA where five were killed, repressions on adivasis in Lalgarh and on various democratic forces in the name of fighting the ‘Maoists menace’…) served to do was to radically alter this mindset. Enough is enough – the people of Bengal cried out in one voice – this bunch of betrayers, this pack of arrogant autocrats must go, come what may! For once, for this historical moment appearing after long 34 years, people stopped bothering about the credibility or dependability of the likely successors to the present government. ‘Away with this government now’, they fumed, ‘we would see what happens next’. It is this sea-change in public mood, this singleness of purpose which gripped the people of Bengal cutting across class, caste and religious divides that determined the outcome of 2011 elections.
Implications of the 13 May Verdict
The latest popular mandate is thus largely a reflection of full five years of mass movement. It is a case – one of the many that history is replete with – of people’s protest and people’s victory manipulated by, and temporarily serving, the interests of anti-people forces. The CPI(M) will never understand these linkages or dialectical relationships; we must.
Huge explosions of extra-parliamentary mass movements – in the villages and meadows of Singur and Nandigram, streets and avenues of Kolkata and other cities, forests and hamlets in Jangalmahal – laid out the ground on which electoral battles developed and inflicted a series of defeats on the ruling parties in the panchayat, Lok Sabha, municipal and now the assembly polls. Mamata Banerjee could score the astounding victory because she was eminently successful in presenting herself as the most energetic, always-the-first-to-reach-the-spot type of leader moving in tune with the masses fighting against injustice and oppression. In the process she not only galvanized the entire Congress camp languishing in political oblivion for so long but also forged a new alliance with certain sections of the Left – attracting wide-ranging support from dissident sections of the CPI(M), parties like the SUCI and Maoist sympathizers alike, and the new combination prevailed decisively over the last-ditch attempt put up by a demoralised and discredited CPI(M) camp to defend itself.
The CPI(ML) and some other Left groups (some other ML organizations, the breakaway forces of the CPI(M) in West Medinipur who fought under the banner of Democratic Communist Party (Marxist), the Mazdoor Kranti Parishad and of course Chhatradhar Mahato, the leader of the Lalgarh movement who contested from jail to the chagrin of the TMC and the Maoists and got more than 20,000 votes after a very brief campaign in the face of enormous difficulties) were the only exception who stood firmly by the fighting people but refused to get swept by the TMC wave. The CPI(ML) polled a total of more than 71,000 votes, the highest till date polled by the party in West Bengal. The independent and spirited assertion of the fighting Left stood in sharp contrast to the performance of the SUCI. This party had allied itself with the TMC, got only two seats (where they had sitting MLAs since 1977) from Ms Banerjee in place of the 12 demanded, and lost one of these. A sharp inner-party struggle ensued, forcing the leadership to hold two press conferences on consecutive dates: first for announcing the decision not to join the new government and on the next day for declaring that they were pulling out of the alliance.
Foundations of the Fabled Stability
Rather than unleashing a fresh wave of class struggle, the CPI(M) since 1977 relied on state-sponsored relief and reform to broaden its own social base and the Left Front Government (LFG) from day one emphasised moderation and class peace.
The most renowned reforms undertaken by this government was the Operation Barga-Panchayati Raj duo. These two together led to the rise of the middle strata – known to be the best vehicle for conciliating antagonistic class interests – to a new prominence in the social hierarchy of rural Bengal, providing the LFG with a broad and stable social base. The next logical step in Operation Barga (OB) would be to transfer ownership to sharecroppers and thereby implement the basic slogan of land reform, “land to the tiller”. But Jyoti Basu and his colleagues deliberately avoided it, apprehending intensification of class contradictions. Abandoned midstream, OB lost momentum and by late 1980s reversal of land reforms started. Meantime, Panchayati Raj had generated its own vested interests and increasingly came to represent an oppressive, dictatorial party power.