Stung by the criticism from his party colleagues for the humiliating defeat of his party in the Lok Sabha election in West Bengal, the chief minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee has informed his party of his intention to step down from his post. Though the party has strongly ruled out any such possibility, Bhattacharjee declined to make any comment on this issue.
His sudden meeting with Jyoti Basu this evening indicates that the party has initiated a last ditch effort to restrain Bhattacharjee from taking such decision ‘individually’. “This is all bogus. Nothing has happened on this line. Whatever happens, our party does not behave like bourgeois party. We don’t act individually. We own up responsibility collectively,” says Shyamal Chakrabarty, a member of CPI-M central committee.
Not withstanding the denial from the party, Bhattacharjee’s sudden meeting with Jyoti Basu at latter’s residence signifies that the politburo has requested Basu to impress upon the chief minister to rethink his decision.
The politburo met today at Delhi to discuss and review the disastrous performance of the Left in the general election. But, Bhattacharjee, a senior member of the politburo, who had made up his mind about quitting his post, stayed away from the meeting giving an indication of the course he was about to take.
After the humiliating defeat of the party in Bengal, a number of CPI-M leaders started voicing their criticism in public. The bitterest criticism came from Abdur Rezzak Molla, a member of the state committee and the land revenue minister in the present government.
Molla is off course consistent in his criticism of the party line. Ever since the government went for large scale acquisition of farm land for the sake of industry, Molla tried to oppose that. He now feels, because of that “a major chunk of the Muslim community in the state seems to have voted against us this time.”
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Rabin Deb, Sujon Chakrabarty, Tarit Toptar and some other leaders admit that Nandigram and Singur did play a major role on this election. The state government’s handling of Nandigram and Singur issues did damage the party’s image among the people, which in turn motivated them to vote against the ruling Left.
It left no one in confusion that all these criticisms were directed against Buddhadev Bhattacharjee because as chief minister of the state he led the government in its pursuit for rapid industrialization in the state resulting in long drawn confrontation with the peasantry in Nandigram, Singur and elsewhere. Razzak Molla insists that the party leadership did not pay heed to the repeated warnings issued by him about the impending danger of this kind of unnecessary haste.
It is not clear if anybody in the state secretariat spoke in the same vein.
But what Biman Bose said in public indicates that there was a conscious attempt to deflect all these charges from the state level to the central leadership.
By claiming that the people could not be convinced about the viability of the ‘Third Front’ only strengthened the poll prospect of the Congress, Biman only tried to shift the burden of the setback in Bengal to the Delhi-based leaders, namely Prakash Karat.
During the campaign time Biman had admitted that a number of CPI-M leaders became arrogant. He identified three reasons which created a distance between the party and the people.
At the same time there is a vehement effort by the state leaders to minimise the impact of land acquisition bid and Nandigram-Singur. Now as the results of assembly segment-wise break up of the votes are being available it is evident that the Left has lost its majority in around 190 of the total 294 assembly seats. From Farakka Barrage to Bay of Bengal across the both banks of river Hoogly there are 24 Lok Sabha seats in the district of Murshidabad, Nadia, North and South 24 Parganas, Kolkata, East Midnapore, Howrah, Hooghly and one in Burdwan. This had turned into a ‘killing field’ for the Left where they lost most.