After 34 years of Left Front rule, West Bengal could be on the verge of regime change. Ishita Ayan Dutt charts the course of the Left’s long stint in power and the rise of Mamata Banerjee.
The West Bengal elections are some weeks away, but Mamata Banerjee’s men already sense victory and have begun to jostle for key ministries, even as the Communist alliance that has ruled the state for the last 34 years is desperately trying to hold on to its citadel. The West Bengal intelligentsia — artists, writers, former civil servants and activists — has mounted a high-decibel paribartan chai (“we want change”) campaign against the ruling alliance on television, posters and hoardings.
Away from the intellectual discourse, Haradhan Ray, 60, of Meriagram in Hooghly district, can’t thank the Communist government enough. Back in 1978, a year after the Communists came to power, his father was allotted a 1-acre farm in a land redistribution scheme. With the income from that farm, he has recently married off the youngest of his three daughters. Having discharged his familial duties, Ray is profusely grateful to the Communist West Bengal government.
Ray’s case is more the rule than the exception in West Bengal. Through its land reform initiatives, the Communist government has redistributed more than a million acres to 3 million farmers in the last 34 years. Operation Barga, which registered sharecroppers in the state and then gave them legal rights to the land, has benefitted another 1.5 million farmers. In the “modest” estimation of the Communist Party of India (Marxist), the value of the distributed land is nearly Rs 130,000 crore.
The two programmes have changed the rural landscape of West Bengal — once famous for its wealthy landlords, 84 per cent of it is now owned by small and marginal farmers. The Communists came to power after a violent struggle by landless and small farmers, which started from Naxalbari in the north. The Communists kept their promise of land reforms.
In Meriagram, around 160 km north-west of Kolkata, Jaba Murmu, an adivasi, is no less happy. Till 1993, she used to work in the affluent households of her village. In the last 18 years, her kismet has improved dramatically. “I have been elected gram pradhan (village headman) for three consecutive terms. Now, I sign certificates for the babus in whose house I used to work,” says Murmu, one of the first adivasi gram pradhans in the country. The pride is palpable.
Social empowerment through decentralisation of power or Panchayati Raj is probably the bigger achievement in a society ridden with watertight caste hierarchies. “West Bengal has shown the way in the area of land reforms and class-orientation in villages,” says Nirupam Sen, state commerce and industry minister. Inclusive growth — a buzzword today all over the country — made an early entry in West Bengal. Yet, the Communists are all set to lose power in the state, as even their best friends will tell you. The people of West Bengal, by all indications, are in an unforgiving mood.
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Ironically, it was West Bengal’s farm economy that sent out the first alarm signals. The first few years of Communist rule saw a dramatic improvement in food grain production. While growth between 1979 and 1980 was a mere 0.96 per cent, it shot up to 5.81 per cent during 1980-90. “Land reforms and the Boro (a high-yielding variety of rice) revolution increased agricultural productivity in West Bengal,” says Abhirup Sarkar, professor of economics at the Indian Statistical Institute. Then the laws of diminishing returns set in, and growth fell to 2.13 per cent from 1990 to 1995.
Towards the end of his tenure, Jyoti Basu, the long-standing chief minister of the state from 1977 to 2000, realised stagnation in farm output could turn the popular mood against his government. That was also the time when India began to liberalise its economy. Free markets had come to be accepted as the most efficient mechanism to allocate resources the world over, including the Communist countries. Till then, the Communists wanted no truck with industry. Basu, in his first term as chief minister, had famously said: “Let the capitalists understand us, we shall also try to understand their point of view.” But if jobs had to be created, businessmen could no longer be ignored. Left with no choice, Basu came out with the Industrial Policy of 1994.
But it was too late by then — Basu had already scared businessmen enough. Besides agrarian reforms, his regime is still known for militant trade unionism, flight of capital and brain drain. Through the 1980s and later, several large companies and notable businessmen — the Mittals of Ispat, the Singhanias, Philips and Bata, to name a few — moved their headquarters or important divisions from Kolkata.
For Deepak Khaitan, executive vice-chairman and managing director of Eveready Industries, it was a bit of a shocker when he came back from Geneva in 1985 after completing his MBA. “I took charge of Macneill & Magor’s engineering business. Every day my office room would be brimming with union leaders. From 1982 to 1995, my life was spent cutting costs,” recalls Khaitan. Not surprisingly, he gradually reduced the workforce and finally shut shop. The bitter experience still haunts him. “My companies will expand or add facilities in other states,” he says, not mincing his words.
Kali Ghosh, secretary of the Centre of Indian Trade Unions which is affiliated to
CPI (M), doesn’t buy Khaitan’s story. “Industrialists cited trade unionism when they left Kolkata, but that is not the reason. They are capitalists; they will not leave if they know they are going to gain. It was the Centre’s discriminatory policy towards West Bengal that made it less lucrative to invest in,” he says, adding, “Ask ITC whether it has faced any industrial dispute in the state.”
The truth was that Basu couldn’t strike a chord with businessmen. When India liberalised in 1991, investments in West Bengal stood at just Rs 83 crore. Cumulative investments till 2000, when Basu gave up office at the age of 86, were Rs 17,000 crore. For a large part of his career, though, Basu pursued a political campaign against the Centre and its policies: industrial licensing, scrapping of the freight equalisation scheme, discrimination in sanction from financial institutions and direct investment from the Centre.
“The anti-Centre doctrine of the Communist rulers gave false hope to the working class and their demands intensified, making the owners of enterprises nervous. Striking work became a culture and the workers turned workless. Again, the government gave a false sense of security by providing them a different kind of work, what later came to be known as the cadre culture. This was the Left Front’s worst failure,” explains Dipankar Dasgupta, a professor of economics at the Indian Statistical Institute.
The problem of unemployment was reaching gigantic proportions and Basu made way for Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee, better known as the “do it now” chief minister. In Nirupam Sen, Bhattacharjee found the perfect comrade to industrialise the state. The first rush was from information technology companies: Wipro set up an office in Greater Kolkata, while TCS, Cognizant and IBM expanded. The sector grew at 70 per cent a year, jobs were aplenty and Bhattacharjee came back in 2006 with a resounding mandate for industrialisation.
This time, his focus shifted to manufacturing. Once he had made his intentions clear, investors — from Mukesh and Anil Ambani to Ratan Tata — flocked to Writers’ Building, the red colonial structure that houses the state secretariat. Several projects were announced. The Nano was one. Large tracts of land were needed. The government turned to rural Bengal. But land reforms had made holdings small and fragmented. “Land fragmentation was inevitable. Opportunities outside of rural Bengal were not created, so people continued to live off the land and families were growing,” points out Sarkar. Sen agrees. The average land holding had come down to between 1 and 2 acres.
Bhattacharjee had a strong weapon: his mandate. Or so he thought. Land was allocated without any consultation to projects like the Nano in Singur and a chemical special economic zone in Nandigram, that would displace some 36 villages. Agitations erupted in both places. On March 14, 2007, a police firing ordered by the West Bengal government killed a large number of people — estimates vary from 14 to 50. It was a “historic blunder”.
The Trinamool Congress, led by Mamata Banerjee, was quick to capitalise on it, though it had been crushed in the 2006 assembly elections. A 26-day hunger strike and a month-long siege by Banerjee finally forced Tata Motors to pull out of the state, dealing an irreparable blow to West Bengal’s image and its Communist government. The Communists performed miserably in the ensuing elections — panchayat (2008), Lok Sabha (2009) and municipalities (2010).
Chandan Kumar Das, 21, will vote for Paribartan this election. Paribartan, for him, means an anti-Left regime. “Mamata Banerjee is the only person who can unseat the Left, and they [Left rulers] need to be brought back to the earth.” Das, a resident of Nandigram, should know. After all, it was Nandigram that turned the tide against the West Bengal government and in Banerjee’s favour. Kolkata was her stronghold, but with Nandigram and Singur, she emerged as a state leader, a void filled perhaps for the first time since Siddhartha Shankar Ray, the Congress chief minister in the early 1970s.
Largely owing to the land agitation spearheaded by Banerjee and, of course, the failings of the Left, only 10 per cent of the Rs 237,000 crore worth of investment proposals that West Bengal received between 2005 and 2010, has translated into actual investment. Clearly, businessmen have turned cautious. Bhattacharjee, for his part, has tried his best to become investor-friendly. Infosys, for instance, was given land in a matter of hours. The government has also managed to acquire 8,000 acres for industry in the last two years, but nobody wants to commit big money to the state. Bhushan Steel’s 6 million tonne plant hasn’t left the drawing board. JSW’s 10 million tonne steel plant is running late by two years — work could start anytime soon. Jobs remain scarce, urban youth are dissatisfied and social tension is on the rise.
The Communists of West Bengal are skating on thin ice, Ray and Murmu’s gratitude notwithstanding.
