West Bengal Chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee will not attend the crucial CPI(M) politburo meeting tomorrow in Delhi. The meeting has been convened to review the party’s electoral performance in the Lok Sabha elections. Biman Bose, Nirupam Sen and Mohammad Amin are expected to attend the meeting.
Though he did not show any ostensive reason for his inability to attend the meeting, Bhattacharjee has only made known his decision following the humiliating defeat of the Left in Bengal. According to party insiders, Bhattacharjee’s apprehension was that tomorrow’s meeting in Delhi would turn into a blame game and he wanted to avoid that. Since he did not give any serious reason for not going to Delhi, it is interpreted in the party circle as a defiance shown towards his Delhi comrades, like Prakash Karat. Bhattacharjee had tried his best to convince Karat not to withdraw the party’s support to the UPA government on nuclear issue.
The party’s national leadership also seems to be in disarray. Tomorrow’s politburo meeting was to be followed by a meeting of the Central Committee (CC) the day after, which was, however, cancelled by Karat last night.
Shyamal Chakrabarty, a member of the 82-member Central Committee, told Business Standard that instead of CC the politburo would now review the poll outcome. A section of the party’s state unit feels that the meeting would have generated much heat as the party had suffered a serious setback in two states Bengal and Kerala, and did not get any benefit out of its alliances with non-left parties in Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh, Karanata and Orissa.
Much of the blame will be put on the party’s central leadership, mostly on Karat. Already, expelled CPI(M) leader Somnath Chatterjee had issued a statement yesterday saying Karat should step down. Though Chatterjee does not belong to the party anymore, he has maintained close contact with some of the senior leaders in Bengal, including former chief minister Jyoti Basu. The timing of the remark indicates there could be more than what was visible.
CPI’s win in Jagatsingpur in Orissa only highlights the scale and the nature of the debacle. According to CPI national leadership, they won the seat riding on the sustained pro-farmers movement against the Posco project there. Contrast it with the complete rout faced by the Left in Hoogly and East Midnapur where Singur and Nandigram are located. While a section of the Left fought against the land acquisition in Orissa and got rewarded by the people there, Buddhadev Bhattacharya led CPIM in Bengal tried to acquire farm land against the will of the farmers thus giving rise to a resistance which led to yesterday’s catastrophe. So far nobody in the party has tries to face this question in Bengal.
In Kerala, the internecine battle between P Vijayan, who controls the party machinery, and V S Achyudanandan, who heads the government, had become part of the CPIM folklore now. V S was apprehensive of being finding outside the party after the election. An all round debacle might delay the process.
Indeed leaders at different levels of the party in Bengal are now in a very angry mood and some of them started blaming the party for failing to gauge the mood of the people. Yesterday, when the early trends of the result made it obvious that a major setback was awaiting the Left in Bengal, Buddhadev Bhattacharya, Biman Bose, Nirupam Sen, Shyamal Chakrabarty and some other leaders were present in the party headquarters in Alimuddin Street and they were keeping a watch on the television screen.
Md. Selim, a member of the central committee and who contested the North Kolkata seat was also there. According to party insiders, after realizing that he was certain to be defeated in the election Selim gave vent to his feeling in front of other leaders. He angrily criticized the party leadership and its much lauded organization for its inability to sense the public mood. The problems of the Left leaders have further compounded as the jubilant workers of TMC had attacked and ransacked CPIM party offices in some places and assaulted the party workers. Mamata’s repeated appeal to the workers to restrain themselves did not allow the situation to go out of hand for the time being.
Later Biman Bose said that they would discuss and try to review this in tomorrow’s politburo meeting. But, the CPIM leaders at different levels now grudgingly admit that the party workers have lost touch with the people. Otherwise they would have been able to sense the mood of the people. The inputs gathered by district, zonal and local party sources throughout the last three months never prepared them for this kind of setback.
As the details of the results started reaching the party headquarters, it becomes evident that the steady erosion which started last year during the panchayat election now became a landslide even in the strongest support base of the CPIM. The commerce and industry minister Nirupam Sen’s assembly seat in Burdwan has this time given a lead to the opposition. Buddhadev Bhattacharya’s Jadavpur assembly constituency also suffered a huge loss of support.
If judged by yesterday’s Lok Sabha results, Ashim Dasgupta and a host of Left ministers’ constituencies have gone over to the opposition. As it is, the Lok Sabha results have radically changed the state political scene. The Left with its disproportionate majority of 235 in a 294 member assembly now stands on a ground which is no longer supportive of them. (EOM)
