Faced with the growing attack on its cadres and sympathisers and a possible rout in the coming assembly election, the CPI(M) in West Bengal has come out with a recipe of putting their house in order. The party has initiated a process which will eventually weaken the hands of chief minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee and put the party organisation over and above the CPI(M)-led government.
In a state where its party is running the government for the past 32 years, the party is now on the defensive on the face of violent attacks launched by its political adversaries. Apparently the party has lost complete faith on its own government to maintain the law and order and now decided to take the law in its own hands. The CPI(M) state committee gave a call today to begin mass resistance against the attackers.
According to the CPI(M), the post-Lok Sabha election situation in Bengal is worse than what it had experienced in the time of Emergency.
The party has lost 161 men in post-poll violence, thousands have been forced to flee their homes, a number of small peasants have lost their right to till their own land, and many have been evicted from their land. The party for the first time admitted that some partymen had resigned to the fact that in the coming assembly election the Opposition TMC led by Mamata Banerjee would come to power in the state. In an 18-page note prepared for the two-day long meeting of the extended state committee which ended today, it mentioned that a section of the party, including both ordinary members and leaders, had surrendered to the ‘enemy’ during the election.
A number of them snapped ties with the party; many have started avoiding the party. It has admitted that they had failed to gauge the mood of the voters before the Lok Sabha election. At the same time, the bewilderment of the leadership is evident from the admission that “..We are not sufficiently experienced to face this situation. Also, the experience of the violent days of 1970s is not sufficient to tackle this new development.”
The meeting of the extended state committee endorsed the view that the massive debacle of the party in West Bengal had nothing to do with the party’s central leadership’s decision to withdraw support from the first UPA government on the issue of Indo-US Nuclear Deal.
At the same time, it stressed the point that the state government’s performance in implementing the pro-poor schemes did have an adverse impact on the people.
Incidentally, a section of the Bengal party did raise that issue earlier and claimed that the wrong decisions taken by the party’s central leadership on that issue had much to do with the electoral setback. But today, the CPI(M) state committee endorsed the central line. In other words, it’s a victory for Prakash Karat and a defeat of Bengal line within the party.
For the first time, the party has rejected the method adopted by its state government in acquiring farmland for industry and put the entire blame of for the bungling on the shoulders of the Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee government.
