After a humiliating defeat in Assembly elections, both in West Bengal and Kerala, it’s time for the Left Front to start living in the present.
Exactly two years ago, on May 15, a senior CPI(M) Central Committee member had called up a Business Standard correspondent. Full of confidence, he said: “We will get at least 30 of the 42 Lok Sabha seats in West Bengal. In Kerala, we will get nothing less than seven.”
Next evening, when the results of the 2009 Lok Sabha elections were announced, it turned out that the Left Front had managed to get only 16 seats from Bengal and four from Kerala.
On May 12 this year — a day before the results of the Assembly elections were out — West Bengal Finance Minister Asim Dasgupta rang Union Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee and said: “Dada, based on district committees’ feedback, our internal assessment says we will retain power with 155-157 seats.” Twelve hours later, the actual figures showed the Left Front had won barely 61 seats.
The two incidents point to one bitter truth that the comrades, known to be working with deep organisational network among the poor at the grassroots level, have comprehensively lost touch with their own base – to an extent that they do no even have the hint of what awaits them the next morning.
The communists are taking their time analysing the reasons behind the drubbing they recently got. And, Prakash Karat, the all-powerful CPI(M) general secretary, has yet to figure out if the electoral disaster in Kerala and Bengal is a result of his faulty policies at the centre, or just an aberration.
Karat certainly has been proactive in issuing a warning to his detractors: “There are some who have started writing epitaphs of the Left forces in the country. They are totally mistaken. They will be proved wrong.”
However, communists acknowledge that the defeat in these two states is the indication of a serious crisis for the Left movement in general and CPI(M) in particular.
Top Congress leaders, aware of the developments in West Bengal, think the Left would have been able to save itself this humiliating defeat and narrowed differences between factions within CPI(M), had Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee stepped down after the Lok Sabha elections in 2009, making way for a new face. CPI(M) insiders say Bhattacharjee had indeed offered to resign, only to be stopped by Prakash Karat. “He felt, if Bhattacharjee went, he too would have to take moral responsibility and go. He wanted to save his own seat,” says a Karat critic.
But that is only one aspect of the crisis. The CPI(M) is beset with more fundamental problems. The party’s intolerance to dissenting voices stems from its Stalinist mindset, which does not seem to be fit in today’s multi-party democracy. Economist Amartya Sen had earlier pointed out to West Bengal CPI(M) leaders that the party was yet to make a serious and fact-based assessment of the Stalinist period. The implication was that it would be difficult for the party to move forward, unless it severed its link with the past. But the party has never done that. Even after 20 years, the CPI(M) is still to come to terms with the demise of the Soviet Union and the East European socialist bloc.
The party’s crisis in Bengal is set to deepen further because a large chunk of the party members in the state has never experienced life outside power. There were around 33,000 party members in 1977, when the CPI (M)-led Left Front came to power in the state. Of those, only 7,000 are alive. The party’s membership in the state stands at around 350,000 today. After the defeat, with the party likely to face serious attacks from political opponents, these members will have to see they do not crumble under pressure.
In both Kerala and West Bengal, the party is said to have acquired real estate worth thousands of crores of rupees. Though most of the property is controlled by private trusts to evade public scrutiny, the public seems to know who the real owners are. People like Rezzak Molla, a minister in the Bhattacharjee government, besides some other party leaders, has come to admit that the party’s face in rural West Bengal has changed over the years, with a new class of people emerging under its direct patronage. The class of people he refers to is that of dealers of seeds, pesticide and ration, also playing the role of money lenders and forwarding credit to farmers. The ineffectiveness of rural banks and agricultural credit banks has made farmers increasingly dependent on this new breed of moneylenders.
Tarun Banerjee, an ardent CPI(M) worker in Lalgarh, is a very bitter person today. This is because he feels his party has let people down. He points out that both corruption and arrogance have made the party unpopular among the masses. Banerjee recently told Business Standard that the party collected funds by charging hefty fees from people requiring any permit from the local administration. For example, an elderly woman in Lalgarh who sought permission from the local administration to allow a mobile company to set up a tower was forced to shell out Rs 56,000 for the party.
According to a senior politburo member, “if we have to regain lost ground, we have to return to the basics. We have to take people’s issues more aggressively and fight for their cause”.
But can they do it? On the evening of May 13, after being completely routed in the elections, Left Front leaders assembled at the Alimuddin Street party office for a formal meeting. The leaders together presented quite a tragic picture. Most were on the wrong side of 70s. Ashok Ghosh, the seniormost of them, and two others needed support to walk the few steps from their cars to the party office. The world has changed beyond recognition in the last 20 years and people’s aspirations have also changed a lot. But these leaders do not seem to be aware of that. Like the old map of the Soviet Union hanging in the party office, they belong to the years gone by.
