Of all the state assembly elections round the corner, the one in West Bengal is by far the most engrossing in terms of the evolution of political forces and the underlying social realities that they bring to the fore. For sheer contrast, compare them with the last assembly elections in Karnataka. Those were utterly issueless — legitimised corruption (one village or panchayat after another asking each candidate how much money he could put on the table for the votes) overlaid on unchanging historical caste equations.
In West Bengal, on the other hand, after a historic 33 years of uninterrupted rule, a social democratic movement with strong Stalinist characteristics may well be forced to give up power by a system in which periodic free and fair elections have become the opiate of the masses. A people may be readying to throw out a people’s party by adopting an alien system left behind by their former colonial rulers. Quaint customs evolved at the palace of Westminster standing next to a littler river called the Thames are holding sway over a people brought up around the mighty Ganga whose ebullient ways could not be more different from that of the phlegmatic British.
What is happening is riddled with contradictions. The largest political party currently ruling in Delhi, the seat of political power for millennia in India, is meekly getting down to playing not second but fourth fiddle, if there be such a position in an orchestra, to a party, Trinamool Congress, that is more of a movement whose firm contours are barely visible as they are still ill-defined, like a baby that is nowhere near ready to leave the womb. Just as such a baby takes shape week by week, this movement has taken shape as an evolving coalition, picking up a new partner with every phase. First it was a disillusion urban middle-class that called the ideological bluff of the left theorists. Then the peasantry, the backbone of people’s power in Asia, changed sides and joined hands with the bhadrolok form the city. And finally, the intellectuals and the cultural articulators of the people’s dream left the corrupt apparatchik and joined the rabble, as rag tag as the hordes that raided the Bastille.
The ancien regime, that is the Congress, which has been the oldest home to the rulers of independent India, has given up without a fight. The Trinamool said take these 65 seats or else, and come the end of the weekend, the venerable old party capitulated. A leader in the party’s stronghold, Murshidabad district, is revolting by readying to put up several rebel candidates. Leaders elsewhere who have been winning elections ever since elections were invented have seen their redrawn constituencies (Kabitirtha, Metiabruz) given to the Trinamool and are readying to fight as Independents. All that will be left of the Congress in the state will be a signboard, sacrificed at the altar of retaining power at the centre, accuse some. It had already become one, reply others, pace the results of the Kolkata Municipal Corporation elections when the Congress fought without the Trinamool and you know what happened.
Forecasters are fiercely divided. Mamata Banerjee will ride the crest of a wave, no less, say some. The left is regrouping, argue others. Wherever the Trinamool has exercised power, as at the Kolkata Municipal Corporation or the South 26 Parganas zilla parishad, people have seen the Trinamool merrily misrule and have begun to ask questions. But disputes over the margin of victory are pointless as most have given away the match to the Trinamool. So, the real issue is what next. How exactly will the Trinamool and its leader, who is an untamed phenomenon, govern? And it is here that doubts begin to cloud the certitude born out of victory foretold.
The strongest argument of the leftists in countering Miss Banerjee is her record at the railways. The national carrier, like the bureaucracy, is supposed to provide the system with a kind of iron frame. It takes a lot to shake it, not to speak of hurtling it downhill. And that is precisely what she has done. The railways’ finances are in the doldrums, projects have not taken off, despite her not being hamstrung by ideology, as the leftists are. Public private partnerships were to be the vehicles of rapid investment, but indecision, a one-point concern of not getting into any kind of scam, ala A K Antony, has incapacitated her. Again, opinions are sharply divided. She has handpicked great advisers who will run key ministries, say some. Others retort that the same great advisers are there at the railways and look, which way it is headed.
The more careful analysts of her career so far say that she has all along had a one-point programme to defeat the leftists in West Bengal and to achieve that she has stopped at nothing, including joining hands with the Maoists while keeping the UPA in power at the centre, enabling it to hunt down Maoists all over the country. But she has not yet worked out what to do with power once it is her’s. Without personal administrative acumen and wary of anyone else in her party getting too big, she is today a one-woman band of administrative incompetence.
Even this is unsurprising. Historic change always comes in waves, leaving little time for tomorrow’s leader to engage a trainer to prepare for life after victory. To have victory in hand and not know what to do with it is part of the overall contradiction.
