Green government, red alert

Can the Communists achieve what appears impossible to all but its most die-hard supporters and be re-elected to power in West Bengal for the eighth time in a row? The odds appear so heavily weighted against such a possibility that many analysts expect a tsunami of support in favour of the Trinamul Congress, in an uneasy coalition with the Congress.

This writer, however, believes the contest will be closer than anticipated although the Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPI-M) led coalition will find it difficult to significantly improve on its performance when compared to the Lok Sabha elections held two years ago in which the Left managed to record leads in a third of the Assembly constituencies (to be precise, 99 out of 294).
West Bengal is unique among the 28 states in the country. It is the only part of India (perhaps, the world) that has elected a Left coalition no less than seven times continuously over a period of 34 years. Even as this record is expected to break on May 13, a few questions remain. Will the Trinamul Congress on its own get a majority? Will Mamata Banerjee become the new chief minister of Bengal or remain India’s railways minister? Is the state in for a period of turmoil?
The Left Front’s opponents have for long claimed that the CPI(M) and its supporters have rigged elections through intimidation of voters, because they control the local administration and the police. Left spokespersons, however, contend that their supporters could not have manipulated the outcome of successive elections because the proportion of anti-Left votes has varied between 55 per cent and 49 per cent of the total votes polled since 1977. The shoe is now on the other foot. More complaints of alleged rigging and intimidation have come from the Left during these elections.
The desperation of the Left is on account of the expectation that anti-Left votes will consolidate. Yet a sweep against the ruling regime may not materialise because of a number of reasons. The consolidation of anti-Left votes is uneven because the Trinamul Congress’ alliance with the Congress is more of a seat-sharing arrangement and less of a coalition. The fact that the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which has a marginal presence in the state, has put up candidates in almost all the Vidhan Sabha constituencies could help the Left. While distributing tickets, the Left has replaced nearly two out of three sitting members of Legislative Assembly (MLAs) and selected young candidates in nearly a third of the seats. Then there is the presence of strong rebel candidates, especially “former” Congressmen in Kolkata and Murshidabad. The dent in the image of the United Progressive Alliance government in Delhi following a slew of corruption scandals may indirectly help the Left.
What is working against the Communists is the belief that the “red fort” is no longer invincible. After the 2009 Lok Sabha elections, the number of members of Parliament (MPs) belonging to the Left from Bengal crashed from 35 to 15 while the number of Trinamul Congress MPs jumped from one to 19. More importantly, the overall mood in the state appears to be in favour of paribartan (change) instead of pratyabartan (a return of the incumbents) even among sections of traditional Left supporters who argue that the only way the Communists can cleanse their organisations of corrupt and criminal elements is if they are out of power.
Why have the strong anti-incumbency sentiments that have prevailed in all states in India been conspicuous by their absence in Bengal? Those who support the Left argue that this is largely on account of the state government’s land reforms programme during the 1980s, especially Operation Barga — a scheme to provide rights to tillers of land. For over a decade, agricultural productivity in Bengal went up roughly twice as fast as the all-India average. But this success story is now a thing of the past with farm productivity hitting a plateau.
The government in Kolkata used to accuse the Union government of having neglected the state for decades by, among other things, initiating a policy of “freight equalisation” of coal and steel prices that robbed the eastern region of many of its locational advantages. Once a centre of steel making and heavy industry, many large factories in the state have shut down throwing hundreds of thousands of workers out of their jobs. Since the 1990s, however, as the Indian economy liberalised, complaints of discrimination by Delhi became less valid. The industrial rejuvenation of Bengal is yet to take place.
Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee, 68, who took over charge in Writers’ Buildings in November 2000 from Jyoti Basu (India’s longest serving chief minister who headed the West Bengal government for nearly 25 years) had a reputation of being a practical “new Left” leader. He had, for a while, become the darling of the middle classes till Singur and Nandigram changed all that. The chief minister is today fighting with his back to the wall. Gone is the swagger that accompanied his announcement that the Tata group would be setting up a car factory in the state the evening the results of the 2006 Assembly elections were declared in May 2006 in which the Left Front won 235 out of the 294 seats with a more that 50 per cent vote share.
In retrospect, it seems that this unexpectedly convincing victory added to complacency of the Left. In fact, the writing on the wall was clear a year before the 2009 Lok Sabha elections, when the Left lost control over 1,620 of the 3,220 gram panchayats where elections were held, lost majority in panchayat samitis in seven (out of 18) districts (excluding Kolkata) and four zilla parishads. This trend got reinforced when the Left lost in 54 out of the 80 municipalities where elections were held in 2010.
What had aided the Left in the past was the weakness of its political opponents — the Trinamul Congress had formally broken away from its parent in 1988 but its periodic flirtations with the BJP worked to the advantage of the Communists. (Ms Banerjee had ditched the BJP in 2001, then joined hands with the Congress and again returned to the fold of the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance after losing the state Assembly elections that year.)
It is not as if Ms Banerjee will be able to quickly revive Bengal’s industrial fortunes. On the contrary, there is every possibility that the state will go through a period of unrest. Out of power, the Communists will have tremendous nuisance value.

Paranjoy Guha Thakurta is an educator and commentator