Roots of malady of the left rule in West Bengal (contd.)

Stagnation in agrculture, lack of industrial development and the government policy lurching to the opposite extreme of potential expropriation of peasants of their land, disconnect with the Muslim vote base were all important causal factors in preparing for the ensuing electoral upheaval. But there was probably another little appreciated reason for the debacle.

Demise of Ideology

The Bengali intellectuals and the articulate elite have almost always taken to leftist ‘ideology’ as fish in water. Even if this ideological affinity has often been based on very superficial understanding, this used to be considered a given till possibly mid 1980s. A democratically elected left-oriented government was almost a popular expression of the ardent idealism of a large section of the urban intellectuals, artists, writers, theater and movie artists, singers and of course the general consumers of the cultural products. Many of them spent their youth and much of the adulthood in the fond hope of waking up in a city, a state which is ruled by people of supposedly socialist (if not communist) persuasion - a group of earnest people, who grew up within this milieu sharing the idea of uplifting the condition of the peasants, workers, urban poor significantly within their lifetime. There was a strong (pathetically naïve in the hindsight) moral underpinning to the Bengali intellectual’s sentimental and somewhat uncritical attachment to the ‘left’ ideology and all its baggage. Left’s was a righteous path. Also it had to happen in Bengal (“what Bengal thinks…” etc), with all its post-independence record of popular, secular and anti-establishment political agitations for all the right causes.    

The beginning was suitably spectacular : land-reforms (however limited) with at least a modicum of redistribution of land, release of political prisoners including the extremists who were bitter antagonists to the ruling parties not long ago, freedom of agitating for their economic demands for the industrial workers and so on.

But the plot was undergoing subversive changes even during the first decade of the LF rule. The strain of not living up to the claims of completing the unfinished task of bourgeois democratic revolution was telling. The task of catering to the practical needs (food, shelter, health, education, employment) of the broad populace within the confines of a state as a part of a federal structure (with an obviously indifferent if not partisan central government, itself mired in growing financial insolvency) was not getting any easier. Freedom to agitate, strike work was degenerating into labour indiscipline and diminishing work ethic and thereby leading to headline-grabbing flight of capital from the state. Government seemed nonplussed, had stock parrot like responses (like blaming the central government for all ills), offering, as far as possible, only blind eyes and ears to loss of work ethic among the vast army of government employees, police inaction and/or brutality, growing crimes (including significant rise in political murders), human rights violations. Left parties, CPM in particular, were more seriously engaged in perpetuating themselves, often by devious means not excluding outright bullying, even indulging in electoral malpractices in some areas, making disingenuous propaganda against the enemy without (often the central government, inimical foreign agents, media houses), rather than looking inward at the deficiencies at the party and the government levels and looking for an innovative way out of the growing mess. A broad section of the ordinary middle class people, many of them left sympathisers, educated and the urban elite, artists and intelligentsia came to be rubbed in a wrong way by the bulldozing party apparatchicks in the field of education and culture, the latter exercising an effective, almost ‘totalitarian’, control of many of the associations or organizations in these fields and dispensing selective partisan favours).

Pre-eminence of the party and the manufacture of the consent

Post 1977, the CPM, on its part, was largely content with entrenching itself in the new vote catchment areas (short shrift to the ideology at the alter of expediency gave ‘politics’ its dirtiest meaning), expanding membership in an indiscriminate manner. Using this growing political influence as the make or break in many aspects of their daily life the majority in the rural Bengal were gradually ‘won’ over forming a captive vote bank for many years to come.

To partly circumvent the stagnation in the economic growth and opportunities, both in rural and urban areas on governmental as well as non-governmental initiatives there was some spread of small scale informal economic activities (“informalisation of the economy”) in many parts of the state. Fruits of these initiatives were distributed, controlled at the lower working levels by the party and the distribution was based on the carrot/stick principle (patronage for those who would support the party, threat for those who wouldn’t). It is conceivable that for years this was probably one of the main mechanisms operative behind the subtle manipulation of the consent in favour of the government.