Postcript to the left front debacle in West Bengal

 

Two residual questions :

(a)    LF still polled 41% of the popular votes in an election that everybody agreed has been conducted in a fair and acceptable manner. The overall vote percentage all over the state has significantly increased. As usually reticent and even cynical voters might have exercised their votes this time, young newly eligible voters, without either the ideological baggage or a political opportunism, hatred and vendetta, carried their weightage too in a critical balance flipping game, did the LF at all derive any benefit out of this surge ? If not, this 41%, not a small number by itself, represents a solid unwavering support base for the left parties. What do they expect from the parties they had supported even under these hostile conditions probably at great personal risks (validated by the daily events of bloody vendetta by the ruling party supporters) ? The left parties should humbly reach out to this natural resource if they have to survive politically or otherwise.

(b)   To say that the vote against LF played a bigger role than the vote for TMC/Congress combine is no-brainer. However, there must have been some key expectations of both the traditional anti-left constituencies in the state and the sizable ‘adjustable’ segment of voters (who played the arbiter of the election results) from a new government formed by an alliance of parties and colourful individuals who were so far known for their demagoguery, hate speech and pandering to perceived persecution and injustice rather than articulating a coherent policy for the economic renewal of all sectors of the state. What are the changes these sections expect the government to initiate ? Accelerating liberalisation and industrial development (and not touching the interests of the peasantry ) ? Rejig the land relations in favour of the dominant farmers with political clout at the cost of share croppers and labourers, especially those painted with a colour remotely resembling red ? Replacing your favourite cultural and educational elites with a set of mine ?

Such questions must await detailed unbiased analysis of the facts and trends to be unfolded in future.

The spectacular demise of the left rule in West Bengal (India)

Like many others concerned about West Bengal (WB), one could not, in the context of the resounding loss of the left front (LF) in the May 2011 assembly elections, avoid pondering about the key factors that undermined the long standing left rule in WB.

Trinamul Congress (TMC)/Congress leaders, sympathisers as well as a host of commentators in the media have had a clear prognosis about the endgame since 2009 parliamentary elections. Nobody other than die-hard LF supporters was left in doubt about the rot and debility in the government administration and the despondency enveloping the party organization at various levels.

What were the roots of this malady and the trajectory of its growth ? Was it a post 2006 election development or rather a work-in-progress over the three decades of the LF rule ? Many commentators (e.g., Sumanta Banerjee, EPW June 4 2011) have pointed in that direction. But then how did they manage to stay in power this long despite growing anti-incumbancy ? Beyond TMC’s hell raising claims about electoral malpractice by CPM/LF, vote splitting due to non-alignment of non-left forces there must be some substantial reason for the remarkable electoral success of the left all these years and the spectacular failure this time. 

Urban votes were probably always more evenly partitioned between LF and non-LF categories. When and how did the rural vote banks of LF collapse ? If the rural masses (and even a decent section of urban voters) were ‘solidly’ behind LF even at the time of 2006 elections (their vote share was a little over 50%), what happened during the next 2-3 years to cause a tectonic shift in this support base (2008 Panchayat elections were the early evidence of this shift). Is it possible that the misadventure, mismanagement and miscommunication at Nandigram and Singur were like straws on the camel’s back pulling down this illusory and waning support base like a pack of cards ?

Have been thinking about the roots of the malady and the spectacular demise. Watch this space for more on this subject ...

Demise of Soviet Union, sweep out of Left Front in West Bengal, India : some parallels ?

Found an interesting article in EPW trying a post-mortem analysis of the demise of Soviet Socialism in terms of a Marxian framework. The key point is that the soviet system, as it perpetuated itself over decades in a hostile international environment, gradually came to a saturation of the economic growth, stagnation, which worsened due to the arms race it was partly forced into due to the war and later soviet occupation in Afganistan. Within this worsening economic scenario, a segment of people, especially those wielding power in the government (the bureaucracy) and the communist party (central and regional leaders close to those running the government at various levels) have gradually come to acquire privileges that they found it legally and constitutionally perpetuate among their offsprings/relatives. Thus those saddled with the power and responsibility of the state – or at least a significant number of them – felt constricted in exercising their ‘liberty’, ‘freedom’ in bourgeois/capitalist individualist sense (creating and amassing wealth in their private capacity and by extension ‘legally’ controlling the means of production) by the existing legal, economic and political structure. Though whether and when these masses of privileged people formed a ‘class’ is not clear, the author argues that it is this nascent ‘class’ of people who were the real gravedigger of the soviet socialist structure with generous moral, material support from the west.

An important parallel arises in the context of the electoral whitewash (May 2011) of the long running (perhaps the longest running, democratically elected) left front (LF) government in the state of West Bengal, India. In both cases the rhetoric of the opponents of the regimes concerned are about the same : ‘communism’, ‘Marxism’, those professing these ideologies have thwarted the basic economic, political freedom of the populace. Beyond the demagoguery, one needs to identify the real issues, real actors in an evolving historical perspective. There may be a case for the thesis that the LF government, in the first decade of its rule, did devolve significant economic power to the rural poor, but the development of the agriculture, though among the better ones achieved by several Indian states, was not keeping pace with the rising aspirations among the rural masses who were, ironically, unshackled by the half-steps of land reforms initiated by the LF. Add to this the issue of failure to evolve an appropriate dynamic political structure that could feel the pulse and mobilize the dynamism of the rural masses in a direction that would have benefited the left’s cause (if there ever was any) in the long run rather than pushing them to become abject followers by threats and patronage. A rare insight was provided by one commentator in a TV discussion before the elections. He talked about the stagnation in the economic growth and opportunities, both in rural and urban areas. To partly circumvent this situation on both governmental and non-governmental initiatives there was some spread of informal economies (“informalisation of the economy”) in many part 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 was argued that for years this was one of the mechanisms behind the manufacture of the consent that sustained the government this long.