Disquiet on the Left front

The results of the recently concluded elections to the West Bengal state Assembly have brought forth some worrying facts for the Left, particularly, the CPI(M). Arguably the most powerful of the mainstream Left parties in India, the CPI(M) has come face to face with some harsh realities. Top among these is the harrowing question of whether the Left, after having ruled for the greater part of four decades, is losing political relevance in Bengal. 

Within hours of the CPI(M)-led Left Front’s embarrassing loss, the voice of dissent in the family grew strong and calls for state secretary Surjya Kanta Mishra’s resignation started doing the rounds. The three-storeyed building in central Kolkata, from where party mandarins have run the show for years, has worn a mostly deserted look since the afternoon of May 19. What echoed through the corridors of 33, Alimuddin Street was a grumbling, emanating from a deeply felt sense of betrayal. 

Senior CPI(M) leaders were quick to put the blame on the Congress, with whom they had struck a loose coalition. Voices of reason within the party, and the larger Left family, however, have pointed out that the verdict — resounding for Mamata Banerjee’s Trinamool Congress — did not just go against them but was also a rejection of its coalition with the Congress. The Left’s further slide in vote-share percentage also seemed to point out that its ideological bankruptcy has been exposed. 

The electorate seems to have resoundingly refused to accept old rivals joining hands, more so since CPI(M) leaders clamoured to shake hands with the Congress, a party that almost belongs to the other end of the political spectrum, not to be considered a natural ally. Even though the Left has provided support from the sidelines to two Congress-led governments at the Centre, the “workable” formula of leaders from both ends rubbing shoulders at campaign rallies did not seem to have been a convincing factor for a large number of voters.

In their desire for power, a proclivity the CPI(M) in Bengal is probably finding hard to shed after a regime spanning over three decades, they hid behind a provision of the last party congress resolutions, which suggests taking a case by case decision on alliances, from state to state, albeit as a last bit measure. Even though the undercurrents went mostly unnoticed, the common voter did not seem to like the idea of the Left compromising on its basic ideology just in the pursuit of power.

If the Left’s ideological bankruptcy pushed many voters towards the Trinamool, or in some cases, even the BJP, the lack of any organised movement against the ruling party and an over-dependency on the media, also did not seem to work for the Red brigade. Even as the surfacing of the controversial ‘Narada’ footage and the deadly collapse of an under-construction flyover in Kolkata provided them with the necessary arsenal, Left leaders took the fight to be addressed via the media. The Left, which rose to power on the merit of its mass movements in the 1950s and 1960s, seemed to have shed all such habits. 

The electoral success of communist parties in India is intricately related to mass movements, tempered by prolonged struggles. Between the 1950s and 1970s, the Left spearheaded grassroots movements, setting the ground with continuous opposition to “Congress misrule”. It reached a pinnacle in October 1959 with Khadya Andolan or ‘ration uprising’, when 80 people fell to police action, following food riots. Few years before this, in 1956, the erstwhile Chief Minister of Bengal, Dr Bidhan Chandra Roy, and his Bihar counterpart, Krishna Kanta Singh, came to an agreement on merging the two states. 

Then still one party, the CPI launched a series of marches, rallies and street-corner meetings, building public opinion against the merger. At the same time, the sudden demise of prominent astrophysicist Dr Meghnad Saha, an elected Left member to the Bengal Constituent Assembly, led to a bye-election. Irked by the sustained ‘disturbance’, Roy called on the Leader of the Opposition, Jyoti Basu, and proposed that if the Left won the bye-election, he would accept it as a referendum against the merger. 

Then also the state party secretary, Basu — he later evolved into India’s ‘Marxist’ patriarch — accepted the challenge and led his party to victory. Riding on the success of these movements, the United Front wrested power in Bengal in 1967 and 1969. While history was not written in a day, it is time for the CPI(M) Politburo and state leaders to learn from the past. 

Instead of launching movements to draw in the masses and enthusing cadres to march on, leaders preferred air-conditioned studios over sunny streets. Despite the poll season being heralded as the coalition’s ‘Bengal spring’, it began to look more like the means to an end, eyeing the big chair as prize. With nothing to show, when weighed against the populist politics of dole Mamata practiced, the Left received a beating worse than in 2011. 

A glance through the 2016 poll results also reveals that while the coalition was formed after working out that transferability of votes between the two is possible, even if Left supporters voted for Congress candidates, the reverse might not have happened at many places, particularly in North Bengal, where Congress has a better presence. Already pushed to number three in the House, the biggest crisis the Left now faces is to counter BJP’s rise to become the viable and primary Opposition force. Despite hardly any ‘Modi’ wave at work, the BJP lost just around 4 per cent of its 17 per cent vote share and at places even ate into the Left’s. 

The CPI(M) is now faced with an existential dilemma: should it return to the core values of mass movement or keep trying its electoral luck till the party  is rendered obsolete? If these are the troubles waiting outside the gates of Alimuddin Street, a cyclone is quietly gathering strength inside. It is not just Mishra, even party general secretary Sitaram Yechury, a supporter of the coalition, could get badly hurt. For now, he has managed to keep at bay the sharpened knives but the question remains: for how long? What waits on the other side is a possible tempest, wrapped in a metaphor. 

The author is a Kolkata-based senior journalist