Comment

The poll outcome has been seen as marking the end of Marxist rule in West Bengal. However, it is possible to argue that the last 34 years when the Left Front occupied Kolkata’s Writers Building were an aberration in the sense that the ascent of the comrades was due to the follies of their opponents rather than any intrinsic merit of their own.

Although this is true of nearly all electoral results, the unusual nature of the earlier Leftist hegemony is underlined by the fact that through all these years, the non-Left vote was a virtually unshakeable 40%. This meant that the so-called Marxist era in West Bengal was an oddity. Nothing brought out the unreality of this perception more than in 2006 when the difference between the Left’s vote and that of the non-Left Front parties, which included the Left-wing Socialist Unity Centre, was a mere 1%.

If the preferences of the voters are seen in terms of percentages, therefore, and not seats, then to call West Bengal a Leftist state or describe Friday’s resignation of Buddhadev Bhattacharjee as chief minister as the end of an era will be wrong. It was an arithmetic sleight of hand which enabled the Left to retain its control. Moreover, it learnt to play this trick after the 1967 elections, when the two rival Leftist formations — the United Left Front led by the CPI(M), and the People’s United Left Front which included the CPI — won more seats than the Congress and was, therefore, able to form the government.

Split in the Congress
Even this forward movement by the Left would not have been possible but for the split in the Congress, which saw Ajoy Mukherji walk out of the party to form his Bangla Congress, which included the then virtually unknown Pranab Mukherjee. This was the first mistake of the Left’s adversaries while the commissars learnt the value of sticking together. Herein lay the germ of the Left Front of 1977 which commenced its uninterrupted 34 years of rule in that year.

But they would not have been able to embark on that journey but for the Congress’s folly of the Emergency which led to the fall of Siddhartha Shankar Ray’s government in 1977. After all, it had come to power with a massive majority in 1972, based largely on popular revulsion against the politics of violence associated with the communist rule from 1967 onwards, which compelled the then chief minister, Ajoy Mukherji, to describe his own government as barbaric.

So upset were the comrades about their reputation for violence that they were willing to fight the 1977 elections under the Janata Party led by former chief minister PC Sen. It was the latter’s mistake in believing that the Janata Party’s 1977 victory was his own, which made him reject the Left’s offer of collaboration, thus paving the way for the latter’s victory.

To believe, therefore, that the communists came to power because of their popularity would be a mistake. The Left Front’s unity helped it to stave off the challenge posed by its political enemies, despite their 40%-strong support base. This division became wider when Mamata Banerjee formed the Trinamool Congress.

‘Progressive’ reputation
While the Left’s rule was based on statistical advantage and not ideological conviction, it is also true that an influential section of the intelligentsia, including writers like Manik Bandopadhyay, Samaresh Basu and Mahashweta Devi, film-makers like Satyajit Ray and Mrinal Sen, and academics like Sumit Sarkar, Amiya Bagchi and Amartya Sen were Left-oriented. This wasn’t true, however, of genuinely heavyweight litterateurs like Tarashankar Bandopadhyay or Bibhuti Bhusan Bandopadhyay, not to mention Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay. But, while their writings largely eschewed politics, the pro-Left were more vocal and were, therefore, able to exercise considerable influence.

It was their earlier clout which justified West Bengal’s “progressive” reputation. But the end of the Marxist era could be said to have begun when the intelligentsia began to realize that the CPI(M) hadn’t lived up to their expectations. Mrinal Sen’s film, Padatik, reflected this disenchantment. It is when the fellow-travellers began to desert the Left that its decline began. Mamata completed the process by reversing the earlier margin of votes. It is her alliance which has retained its 49 per cent while the comrades got 41.

— The writer is a Delhi-based political commentator