Poised for a change

Like the season, a different sentiment is sweeping across West Bengal. Like the ominous pre-monsoon storms, electoral setbacks for the reigning Communist Party of India Marxist (CPM)-led Left Front, starting with the 2008 panchayat , through the 2009 Lok Sabha and the recent  by-elections, can be read as harbingers of a change. The Trinamool Congress has certainly read the signs as such and its campaign slogan has reiterated “change” as an imperative for improving the health of West Bengal. 
The unprecedented November by-election results in which CPM got zero and the Trinamool Congress won seven out of 10 confirm that change is in the air. By acknowledging that it had, of late, grown alienated from the “people”, the CPM’s state leadership confirmed that the Trinamool Congress received a positive endorsement from voters. 

In West Bengal, in the addas of Kolkata, the guess is that the Congress-Trinamool Congress combine can pull of a bare 148 seat win in the 294 seat state assembly. While that would be necessary for the CPM to get thrown out of government, it would not be sufficient as an indicator that the party has lost power. And Mamata Banerjee knows this. 

To make good on her claim that instead of the famous “Red Flag” signifying the CPM’s dominance over rural Bengal, the Trinamool Congress flag will flutter, Banerjee has to get on her own a minimum of 148 seats in the next state assembly elections due in 2011. It is a challenge because chief minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee scored 175 seats for the CPM in 2006 and Jyoti Basu scored 178 seats in 1977. As of now, the Congress has rubbed it in that the Trinamool Congress’s stunning 19-seat victory in the Lok Sabha and the equally dismal nine-wins performance of the CPM was not a one-to-one combat.  

Assuming that West Bengal’s electorate moves in roughly 30 year cycles, the first phase under the Congress and the next 30 plus years under the CPM, Banerjee needs to win by a margin of seats that ensures her reign in the state for at least a decade. Since the leitmotif of politics in Bengal is the misrule of the ruling party, Banerjee’s longevity, once she wins, is guaranteed.

As the party-in-waiting, unburdened by any past track record, the Trinamool Congress is uniquely placed. Unlike other parties-in-waiting elsewhere in India, the Trinamool Congress has no special constituency to serve, barring voters disenchanted by the CPM and those who had been excluded by both the Left and the Congress. While it gives Banerjee greater room to manoeuvre, it also pushes her towards keeping unsavoury company. 

In Nandigram and in Singur, the Trinamool Congress made common cause with whichever political group opposed to the CPM. It was not choosy about the agendas of these groups. It is now evident that the People’s Committee Against Police Atrocities in Lalgarh as well as the anti-land acquisition coalition were used by the Maoists to promote their politics and occupy turf in West Bengal. Banerjee has admitted her proximity of the Maoists/Naxalites by advertising her success in “mainstreaming” some of them. Since the Maoists have declared her their candidate for 2011, it seems obvious that she will get their support.

The re-entry of the ultra Left and its politics of violence in West Bengal is the outcome as much of the CPM’s failure, as it is of the encouragement the Maoists have got from the Trinamool Congress. Because the famous party organisation has grown as dysfunctional as the equally famous inefficient administration, the mounting grievances have touched unbearable highs. From the CPM’s inability to recover morale after its losses in the 2008 panchayat elections, preceded by the fierce confrontation over land acquisition for the Tata Motors factory in Singur, the Nandigram SEZ and its defeat on both counts, it is obvious that the fight has gone out of the party. The differences within the CPM over managing the series of crises that its actions have provoked, from the withdrawal of support to the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance in 2008 to the panic-stricken response over land acquisition conflicts have further eroded the credibility of a weak leadership. 

Missteps by the CPM, the abuse of power by opportunists crowding under the party flag, its badly handled shift to enthusiastically espousing market reforms have all contributed to making space for every sort of opposition to make headway. Because the difference between regular bourgeois parties and the CPM has narrowed, Banerjee can claim, apparently convincingly that she is the “new” and “real” Left leader, despite her three stints as minister in Congress and BJP-led governments at the Centre. With nothing to choose between, West Bengal’s jaded voters seem to be veering round to changing their brand, though it is unclear if the brand they prefer is only Trinamool.