The Left learns the pitfalls of arrogance

The astounding outcome for the Communist Party of India Marxists, which is a rout in West Bengal and a debacle when the Kerala results are added to its total haul in this general election, is the people’s verdict. The impact of the punch delivered by the vote of no confidence in the CPM’s leadership has pole-axed the comrades.

In West Bengal and in Kerala the CPM-led Left Front has been decimated; of the 42 seats in West Bengal, the Left struggled to salvage a third, while the Trinamool Congress and its ally the Congress picked up the rest, barring Darjeeling where the Bharatiya Janata Party won with the support of the separatist Gorkha Janamukti Morcha. In Kerala, the Left was down to five seats out of 20 and only in Tripura did the comrades manage to retain the two seats.

Instead of the Left triumphantly leading a “Third Alternative,” people especially in West Bengal clearly feel that the CPM in its current shape and arrogance is not worthy of that responsibility. By rejecting the Left’s claim to representing the “people”, and their aspirations, the electorate has signalled its disapproval of a leadership that failed at several different levels.

The famously efficient organisation of the CPM and its capacity to reach out to the “people” was caught unawares and obviously failed to register the disapproval that had built up among the voters. In other words, the connection of the party to the grassroots had snapped and the CPM, which may have guessed that it was losing touch with its base following the outcome of the panchayat results in 2008, did not figure how comprehensively it had been cut off.

The reasons for the breakdown between the party, its organisation and the masses are a combination of the quality of governance of the West Bengal government, grown weak and slack after 32 years in power, the claustrophobic climate of a politics that intruded and decided on matters that ranged from the personal to the public, and the outsize role that the CPM had arrogated to itself backed by its conviction that the state was a pocket borough that would do exactly what it was told. The people proved the party wrong.

By aggressively attacking the CPM and relentlessly reminding voters that the political environment had grown stifling, the Trinamool Congress gave voice to long suppressed anger.

By recognising and respecting that anger and its demand that an “alternative” to the CPM was the minimum that the fragmented opposition could offer, the seat adjustment between the Congress and the Trinamool Congress became not a matter of political tactics, but a representation of people’s aspirations. The Congress on its own offered the prospect of a stable government at the Centre that had unrolled policies that were pro-people.

At one level, there was disbelief when the Left asserted that it had taken the leadership in pushing through the pro-people reforms agenda in the shape of the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act and the farm loan waiver, the huge increases in Sarva Siksha Abhiyaan and the National Rural Health Mission, because the implementation of all these programmes in West Bengal was less than impressive, thus nullifying the claims.

At another level, the reckless rush to “industrialise” West Bengal and transform its economic landscape by riding roughshod over people, whose sentiments as well as sense of entitlement was injured via land acquisition, deepened the disconnect.

Therefore, in Nandigram there was a resistance that was picked up and the seed capital was converted into huge profits by the opposition. In Singur, the willing and the unwilling farmers remained passive while the Trinamool Congress and the CPM collided over the Nano factory.

The passive response of the “people” in Singur and elsewhere ought to have alerted the CPM that it was losing its legendary link to its once upon a time rural base. By the time the CPM began to realise the magnitude of the problems it faced politically, the game had begun to get out of hand.

As is now obvious, the electorate across the country has in successive elections in different states rewarded good governance or rather its perception of a government that works for to deliver benefits, advantages and opportunities to it. It is also obvious that the electorate does not approve of adventurism and opportunistic politics.

The verdict in West Bengal suggests that the combination of the two is a measure of the people’s perception that the CPM has opted for highly dubious and perhaps unhygienic politics by picking up partners that it would have once upon a time treated as untouchable.

In Orissa, the CPM rushed to join forces with the Biju Janata Dal the moment it snapped ties with the Bharatiya Janata Party. In Tamil Nadu it made common cause with Jayalalitha abandoning its 2004 partner the DMK without a clearly identifiable reason.

In befriending Mayawati in Uttar Pradesh having attacked her over the years, the CPM converted itself into a party without either the squeamishness that bestowed some sort of distinction on it in the past or the scruples that underpinned its claims to be principled in politics. An electorate that is famously politically conscious viewed it all and has now delivered the thumbs down. But it is a clever verdict, because the change that Mamata Banerjee demands can only happen when the next state assembly elections are due in 2011.