THE state of West Bengal is a puzzle for most analysts and critics. They are hard put to explain the absence of political change or, more precisely, any change in government. After all, if all states face an ubiquitous anti-incumbency factor, what makes West Bengal an exception?

Though the CPI(M) led government has not changed for more than three decades, much nevertheless has changed in this part of India – more specifically that the Left has become Right and the Right Left. This essay addresses some of these puzzles and takes a somewhat longer view of political change and its prospects in Bengal, especially in the wake of popular struggles against the regime and the slow awakening of civil society.

The first period of major social and political change in recent times came about between the mid-1960s and the mid-1980s. In the mid-1960s, the Left led United Front governments and militant peoples’ movements frontally attacked the old structures of power and privilege in the economy, society and polity. This led to a violent counter-attack by the Indian state and the return to power of the Congress in 1972. The parliamentary Left then made a historic compromise with the state and capital.

This Left which came to power in 1977 introduced three major changes: first, agrarian reforms put a formal end to semi-feudal landlordism in rural Bengal and created the most enduring and widespread social basis of support among the rural poor for the government. Second, through panchayati raj, the Left created a powerful ally in the rural middle classes – rich and middle peasants and teachers. Third, the Left-led Bengali middle class, especially the lower middle classes, came to establish its political and cultural hegemony over the state of Bengal. This accounts for the continuity of the Left government. Moreover, the Congress still remains discredited for its violence and misrule between 1972 and 1977.

Officially, though the CPM does not believe that anything of significance can be achieved within the parliamentary frame without a revolution, not only has the revolution not happened, the party itself soon ceased to believe in its possibility. In fact, it had not even expected to remain in power. As Jyoti Basu admitted, ‘We never before had imagined that we would be able to form a government and that it would last so long.’¹ Likewise, Buddhadeb Bhattacharya said, ‘We never imagined we would rule from Writers’ Building.’²

 

Despite having introduced agrarian changes and provided some ‘immediate relief’ to the people, the CPM’s ideology did not allow it to believe that anything more substantial could be achieved. In fact, it soon started losing support in urban areas; it could not address the normal, everyday bourgeois aspirations of the middle classes. Nor could the Left restructure the constitutional order and acquire greater powers to pursue a Nehruvian development model. Ideology came in the way of a new imaginary of social change and development within the parliamentary frame.

Even as its support base enabled it to win elections, a lack-lustre performance in key areas of development and well-being started pushing Bengal to add another ‘B’ to the infamous acronym BIMARU, much like Ekta Kapoor’s soaps. Finally, with the liberalizing of the economy in the 1990s, the Left Front could no longer blame the Centre for denying it opportunities for growth.

It is against this background that major changes came about in the politics and perspectives of the Left. To get out of this impasse it sought the help of international consultancy firms, who advised the government to pursue an openly pro-capitalist economic growth model. Consequently, it went all out to attract investment and do all that was necessary to make Bengal an attractive and safe investment destination. Calcutta’s roads were sought to be cleared of hawkers, flyovers constructed, modern townships came up by displacing peasants, and ‘closed’ industries provided sites for shopping malls and high-end flats. Yet, despite its best efforts, the promised investments were unable to match the hype.

It was only after Buddhadeb Bhattacharya became chief minister in 2001, that the party went the whole hog to get investments. The CPM embarked on a project to bring about a new transformation of Bengal – a transition to capitalism in the time of globalization, with the communists acting as midwives.

Bhattacharya is generally known to be candid, often to the point of being brusque, unlike his predecessor Jyoti Basu. His slogan was ‘reform or perish’ and his inspiration and model was contemporary China. It meant building a capitalism which combines living in hi-tech cities, complete with the glitz and glamour of shopping malls and entertainment, alongside the violent and brutal state-led primitive accumulation of capital by dispossessing the direct producers of their means of production and a renewed bid to extract natural resources. Industry may need to be set up in Special Economic Zones, which for all practical purposes have become sovereign enclaves enjoying special privileges without bothering about political rules and responsibility.

 

Under this model, the government initiated a series of projects, all claiming to bring about prosperity to the poor of Bengal. Of these the chemical hub in Nandigram and the Tata Motors plant in Singur are the most well-known, but the others were equally impressive – ranging from private highways, hi-tech cities, steel plants, nuclear plants and knowledge industries to Formula 1 motor race courses and a tourist paradise in Sundarbans, one of the most ecologically fragile deltas of the world. Many of these, of course, did not take off.

 

This phenomenon caused both a real dislocation – eviction, loss of livelihoods, cultures and communities accompanied by increased suffering and inequality – and a deep fear of an impending disaster, especially among the peasantry. The peasants felt betrayed by a government which had given them land, power and dignity and towards which they were steadfastly loyal. This immense resentment and anger culminated in the peasant upsurge in Singur and Nandigram against the forcible acquisition of land. Soon, it became evident that the chief minister’s grandiose schemes were not bringing about any improvement in the lives of the people; consequently, the Left started slowly losing its credibility. This was the beginning of the coming of political change in Bengal.

The Left’s popularity rested on three major claims. First, that it represented the poor and the forces of long-term historical progress, meaning socialism and, second, its promise to reverse the general decline of Bengal on account of the Centre’s discriminatory attitude. Nevertheless, after nearly three decades of Left rule, it was found that Bengal was lagging in many of the key indicators of development, as revealed in the state’s Human Development Report. The contrast with Kerala was obvious. Poverty was widespread and there were nagging reports of starvation deaths in villages and suicides of a large numbers of workers of closed industries.³ According to a recent government survey, close to half a million people in the state are living under starvation conditions.⁴

The Bengali middle class, who prides itself on its education, culture and intelligentsia, increasingly found a stifling mediocrity buttressed by political power calling the shots in all fields. In fact, a third reason for the Left’s claim to fame was its immaculate secular credentials and as a champion of the minorities. Unfortunately for the LF government, a series of events worked to explode its secular myth: first, the banning of Tasleema Nasreen’s autobiography and her subsequent banishment from Bengal to pander to conservative Muslim sentiments. In this the Left appeared no different from the Right, which had to always keep its vote banks in mind. The second event was the role of the government, including top police officials close to Buddhadeb Bhattacharya, in the Rizwan-ur-Rahman case. The government till date continues to support the police officials making evident its class and communal bias. Finally, the Sachar Committee report on the state of the minorities in West Bengal came as a big shock.

 

Behind the facade of its radical ideology and image, the Left had become the new rulers, who not only displayed their power, arrogance and intolerance of any dissent, but also had come to ally with global capital to embark on the renewed primitive accumulation process. The CPM dominated the entire state machinery and in the process subverted the rule of law and the Constitution. It captured civil society and turned both the form and substance of democracy into a near farce.⁵ It openly espoused a neo-liberal growth model.

The Left had developed deep stakes in the state and government. It was this transformation of the Left, which led it to not only acquire prime farmland in Singur and Nandigram, but also explains the intensity of state and party repression and violence on the protesting peasants. Over time the Left lost its passion, its intellectual and cultural resources; it essentially became a mammoth machine and a pretty efficient one at that. Buddhadeb Bhattacharya and his government, however, became the darling of the big media and chambers of commerce.

 

The political opposition was for long in a sorry state in West Bengal. The Congress was not only discredited, demoralized and often in disarray, many of its leaders were seriously accused of being hand in glove with the government. In fact, a committee was set up by the Congress to enquire into these charges against its own leaders, some of whom were called ‘watermelons’ – green outside but red within. Mamata Banerjee left the Congress and formed the Trinamool Congress (TMC), charging that the former had become the B-team of the CPM. To counter the opposition’s B-team image, Mamata Banerjee relentlessly fought the CPM.

The Left too identified her as its principal enemy and the relationship between the ruling party and the opposition was conducted in the language of enmity, hatred and war. Civility was the main casualty in this political scenario. Early in her career, Mamata was even physically attacked by the CPM. Slowly, the TMC seemed to be emerging as a match for the CPM. It was a no holds barred fight for political supremacy.

 

Mamata’s politics was personalized, passionate and populist; she took to the streets to protest against any injustice. She did not, however, invest in organization building, sustained political work at the grassroots level, or engage in ideological and cultural interventions; nor did she have a solid political programme or a vision for the future. Incidentally it is precisely on all these counts that the Left had become almost invincible in Bengal.

Nonetheless, Mamata’s battle against the Left was conducted in the style and tactics of the Left itself. Her spartan lifestyle, honesty, militancy, a passion for taking up peoples’ issues and her lack of any personal political ambition or greed for power went a long way in forging her charisma and popular appeal. She built herself on the image of the dedicated communist cadres of the 1950s and 1960s on whose work the present regime rests. Actually, many communists privately remark that she is the right person in the wrong party; that she would have been an asset for any communist party was not in doubt. She conducted militant street protests in the copybook communist style of the past. She also resisted the CPM using both parliamentary and what communists call ‘extra-parliamentary’ methods.

This enabled the TMC to build a strong support base among the urban poor and the unorganized working and lower middle classes. Mamata even defeated CPM heavyweight Somnath Chatterjee in South Calcutta and forced him to flee to a safe rural seat in Birbhum. Yet, in spite of some sustained effort, she could not make much of a dent in rural Bengal, especially among the peasantry. The CPM with its organized strength, peasant support, muscle power and state backing crushed all such attempts.

The TMC’s greatest weakness, especially in Bengal’s context, was its inability to make any inroads in the intellectual and cultural world of the middle classes. This is crucial for making any claim for political leadership in West Bengal. Moreover, it is precisely on this count that the CPM has constantly criticized and ridiculed Mamata Banerjee. She was publicly called mad, irrational, whimsical; someone who could not be trusted or dealt with; in short, that she was not an intellectual. She was even likened to a domestic, belonging to the lower order of society, lacking culture, taste and education.

Such accusations, the Left believed, would never make her dear to the Bengali bhadralok, given its derision for the menials. In a bid to make herself acceptable to the bhadralok, Mamata tried to prove that she too was a woman of many parts, nothing less than the secret desire of Bengali intellectuals to be a versatile renaissance personality. She wrote poetry and prose, painted and recorded her songs, and was even duped into getting an American degree, all in an effort to gain respectability.

 

In the last two and a half years, there has been a spate of protest movements involving peasants, the urban and the rural poor, minorities, workers and all kinds of citizens’ initiatives in Bengal. The peasant struggles in Singur and Nandigram, the awakening of Bengali civil society, and the rise of the political opposition have all been turning points in the unchanging politics of Bengal. In May 2006, the Buddhadeb Bhattacharya led Left Front government came back to power with a massive majority with the promise of industrialization and new employment and a renewal of West Bengal which was fast sliding into decay. The people did not realize that this transition to capitalism, though shepherded by the Left, would demand a heavy price. In fact, the day the new government came to power, the chief minister announced Tata’s small car project in Singur. This was followed by a litany of projects by global capitalist firms. The opposition was in disarray and the government seemed to have won over everybody. However, the situation on the ground was not encouraging. Some of the gains made in agriculture had come to a halt in the 1990s; the number of agricultural labourers had grown phenomenally, and the sharecroppers and small peasants could not hold on.

 

The compulsory acquisition of highly fertile land in Singur for private capital failed to get the consent of considerable sections of the peasantry, even though it was touted as benefiting the public interest. The government’s claim that it was acquiring single cropland and was giving the best compensation package in the country came as an arrogant retort. Soon a powerful movement erupted to protect farmland. The government, which had long claimed to represent peasants, workers and the poor, was now pushed into taking extremely repressive measures for taking away land from the peasants.

All this was seen as a major act of betrayal. The government imposed prohibitory orders to prevent people from assembling and used both state and political violence to crush all protest. The intervention of the High Court, however, set aside the prohibitory order against any assembly. The government increasingly became discredited for its violence and illegal actions. Soon the protest in Singur started gathering support from across the state and outside, as several committees at the grassroots level were formed to carry on this struggle. The opposition parties, especially Mamata Banerjee, further galvanized this struggle. She undertook a 25-day fast at a dharna mancha in Calcutta, which became an important site of protest and coordination of the re-emerging civil society of Bengal.

A predominant section of the middle class and intellectuals who had earlier been feted by the government for the first time felt outraged by the government’s actions in Singur and Nandigram. Several intellectuals resigned from government bodies and joined the civil society protests. Quite a few new citizens’ organizations emerged, which came to play a crucial role in this mobilization against the government. Citizens’ activism gave immense encouragement to the peasant struggle on the ground. Even when Mamata was fasting, a young girl, Tapasi Malik, in the forefront of protest in Singur was raped, bludgeoned, and then burnt alive by ruling party activists. This further outraged the moral conscience of Bengal. The role of the State Women’s Commission and the police further antagonized the people. A CBI inquiry led to the arrest of an important district leader of the CPM as the key suspect.

 

Nandigram followed Singur in quick succession as the next destination of capital’s desire for farmland. This time it was for a dangerous chemical hub to be set up over several thousand acres. On receiving the land acquisition notices, the villagers of Nandigram barricaded their area as a kind of zone free of the control of the state. The struggle in Nandigram saw high levels of violence by the state and the armed cadres of the CPM and massive public protest by citizens, something unprecedented in the 32-year rule of the Left Front.

For the first time in the state several political forces and formations were converging to form an alternative to the Left Front. Some of the allies of the CPM, like the RSP and Forward Bloc, put intense pressure on the government to retract from its policy of compulsory acquisition of fertile farmland and brutal repression of democratic movements in its drive to attract capital. Bengal’s season of protest led to a near statewide movement against corrupt ration dealers and the local CPM bosses. Popular protests in rural Bengal led to the crumbling of the authority of the CPM and the erosion of trust of the people.

Meanwhile, a new culture of silent and nonviolent public protest emerged over the death of Rizwanur. The media joined hands to expose both the role of top police officials and the support they received from the government. This mood of defiance was reflected in the panchayat and municipal elections of 2008. Both the SUCI and several Naxalite groups formally allied with TMC, which earlier would have been unthinkable. The opposition, including the Trinamool, had become Left and the ruling Left openly Right.

 

The patterns of social and political change in Bengal have been distinct from most parts of the country. Here class politics, especially a politics dominated by the left-wing middle class, has for long ruled the state in close alliance with the peasantry, the working class and enjoyed a groundswell of support among the poor. The middle class, especially the intellectuals, forged this alliance by acting as the self-appointed guardian of these classes. The Bengali middle class became the leader and representative of the people. The communist parties and left-wing intellectuals perfected this role.

It is now grudgingly accepted that this middle class is overwhelmingly Hindu upper caste and male though, of course, it did not draw upon caste ideology to claim hegemony. The success of this strategy hinged on the peoples’ acceptance of the hegemony of the left-wing middle class. Thus, we find that in Bengal, neither a phenomenon like the backward caste or dalit movement grew.

 

The problem with this perspective and strategy was that it did not have any serious programme of reforms and justice for the present. This strategy was entirely ideology driven and its success hinged on the making of a revolution, which eluded Indian communism. This, we have seen, led to the reversal of policies and surrender to capital. The entire opposition, including Mamata, played upon this betrayal and took up a Left position, not realizing that that this kind of leftism would inevitably lead to an impasse. The problem with this leftism is that it does not have any serious positive programme. It flourishes on negative politics, a politics of popular protest – the cholbe na cholbe na syndrome.

The Mamata phenomenon reflected another crucial aspect; it was not an intellectual or middle class led movement. Her initial support base was the urban and semi-urban slums, unorganized workers, and the self-employed youth, what in Marxist language is called the lumpen proletariat and the riff-raff. Later, she was successful in reaching out to the peasantry and the minorities. In other words, the Left led middle class hegemony of the largely male bhadralok was first put to test by Mamata Banerjee. It was primarily a populist challenge, which grew around Mamata’s personal charisma.

The Gurkhas and the Rajbongshis in North Bengal had earlier challenged the Left hegemonic model, but only in certain pockets. Now following Singur and Nandigram, the Muslims are fast withdrawing their support from the Left. Some are independently asserting themselves under the leadership of Siddiqullah Choudhury; others are drifting closer to the TMC. I think that these processes are the harbinger of a major social and political change in West Bengal. For the first time in Marxist Bengal, the bhadralok elite faces a challenge from the so-called chhotolok or the subalterns.

The left-wing Bengali bhadralok reaction to this challenge has been resolute, often even brutal and uncivil. Intellectuals have openly expressed their fear, anxiety and disgust of these masses. For example, when there was a mammoth rally, a civil society initiative against the carnage in Nandigram, a respected critic and poet openly warned Mamata against joining the rally. Likewise, when Subhas Mukhopadhyay, Bengal’s leading leftist poet passed away, AM in Economic and Political Weekly lamented that towards the end of his life the poet had started keeping ‘coarse company’; meaning, he had become close to Mamata. However, the middle class is splitting and a section is coming out against the Left Front and supporting popular struggles.

 

In the long run the prospects of change will depend upon the peoples’ ability to come up with new imaginaries and strategies of social and political change and development. Unfortunately, on this count even apparently radical Bengali intellectuals have badly failed Bengal. The mere reversal of the role of the Left and the Right is unlikely to take the state anywhere. The independent emergence of popular forces and a new leadership from below, per se, is no guarantee of change for they often mimic the old elites. The first glimmer of new thinking and ideas can, however faintly, be discerned.

 

Footnotes:

1. Foreword to Nirupam Sen, Bikalper Sandhane, Kolkata NBA, 2008 (in Bengali).

2. Interview, Ananda Bazar Patrika, 16 May 2006.

3. Unfortunately, the press has not sufficiently reported the large number of workers’ suicides in communist Bengal. This has been documented by Nagarik Mancha – an independent activist organization – in many of its reports.

4. The Telegraph, Calcutta, 29 September 2008.

5. For details, see Sanjeeb Mukherjee, ‘The Use and Abuse of Democracy in West Bengal’, Economic and Political Weekly, 3 November 2007.