To the Comrades in Bengal

The 2011 Bengal assembly election is now over. A synthetically manufactured socio-
political commotion that had embarked on a plotted journey from mid-2007 has finally
arrived at its logical end. The much hyped circle of poriborton (change) is now complete.
An assorted conglomerate of anti-Left elements, personified by the “magnanimous”
Trinamool chieftain Mamata Banerjee have triumphed over a thirty-four years long
uninterrupted Left Front rule in this eastern Indian state – the longest-serving elected
communist government in the world. The euphoria over the victory in the anti-Left camp
is therefore obvious. Prominent renegades, fence-sitter Leftists, drawing room
revolutionaries and the awake-aware intellectuals have also joined to sing the celebration
chorus. The winners and their embedded friends in the mainstream corporate media have
announced with a big sigh of relief that Bengal, at last, is free. The people, we are told, is
now liberated from a tyrannical and sluggish regime which has destroyed every aspect of
democratic rights in the state. The Left’s terrible debacle, we are edified again and again,
is therefore nothing less than historic. On the other side, a stoic silence has been observed
from the losers who have gracefully accepted the people’s mandate and are presently
tiring to protect their grass-root workers from the vicious attack launched against them by
the victorious Trinamool goons.

A distinctive feature of this election, too obvious to be doubted, is the unprecedented,

near total consolidation of anti-Left forces. All sorts of incongruent political elements, the
ultra-Leftists, the separatists, the centrists as well as the reactionary Rightists, had
deliberately assembled together with the singular aim to defeat the Left Front. This
election has also seen an extraordinarily antagonistic, insolent and biased campaign by
the corporate media against the Communist Party of India (Marxist). Though anti-Left
campaign by the mainstream media is nothing new during elections, this time the modus
operandi, dimension and range of the media campaign has actually crossed every
imaginable limit. In an act of desperation, the corporate media perhaps have overlooked
the fact that an overdose of anti-Left bias can turn counterproductive in the long run.

Yet, the results have come like a body blow to the Left Front, particularly to the CPI(M),
for a special reason. The way in which the party has lost the elections is not only stunning
but also unprecedented in the party’s legislative history in the state. Almost all of its
stalwarts including incumbent chief minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee have lost in huge
margins to the opposition; many greenhorns of the opposition combine have emerged as
giant-killers. The Marxists are also been routed from the four districts considered to be
their traditional stronghold – Bardhaman, Bankura, West Midnapore and Purulia. The
most shocking news for the CPI(M) came from the Maoist infested Jangalmahal area
where in the past two years over 122 party activists were brutally annihilated, their
families were attacked, hundreds of homes were burnt and thousands were displaced. In
the fourteen Maoist-affected rural constituencies in Jangalmahal the Left Front has won
only seven assembly seats. They were defeated in their stronghold Salboni and also in
Jhargram that includes Lalgarh – the epicenter of the Maoist movement in the region.
Earlier, the masses had never completely believed the lies spread against the Left parties
and their leaders. This time they did.
From the moment the results were declared, Left Front and CPI(M) nitpickers are having
a field day. They are yelling from the rooftops: Isn’t it true that the Left Front has
ultimately paid the price for their arrogance, for imposing their myopic vision, for their
incapability to deliver good governance, for their autocratic approach to control each and
every democratic institutions, for their absolute but needless interference in the daily
lives of the people, for unleashing a reign of terror in the countryside to maintain their
supremacy? Have they not tried to cripple the people of Bengal and prevented them to
flourish like the people of many “vibrant” states of the country like Gujarat or
Maharashtra? Why the Bengalis needed to leave their homeland in numbers in search of
better education, medical facilities and jobs? The decade long Left rule, as one Rupert
Murdock blessed media group tells us, has ruined the state to such a level that it will be
difficult, if not impossible, for the new government to repair the damage in just one term.

Curiously enough, these viewpoints are not only raised by the vociferous critics of the
Left but are also seen to be shared by many of their well-meaning advocates too. Even
the Communist Party of India (CPI) general secretary A.B. Bardhan has jumped into the
fray with his “spirited” opinion that the electoral debacle in Bengal is the fallout of
arrogance and corruption that has crept in among the cadres and leaders at certain levels
and a series of “mistakes and sins of omission and commission.” Everyone seems to have
grown wiser after the event.

***

From close to 50 per cent in the previous 2006 elections, the Left Front’s share of total
votes has sharply reduced to just over 41 per cent in the present. Though the opposition
TMC-Congress combine has received just 6 per cent more votes than the Left parties and
the CPI(M) has still retained a core base, compared to the 2009 Lok Sabha elections the
Left’s vote-share has reduced an additional 2.2 per cent. How is it possible that the
Marxists who brag on their incisive organizational strength failed to even sense this
immense public mood? Is it not then a clear indication, as one observer has judiciously
concluded, how much detached they were from ground reality? Former Left Front
minister and noted essayist Ashok Mitra has bitterly criticized the Left leadership for
displaying a “grotesque” optimism and “ridiculous self-confidence” on the eve of vote
counting.

However, C.P. Chandrasekhar and Jayati Ghosh has shown in their post-election analysis
that this optimism most likely came from the fact that the Left Front had indeed managed
to considerably improve its performance by gaining nearly 1.1 million additional votes
compared to the 2009 Lok Sabha elections. “Not only was the Left Front vote in 2011
very close to that in 2006,” the authors have observed, “this increase was almost equal to
the extent by which the Left Front had fallen short of the votes of the TMC-Congress
combine in 2009.” The authors have further noted that even if “more people actually did
come out to vote for Left parties than had done so in 2009 […] the party cadre apparently
did not anticipate that many more people would turn out to vote for the opposition.”
(Emphasis added) The opposition combine had the last laugh as 72 per cent of the 4.8
million overall votes which has increased between 2009 and 2011 have gone in their
favor whereas the Left was able to garner only 23 per cent of the votes. A significant
number of these additional votes came from the women voters. The women of Bengal, as
some commentators have suggested, seems to have strongly identified with the famous
lady.

Another point is worth noting. While the Left Front this time has received 19.6 million
votes and ended up with just 61 of the 294 seats, in the previous 2006 assembly elections
it had secured 19.8 million votes and yet won a massive 235 seats. Thus a fundamental
question is raised by human rights activist and blogger Vidya Bhushan Rawat: “Just 6%
of shift in votes has changed the fortunes of the left in West Bengal reflect a serious
concern of all of us that we need to discuss on the issue of electoral reform. How can a
mere 6% difference create loss of 162 seats?” The Left Democratic Front (LDF) in
Kerala, however, has lost the election by a slender margin and was also successful to
slightly increase its vote-share from the 2006 assembly elections. LDF’s vote-share in the
2011 elections is just under less than one per cent of what the opposition UDF has
acquired.

***

While gloating at the defeat, congenital Left detractors are pretending to be greatly
worried about the Left’s future too! Advising to scrap Lenin and Stalin along with the
ideological commitments, media-bred pundits have recommended that the Left parties in
India now must “challenge existing beliefs and assumptions” to follow the path of
revisionism and convert themselves into Social Democrats – just like what their Eastern
European counterparts have done after the collapse of the Soviet Union. From the barrage
of advices pitched towards them from all directions, the Left leaders and workers must be
having a hard time to distinguish between the “friendly” and the “fiendish”. Furthermore,
a malicious attack has been systematically instigated to dilute the historic contribution of
the Left Front in Bengal – the remarkable role they have played to deepen grassroots
democracy through decentralization of power, to uphold communal harmony for more
than three successive decades, for distributing land to the sharecroppers, for bringing the
poor and marginalized into the democratic mainstream and giving them the respect they
deserve.

It was certain that when the law of Dialectics takes its own course, the Left Front
government of Bengal was bound to fall. However strong it may be, no political party or
alliance can remain invincible forever in a democracy. “In a democracy, political parties
win and lose electoral battles,” commented senior journalist M.R. Narayan Swamy in a
recent article. “There is no Shakespearean tragedy in the rout of the Left in West
Bengal.” Why then some of us are feeling heartbroken and the others are trying to phrase
the election results as a catastrophe for the Left? No doubt, the 34 year-long stint in
absolute power is one of the key reasons behind such attitudes to develop. It will also be
wrong to deny that a good section of the Left leadership and workers at various levels
took the people of Bengal for granted and had started to think and behave like an
everlasting ruler. Then there is another oblivious section among the Left’s extended
family which had completely forgotten that winning elections is not the only purpose or
the real marker of the significance and strength of the communist parties. The wise
masses have given a fitting reply against these attitudes.

Has the time come to write an elegy for the Left? Will it be possible for the major Left
parties in the country to recover from this enormous defeat? These are the fundamental
questions which has prompted much discussion and debate in various corners in and
outside the country today. Instead of backing away after the defeat, the Left parties must
look-up at the silver lining outshining the gloom. The election results have provided a
unique opportunity for them. First of all, after a long time they are now free from the
apparent obligations of balancing their “words and deeds” while functioning to run two
state governments in Bengal and Kerala within the parameters of a fiercely competitive
neo-liberal bourgeois democratic framework. After a long time, the Left parties will not
have to constantly defend or explain their inner contradictions, alleged as “duplicity” or
“hypocrisy” by the critics, for adopting the neo-liberal policies on one hand and opposing
pro-US neo-liberalism on the other. They have nothing further to lose and therefore there
will be no need now to go on defending the concentrated attack launched against them on
this question. Instead, they have more time to focus on past mistakes, seriously
introspect, undertake in-depth analysis and initiate systematic rational debates within
itself which will eventually help to generate newer ideas on their future approaches to
socio-political issues. They now have a golden opportunity to transform themselves from
within and reinvent a creative Left Front – reflecting the aspirations of the masses, being
uncompromising in their anti- imperialist, anti-liberalism stand.

The Left parties will have the wonderful chance to sharpen their praxis and launch waves
after waves of vigorous mass movements against the mounting imposition of economic
burdens on the livelihood of the people. They have the capacity to emerge as a dedicated,
meaningful and uncompromising opposition force protesting each and every anti-people
policies of the corrupt Congress government at the central and its tributary in Bengal. We
sincerely believe that it is only the Left parties who can take-up such a crusader role.
They will also have more time now to rethink, reorganize and bounce back stronger with
a viable, structurally reformative and alternative concept of governance.

On the other side, the Trinamool led government will gradually get strangled in its own
web of perilous incongruity. The hideous rogue elements which are carefully kept
obscured as of now will soon take full charge of the situation. News reports has already
started rolling out that 38 per cent of the victorious Trinamool legislators are facing
pending criminal cases against them which includes serious charges like murder, attempt
to murder, theft and kidnapping. The crooks, buffoons and cunning opportunists, those
who have been steadily creeping into the Trinamool bandwagon for quite some time will
start demanding their pound of flesh. The “matured” media-made “honest and humble”
new chief minister has afforded quite a lot of time and money to change the color of her
skin. “I am against the Left here but not against Leftism. I share the values of the old
Left,” she had boasted in order to emotionally impress the Left-minded voters just a few
days before the crucial election. Though it looks like she has succeeded to impress them
for the moment, the people of Bengal will eventually realize that a snake, after all,
remains a snake.

Keeping in mind the core composition of the new rulers, certain possibilities are almost
inevitable. Shortly after the honeymoon period is over, the feel-good factor will vanish
into the blue. Many of the bombastic ideas, the duplicitous “leftist” slogans and hollow
policy concepts will eventually get exposed as plain rubbish. The demand to fulfill the
bogus promises will grow louder and louder. Bertrand Russell once made a distinction
about the difference between change and progress. “Change,” he wrote, “is scientific,
progress is ethical; change is indubitable, whereas progress is a matter of controversy.”
On their “progressive” path towards a “change”, Mamata Banerjee and her Ma-Mati-
Manush (Mother-Earth-People) army of gallant warriors will start churning out a
sufficient amount of illegitimate and divisive stuff and eventually create ground for a
complete reversal of the circumstances. Time will come when the victors of today will
recognize why it is too dangerous to gamble with people’s lives.

So, there is no real need to rush. Responding to the new chief minister’s “courteous”
opening, popular CPI(M) leader Gautam Deb has written the following words in an
article in his party organ Ganashakti: “We have taken an oath – for the sake of Bengal,
for the sake of the country, for the sake of democracy and for the sake of courteousness
we will return you your teachings in due course.” Deb then wrote with conviction, “We
have taken an oath – to meet up again on the grand road of struggle.”

***

The primary task of the Left Front parties is to win back the people’s trust they have lost.
It will be a terrible blunder to lose faith on the ordinary masses who are disenchanted
right now. The corrupt elements occupying a good portion of the deck also need to be
ruthlessly weeded out. The Left parties must concentrate on widening and strengthening
their social base with more imagination, maturity and integrity. This is a pivotal task and
is easy to say than done. But it is the only way for the Left Front to pull off a stunning
comeback.

Meanwhile, we want to ask all the Leftist critics of the Left Front to spare some time and
ponder why the neo-liberal, pro-US lobby requires to aggressively and repeatedly suggest
the “end of the Left in India” after Left Front's defeat in Bengal and Kerala. We really do
not want to disagree with these adored critics when they say that the Left in India is
certainly not the Left Front parties alone. But how can we deny or ignore the significant
contribution and relevance of the Left Front parties in contemporary India? Only an
iniquitous mind or a fool can afford to do so.