Bangla Shining?

After three decades of power, a spectre is haunting the CPI(M): the spectre of Nandigram. Faced with widespread outrage, the Left Front is  resorting to corporate-style media propaganda

Rajat Roy Kolkata

At the face of it it's celebration time for the CPI(M) in West Bengal. On June 21 this year, the CPI(M)-led Left Front government completed 30 years in power. A rally was organised at Kolkata's Netaji Indoor Stadium where Chief Minister Buddhadev Bhattacharya and former chief minister Jyoti Basu exhorted followers to support the party and the front. The state government has also started a publicity campaign in the print and electronic media, and the party has planned a series of programmes. Yet, one can detect a note of anxiety hidden in the high-pitched rhetoric.

Needless to say, theoretically, the political scenario is loaded in favour of the ruling Left Front. Of the 294 seats in the West Bengal legislative assembly, the Left Front has 235. In the last assembly election in 2005, held under strict supervision of the Election Commission, they garnered 50.24 per cent of the votes, silencing the opposition, which earlier used to attribute CPI(M)'s victories to 'scientific rigging'. The Left Front government started its seventh term very favourably indeed!

Yet, within a year or so, the CPI(M) and its government is faced with a political crisis that they had rarely experienced or anticipated before. The government's industrialisation policy has created a furore; it has led to bloodshed in Singur, widespread outrage against the police-cadre organised Nandigram massacre all over Bengal and India (the daily violence continues in Nandigram with new evidence of brutality, including against women and children), and fierce debate on the nature and process of industrialisation. Not only has it suddenly woken up from its rather arrogant slumber, fissures have also started appearing within the front and party itself.

Senior CPI(M) leader and minister Rezzak Molla put the crisis in perspective: he stressed that the Left Front's key to success lay in land reforms (distribution of vested land to the landless) and Operation Barga (recording names of sharecroppers to protect them from eviction by landowners). Over the years the Left has been enjoying steady mass support in rural Bengal, a factor that gives them a clear edge over the opposition. If this support base is destabilised, it might backfire. And Buddhadev Bhattacharya's government has done precisely that. To attract investments for big business corporates and multinationals, his government started offering fertile agricultural land to them without initiating any consensual dialogue with the farmers, at Singur, Nandigram and elsewhere, often using coercive tactics, police repression and muscle-flexing by the CPI(M) cadre.

After the people of Nandigram resisted the forcible eviction from their land for a massive chemical hub owned by the notorious Indonesian multinational Salem, the government was forced to step back; but the damage was done. Rural Bengal realised that the Left Front regime, which had been so friendly to them in the past, won't hesitate to grab land from them to benefit the big corporates. The government's explanation that the land required for industrialisation will be just about.01 per cent of the total agricultural land in Bengal has failed — the debate just refuses to die out.