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.

Recently, Industry Minister Nirupam Sen announced an enhanced compensation package for the people of Singur whose land has been acquired for the Tata Motors project. The opposition, led by Mamata Banerjee, debunked it but could not offer any alternative solution. That came from unexpected quarters, when Amartya Sen, while giving a lecture in London on the occasion of 150 years of the 1857 mutiny, referred to the issue. A newspaper report stated that while answering a question from the audience, Sen said a compensation package should be based on market price and on what the likely price of that land would be when converted into industrial land. The West Bengal government often swears by Sen, yet, despite Sen's views being reported in a widely circulated Bengali daily, no government or opposition leader chose to go public.

Meanwhile, the state government has resorted to a deceptive media strategy — of course, spending from the public exchequer. An insider confides that since the Singur-Nandigram controversy, the department of information and cultural affairs commissioned various advertising agencies to start a campaign to build up public consent for the state's industrialisation bid. The '30-years-of-Left' celebrations have given further scope to the campaign. No one knows the total budget, but, according to sources, it could be anything between Rs 70 to 100 crore. A media campaign of this sort probably has its roots in the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government's multi-crore 'India Shining' campaign, which backfired in the last general elections, especially in rural India. Indeed, this media campaign in Bengal is apparently the brainchild of the chief minister himself; according to an insider, before their public release all major campaign slogans are shown to him for approval. Cynics are pointing out the uncanny historical coincidence: how come the CPI(M) is toeing the BJP line, and that too a failed strategy? After India Shining, will it be 'Bengal Shining' this time?

This desperation is not without reason. Earlier, the CPI(M)'s party organisation could reach people at the grassroots very effectively. In the last 30 years, party membership has grown more than 10 times, from 22,000 to 290,000. Its various front organisations have nearly three crore members. Yet, the number of 'wholetimers' (full-time activists) are relatively stagnating: from 2,100 in 1977 to 3,200 in 2007. In its bid to broaden its support base, the CPI(M) has been co-opting various sections, including the business community, within its fold. Over a period of time, large sections of the 'non-Bengali' business community came to support the party with funds or otherwise, metamorphosing the CPI(M) into a mass party like the Congress.

However, as recent events show, the party has been losing contact with the grassroots. Nandigram was a case in point where the party failed to gauge the mood of the people and underestimated their determination to resist the government's bid to acquire farm land for setting up a chemical hub. Rezzak Molla, whose feet are firmly rooted to rural Bengal, understands the shifting ground. He laments that compared with early days, today, very few party members are interested in working as 'wholetimers'. More people come for “other benefits” and miscellaneous gains.

Thus, the extra fat gathered by the party in power, in its ever-expanding membership drive, did not come handy at the time of crisis. It's not surprising therefore that nothing came out of state secretary Biman Bose's three-month long political campaign in rural Bengal to dispel the 'misunderstanding'  on Nandigram. In the meantime, CPI(M) lost the Panshkura municipality polls. Panshkura is not far from Nandigram. The results of other municipalities and panchayats have brought little relief; there were no gains, rather losses in some of CPI(M) strongholds. On July 22 this year, municipal elections will be held in Haldia, in the immediate neighbourhood of Nandigram. In the last elections, the CPI(M) won all the seats in Haldia as opposition candidates withdrew their nominations at the last moment, leading to speculations that they were enticed into withdrawing at the instance of CPI(M)'s locally influential supremo, Laxman Seth, who is widely perceived as the 'mastermind' behind the Nandigram brutality. This time, however, the emboldened opposition is expected to put up a strong fight. For the CPI(M), the challenge is to retain, if not all, at least most of the wards. The party has already sent four state secretariat members there to supervise the election campaign.

In May 2008, West Bengal will go to the polls to elect new representatives to its three-tier panchayat system. A spectre is haunting the CPI(M), the spectre of Nandigram; and the party is not in a position to politically respond to the challenge. Therefore, a hapless Buddhadev Bhattacharya has chosen to resort to a corporate propaganda strategy to win over the masses. The catch is that every day, everything looks more and more like the ghost of BJP's  infamous 'India Shining'.