Post- poll tidings

The chief minister will continue to be occupied with the delicate balancing between dministration and agitation

Ashis Biswas Kolkata

The ruling Left Front (LF) resoundingly won the 14th state assembly polls, bagging 235 out of 294 seats, trouncing incumbency and other psephology delights. There has been simplistic speculation that Chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee’s pro-reforms agenda would receive a major boost, even as the “hardliners” (old-timers and the trade union) would be sidelined. Budhadeb himself harbours no illusions about his own importance, despite being a media favourite. “I am very much a product of my party and I happen to have read our party programmes fairly well.”

The first instance of the party overruling Buddhadeb occurred over the formation of the new LF Ministry. The chief minister, keeping middle class grievances in mind, wanted a small team. His reservations about ministers like Subhas Chakravarty, Suryakanta Mishra and Ashim Das Gupta of the CPI (M) Kamal Guha, Amar Choudhury and Nandagopal Bhattacharjee (Forward Bloc, Revolutionary Socialist Party and Communist Party of India) are known. The new council took a week to form. Most old faces including Dasgupta, Chakravarty and Bhattacharjee, were in with their old portfolios. On the other hand, Manab Mukherjee, a Buddhadeb loyalist, along with Ashok Bhattacharya, lost out partially.

Says a senior party leader, “This is where Buddhadeb would miss the near total support of former party Secretary Anil Biswas, who played the game of checks and balances within the party to perfection.” After his death, Biman Bose has replaced him, but Bose lacks Biswas’ flexibility. The second instance of Buddhadeb developing a minor difference of opinion occurred when he told the press that he was “compromising with capitalism, because working within a capitalist framework, it is not possible to practice socialism”. As a chief minister again, he had to welcome industrialists, he added. Earlier he had said that “capital has no colour” while replying to critics who questioned his acceptance of investment from Indonesian capitalists.

Bose took special care to inform newspersons almost immediately afterwards at a separate briefing that the LF had “no intention of compromising with or abandoning the interest of workers”, a clear sign that the chief minister might have said too much.

As for the sidelining of the The Centre of Indian Trade Unions (CITU), the present trend signifies the exact reverse: two jute mills were closed in two days the past week, throwing some 8,000 people out of work. An alleged delay in implementing an agreement between the new Dunlop authorities and the employees also led to a work stoppage and negotiations were proposed. Most significantly, the defeat of former Labour Minister, the veteran Mohammad Amin, also indicates that the ranks of industrial workers are not happy with the LF.

As before, the delicate balancing of the compulsions involved in running an administration and spearheading agitations will continue to keep Buddhadeb engaged. Understanding this, he has declared time and again,” I am only the poor chief minister of West Bengal, I know my limitations. I do not aspire to be a national leader like former chief minister Jyoti Basu.”

For the Trinamul Congress (TMC) and the Congress (I), it is not the end of the road. Both parties should be thankful for the seats they have won, after starting very late in the poll campaign. Still, they jointly won nearly 46 per cent of the votes, as the LF won just over 50 per cent despite its overwhelming advantages. Clearly, if these parties come together in an alliance during the next round, they can pose a stiff challenge to the LF. As former Naxalite leader Ashim Chatterjee told a TMC meeting recently, “We must shed this habit of waking up two months before the polls and try to work the year round.” He won the loudest applause, much to the annoyance of Mamata Banerjee, for whom any kind of organisational discipline and accountability have been political anathema.