Leftwing decadence an infantile disorder

Does the Left Front in West Bengal stand isolated from the people after enjoying their support for over three decades?

Pranay Sharma Kolkata

"How did you manage to isolate yourself so wonderfully from the people in such a short space of time?"  The country's first communist chief minister, EMS Namboodiripad, was asked by Jawaharlal Nehru after the police fired upon striking workers in Kerala's old port city of Quilon in 1959. Namboodiripad never recovered from the crisis and the first communist government in India lasted less than two years.

The crisis the CPM-led Left Front (LF) faces in West Bengal presently is no less grave, although its story may be somewhat different. The CPM-led coalition has been in power in the state for over three decades. It has won an unprecedented seven consecutive terms in office since 1978. In the assembly elections of 2006, its victory has been emphatic: it won an overwhelming majority in the 294-member house.

The question posed before Namboodiripad is being asked of the Left Front today. Does the Front stand isolated from the people after having enjoyed their support for so many years?

There are no easy answers. Any attempt at writing off the LF Front in a hurry can be a mistake. For the past many years it has been the champion of the poor. It has been the architect of radical land reforms and 'Operation Barga' that gave ownership rights to thousands of sharecroppers and landless peasants in the state. It has implemented the Panchayati Raj system that devolved power to the rural areas.

The Front has been the symbol of unity of the Left parties. Its success at being viable and sustainable provided the CPM and its allies with the platform of making the transition from a regional, political outfit to the status of the nation's 'conscience-keeper'. It has remained a force that intervenes on behalf of the people, be it in preventing the growing closeness between India and the US, or in propping up the 'secular' Congress-led UPA coalition at the Centre to keep the BJP's Hindutva brigade at bay.

Few would deny that the crisis within the LF, particularly the CPM, is perhaps the worst it has faced in many decades. It is an irony that it comes at a time when the party's general secretary, Prakash Karat, is being featured on magazine covers as the newsmaker of the year for putting the Congress-led UPA government at the Centre in a crisis over the nuclear deal. Many more questions are being asked across the intellectual and political spectrum about the crisis emerging within the CPM and the need for serious introspection.

As the year comes to an end, many in the Left parties would perhaps remember 2007 as 'the year of the crisis' — a crisis the CPM has brought upon the LF and on itself by its sheer arrogance and refusal to involve those people who will be forced to give up their land for setting up industries in an investment hungry state.

Apparently, there has been no public acknowledgement of the mistakes and the reasons that have led to this pessimistic state of affairs. The central leadership is backing the Bengal CPM and Chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharya to the hilt. There have been protests from LF partners. A minister and RSP leader, Kshiti Goswami, had threatened to resign from the LF government. Veteran Forward Bloc leader, Ashok Ghosh, has decided to lead a march to Nandigram to defy the CPM this month. CPI leaders remain morose in public and vocal behind closed doors.