If West Bengal’s CPI(M) stood for Communist Party of India (Marwari), it should now be Communist Party of India (Mamata). Not that Didi will ever follow the ‘Hammer and Sickle’. But her Trinamool Congress resembles the Marxists in many ways as it marches relentlessly to Writers’ Buildings.
There was precious little difference between the two manifestoes for the Lok Sabha election. Both parties employed the same rumbustious methods. And the trickle deserting the sinking CPI(M) ship for the boisterously sailing Trinamool vessel may soon become an avalanche. Most important, Ms Mamata Banerjee’s “Maa, Mati, Manush” (mother, earth, people) slogan, the title of a popular 1975 jatra, touched the same emotive, even perhaps xenophobic, chord that the Left Front exploited to sweep to power in the late-1970s.
The Communists were seen then as a wholly indigenous force pitted against a Congress that was at Sanjay Gandhi’s beck and call and the Centre’s tool. Bengalis equated the party ‘high command’ with the cow belt. Without overtly invoking provincial passions like the Shiv Sena or Amra Bangali idealists, the Marxists presented themselves as local men determined to restore Bengal’s glory. Championing peasants and Muslims, Ms Banerjee similarly projects herself as the voice of the most underprivileged elements in long-suffering Bengal.
It will take West Bengal some time to grasp the full long-term implications of her party’s Lok Sabha representation shooting up from one solitary MP (herself) to 19 and the Left Front’s plummeting from 35 to 15. But the Marxists, whose State committee will discuss the rout tomorrow with inputs from the districts, obviously understand their future is at stake.
In a not dissimilar situation in 1977, the Centre’s Janata Party regime arbitrarily dismissed nine State Governments. Three years later, Mrs Indira Gandhi’s Congress did the same. The Centre held in both cases that the parliamentary election results indicated that voters had lost confidence in the State ruling parties.
That argument is again being peddled. Though the Left Front controls 235 out of 294 legislature seats, even West Bengal’s Land and Land Revenue Minister, Mr Abdur Rezzak Mollah, advises Mr Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee to dissolve the Assembly and seek a fresh mandate. His case is that the Lok Sabha vote showed that the CPI(M) had lost its majority in 198 Assembly segments and that the Congress-Trinamool alliance had made serious dents in the constituencies of 27 Ministers.
Mr Mollah’s principled stand is unlikely to find takers. Instead, the growing clamour among Bengali Marxists against Mr Prakash Karat and the Polit Bureau recalls West Bengal’s history of resentment against central diktats. Mr Jyoti Basu blames the Polit Bureau for not supporting Morarji Desai’s Government in 1979 as he recommended. Worse, it would not allow him to become Prime Minister 17 years later. Apparently, the CPI(M)’s West Bengal unit wanted the parliamentary Left Front to continue supporting Mr Manmohan Singh’s Government last year and was anguished and angered when failing to bring down the UPA regime, the Polit Bureau expelled the Speaker, Mr Somnath Chatterjee, from the party.
It’s difficult to say whether Bengali Marxists reacted to these Polit Bureau decisions as Bengalis or faulted them on political grounds. But the conflict holds unmistakable echoes of the furore over the 1939 Tripuri Congress when Mahatma Gandhi famously regarded Subhas Chandra Bose’s re-election as Congress president as his own defeat since he had sponsored the defeated candidate, Pattabhi Sitaramayya. Irrespective of ideology, many Bengalis see Syama Prasad Mookerjee’s arrest and death in custody in a similar light.
Now, the former Lok Sabha Speaker denounces the CPI(M)’s central leadership without naming Mr Karat, his wife or Mr Sitaram Yechury on two counts. First, leaders should contest elections and be accountable to voters. Second, the ‘Third Front’ was only a “myth”. West Bengal’s Transport Minister, Mr Subhas Chakrabarty, agrees.
Less prominent and more outspoken political activists blame the CPI(M)’s plight on the party general secretary’s high-handedness, and accuse Mr Karat of deliberately committing political suicide by toeing Beijing’s line. They stress that China played a negative role in the Nuclear Suppliers’ Group until US President George W Bush telephoned Chinese President Hu Jintao. The speculation is that having failed to stop the Indo-American nuclear agreement, China sought to sabotage it through the CPI(M)’s obedient central leadership.
Communists with longer memories claim that betrayal of the national cause has a hoary lineage. They recall that pro-China elements in the undivided CPI opposed SA Dange, the party chairman, when he supported India’s stand in the disputes over the McMahon Line and Aksai Chin. These elements broke away in 1964 to form the CPI(M), thereby establishing a tradition of opposing India’s interests to placate China.
If Mr Mollah is to be believed, a far more remote conflict also casts a sombre shadow on West Bengal. He warns that if the Trinamool comes to power, it will try to replicate the grisly bloodbath that engulfed Indonesia in 1965-66. With three million members, the Partai Komunis Indonesia was the world’s biggest Communist party outside the Soviet Union and China. The purge began when six top Indonesian Generals were killed, allegedly by the PKI, and their bodies thrown down a well. The event triggered a reprisal massacre of Communists by the Army under Gen Suharto, probably with US backing.
A CIA study claimed that “In terms of the numbers killed the anti-PKI massacres in Indonesia rank as one of the worst mass murders of the 20th century...” The death toll was estimated at between 500,000 and a million. Sukarno was deposed and Suharto became the ruler in 1967. His dictatorship lasted 31 years.
Such drastic events are inconceivable in West Bengal, even for those who nurse nightmares of the Muslim League’s Direct Action Day and the ‘Great Calcutta Killing’. But turmoil there is bound to be as Communists try to cling to their 32-year monopoly of power and Ms Banerjee, standing high in the Congress’s favour, insists on her reward. She can expect Central help as she sets about storming the bastion of Left Front power.
Mr Bhattacharjee accuses her Trinamool of lacking any “ideological mooring”. She retorts that the CPI(M) is “politically bankrupt”. Both are right. The brewing storm has nothing to do with programmes or policies. It is about power. For ordinary apolitical citizens, therefore, the change can mean jumping out of the frying pan into the fire.
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