National

Who's Got Change?

The Left's biggest battle yet, but is Mamata & co up to the task?

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Who's Got Change?
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Red Ain’t Right
  • The buzz in Bengal is ‘change’. The Nandigram effect has spread far.
  • The Left is fighting with its back to the wall in erstwhile strongholds.
  • Muslims with 27 per cent vote share and traditional supporters of the Left have turned against them.
  • Reversals in the panchayat polls last year proved that the Communists are not invincible. This has emboldened parties like the Trinamool Congress.
  • Marxists privately admit the party is paying for its cadre’s excesses and corruption at the panchayat level.
  • The Left may contain the damage because of organisational strength.

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Nandigram, along with Singur, has become a defining moment for Left politics in the state, a trigger for long pent-up anger among the people against the corrupt and arrogant party cadres. But catch the CPI(M) making even a token apology for the strong-arm tactics it used in 2007 in both places. Despite last year’s rout during the panchayat polls, the Left Front (LF) is on the offensive. And curiously, it’s the Ramayana the commissars keep quoting, not Das Kapital. "Don’t cross the Lakshman rekha, and vote for someone else," warns one, speaking at the Tamluk rally, "remember what happened to Sita...." But it doesn’t look like the warning will be heeded. Notwithstanding the strong show of Left unity at the rally, Tamluk looks ripe for change.

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Tamluk is not an isolated instance of a revolt against the LF. Across southern Bengal, home to 30 of the state’s 42 Lok Sabha seats, the buzzword is "poriborton" or change. In at least 18 of these seats, the LF is engaged in a do-or-die battle. Likewise in eight of the 12 seats in north Bengal. Political observers say this isn’t the first time people have asked for change—it happened in 2001 too. But for one who saw the ’01 assembly polls, which this writer had covered, the change in mood is clear to see. Last year’s panchayat polls, when sections of south Bengal were breached, have given people the confidence that the LF can be confronted, and defeated. The LF, it seems, is no longer invincible.

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Indeed, such is the people’s anger that even LF MPs with good track records are fighting with their backs to the wall. Take Diamond Harbour, a CPI(M) bastion since 1967: it looks set to fall, even though locals at Aamtala acknowledge they prefer the CPI(M)’s four-time MP Samik Lahiri to the TMC’s Somen Mitra. "Samik is a better candidate, and Somen isn’t just an outsider, he also has an unsavoury reputation. But this time, we want to teach the CPI(M) a lesson," they say. In Uluberia, eight-time CPI(M) MP Hannan Mollah is engaged in what is described as a "50:50 battle"—it could go either way.

In North Calcutta, sitting MP Mohammed Salim is employing every trick in the book to retain a constituency which has, to add to his woes, dramatically changed after delimitation. He’s even built up a network of non-party workers—the CPI(M) cadre have become extremely unpopular—and is wooing members of business and social organisations. A hoarding in his constituency invites voters to "Coffee with Salim", the "most dynamic member of the 14th Lok Sabha". Salim has even given Bengal’s traditional "michils" (election processions) a "new look". Recently, Calcuttans were startled to see Salim and the CPI(M) candidate from South Calcutta, Rabin Deb, drive down ajc Bose Road in an ornate horse-driven wedding buggy. "Look, I am holding the reins of Hindustan in my hands," Salim, who hasn’t lost his Puckish sense of humour, shouted to journalists, as the horses, red feathers stuck rakishly behind their ears, trotted by at a sedate pace.

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In South Bengal, the LF lost the districts of South 24 Parganas and Purba Midnapore (covering six LS seats) in last year’s panchayat polls while finding itself severely challenged in North 24 Parganas, Haora and Nadia (another nine seats). This time around, its travails have expanded: an additional two districts, Hooghly and Paschim Midnapore, containing another six LS seats, are on the Opposition’s radar. These are CPI(M) strongholds where, in the panchayat polls, TMC and Congress candidates were not even allowed to file nomination papers. In three of these constituencies—Arambagh, from where the CPI(M) has won by possibly the largest margin in the country, Ghatal and Jhargram—the TMC has been trying, since its birth in 1998, to get a political toehold. With CPI(M) workers resisting fiercely, there have often been bloody clashes. Indeed, it has been hard for the TMC, locals say, to even hoist a party flag, let alone hold a public meeting.

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But the scene is changing. Take Krishnapur in the Bhagabantapur block of Arambagh: once entirely red, this Muslim-majority village of 5,000 voters formed its own unnayan (welfare) committee in 2008 when its members failed to file nomination papers for the panchayat polls. "Our first act," says committee member Ansar Mollah, "was to file for information about public works and social welfare schemes under the RTI Act—and hand over the information to the local district magistrate and the governor." Local TMC leaders were quick to step in and convert that anger into support for the party.

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In the Jhargram constituency, the TMC seems like another party altogether. In Goaltora, close to the Maoist bastion of Lalgarh, our driver Manoj Yadav (who’s from Vaishali in Bihar but grew up on the streets of Calcutta) warns that the activist we have just met may not really be from the TMC: "Couldn’t you tell by their language? They were all Maowadis, didi," he says with assurance. He’s probably right. In these parts, the TMC is refuge to all those opposed to the CPI(M). And both the TMC and Maoists have been quick to use local movements to strengthen their own organisations—from Nandigram and Singur to villages like Krishnapur.

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Not to mention Lalgarh. After last year’s landmine blast which almost killed chief minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharya and Union minister Ram Vilas Paswan, the state police made indiscriminate arrests in the tribal areas of Lalgarh. The result: a spontaneous people’s movement. "The Maoists had never succeeded in social mobilisation in West Bengal," a senior police officer says, "but this time, they rode on the coat-tails of this agitation and have made it a liberated area." Indeed, Chattradhar Mahato, the now famous leader of the Committee against Police Atrocities here, brought the state to its knees recently, refusing to allow the police to enter the area during the elections. Sitting under a tree with his colleagues, he says he "believes in parliamentary democracy". But his brother is a well-known Maoist leader and so are some of his lieutenants like Sidu Soren.

So, will these areas bring negative results for the Left? It will depend on the extent to which non-CPI(M) voters are allowed to exercise their vote, but everyone is agreed that the margins will be narrow. Clearly, none of this is good news for the LF. Muslims, who account for 27 per cent of Bengal’s population, were partly responsible for the Left Front’s rout in the panchayat polls. Their anger is visible in this election too, whether in rural areas where Bengali Muslims dominate, or urban areas like Qamarhati in Barrackpore or Champdani in Hooghly district with their "Urdu" Muslim factory workers. If Lalgarh is any indication, the state’s long-neglected adivasis are also in a mood to revolt.

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Red welts: CM Buddhadeb at an election rally in Calcutta

The TMC has smelt blood and it is leaving no stone unturned. Party supremo Mamata Banerjee is campaigning along with the father of Tapasi Pal, the young woman allegedly raped and murdered by CPI(M) activists in Singur. The Congress’s national leadership, desperately looking for extra seats to help cobble together a majority, agreed to a mahajot with the TMC, giving it the lion’s share of the seats. Asked why, external affairs minister and candidate from Jangipur Pranab Mukherjee replied loftily at a rally: "We didn’t set out to buy prawns. We did the mahajot in answer to the aspirations of the people."

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So, what’s working for the LF? For one, in the year since the panchayat polls, it has worked overtime to try and repair the ‘Party Machine’, and reforge the idea of Left unity, something that was missing in the local elections. But this merely means that instead of being down to 20 seats (from 35 in 2004) it may end up with 25. (Revealingly, LF leaders say they are hoping for 26, which was what they got in 1984 after Indira Gandhi’s assassination—their lowest score since coming to power in 1977.)

Little wonder, then, that a ferocious battle is being fought here, a story vividly told by the poster wars in Calcutta. If the TMC has erected enormous hoardings with gory pictures of those who died in Nandigram and Singur, the LF has hit back with images of people fleeing from Maoist violence and text accusing the Congress-TMC combine of being in cahoots with the Maoists. Left intellectuals—from actress Aparna Sen, writer Mahashweta Devi, artist Suvaprasanna to retired civil servant D. Bandopadhay—have pitched in with their own posters. Their text: "Poriborton Chai". Yes, Bengal desperately needs change from 32 years of unbroken Left rule. But is Mamata Banerjee the change it needs?

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