- The loss in the panchayat elections has proved that the party is not invincible
- Many CPI(M) leaders fear the party's votebank is shifting
- People have begun to question the corruption of district/village-level leaders and the Marxist cadre
- Large-scale acquisition of rural land has affected Muslims sharply for most of them are farmers.
- Despite coercion and violence, a sizeable number of voters silently voted against the party
***
- The CPI(M) has sent out questionnaires to party functionaries right down to the panchayat level to get feedback on what had gone wrong
- The exercise will be completed by July after which the party will decide on the course correction to undertake
- The party has begun to mend relations with its Left partners, the CPI, the Forward Bloc and the RSP by being conciliatory in allocation of seats for the June-end municipal polls
- There will be no large-scale purges. The party will strengthen weak units.
***
What will the CPI(M) do now? Well, it has already distributed questionnaires to its activists (right down to the village level) to explain the reasons for the rout. In July, a review based on these inputs will be followed up by corrective measures. Will there be a large-scale purge? Unlikely, for that would be too risky. At best, say insiders, the party will "strengthen" its weak units, pumping in more muscle and send out a warning about corruption.
The CPI(M) is by no means taking these results lightly. By its own admission, it's a disaster for a party whose strength lies in its rural base to lose out in the panchayats which it had used so effectively for 30 years. In the early idealistic years, it was used for rural transformation; eventually it became an instrument of micro-level control. By then, party diktats had begun to encroach upon even the private domain—from sorting out family feuds to arranging marriages.
The party now reluctantly admits it has made mistakes: the powerful Left Front chairman Biman Bose, sitting in his spartan office at the party HQ on Calcutta's Alimuddin Street, tells Outlook: "Political education needs to be undertaken. Our interest is the interest of the people: these ideas have to be imparted to our workers. We became victims of complacency." Amitava Bose, the district secretary of North 24 Parganas, sipping his morning cup of tea in his home in Barasat, simply says glumly, "It's a debacle."
Across the densely populated traditional party bastions in south Bengal, where most of the state's LS/assembly seats are located, CPI(M) workers openly talk of the party's record of corruption, arrogance and terror, of a lack of transparency in the issuing of ration and bpl cards, granting of Indira Aawas Yojana loans, of a crumbling education system and deteriorating health facilities—all culminating in coercive land acquisition, not just for industry but for expensive housing estates for wealthy NRIs. Nandigram and Singur, they stress, are not the cause of the current debacle; they simply crystallised the discontent and anger that was already simmering across the state.
Indeed, if in the northern districts of Uttar Dinajpur, Malda and Murshidabad, the Congress's traditional base helped it cash in, in the southern districts, there is an actual shift in the CPI(M) vote. Take Mannan Goldar. A lifelong Left worker, he donated all his personal land to build a school and a primary health centre, in the process impoverishing his own family. Unwilling to adapt to the new "culture" of the party, he became its victim: when he questioned the way public works were being sanctioned, he was charged with corruption and expelled from the party. At Durlabhpur, a CPI(M) bastion, near Barasat town, villagers rush to show me the hovel in which Goldar lives and say they worked as one to help him win an independent panchayat samiti seat. He got 918 votes. The CPI(M)? Just 81.
Across North 24 Parganas, South 24 Parganas, Purba Medinipur, Hooghly and Nadia, the story is the same. Meanwhile, wherever the government sought to acquire fertile agricultural land, the CPI(M) fared poorly, as along the Barasat-Raichowk stretch which cuts across three districts, along which the Salem group was to build a highway. At Banapukur, a village in Bhangor, one of the flashpoints in South 24 Parganas, an effigy of CM Buddhadeb Bhattacharya hangs from a house on the edge of a pond shaded by palm trees.
Even where the party has won, there is discontent among the faithful: the village of Baligaon in the Rajarhat area in the hinterland of Calcutta is now just a tight circle of huts, the farming land attached to it all acquired for the government's New Town project. Expensive high-rise buildings for NRIs, such as Rosewood, are visible in the distance. Sitting under a makeshift shelter are a group of young CPI(M) workers—all jobless—and a harassed- looking newly elected gram panchayat member, Abu Fazal Qazi: "With great difficulty I retained this seat for the CPI(M). I have spent the entire morning arguing with the HIDCO (Housing Infrastructure Development Corporation) people to do something about this village. It sank after the surrounding land was acquired. With the monsoons coming, we will soon be under water. But who'll listen to me?"
For the CPI(M), it isn't just about the TC in the south and the Congress in the north cashing in (after all, the opposition parties in Bengal collectively have always polled around 40 per cent of the votes). Now, it's also its alliance partners, the CPI, the Forward Bloc and the RSP. In Basanti, on the edge of the Sunderbans, where the RSP retained its hold against the CPI(M), the latter's goon squads had bombed the home of RSP minister Subhash Lashkar, killing his daughter-in-law. So now, in the villages, RSP supporters don't sleep at night—they take their children to the open fields to keep vigil. In the recent past, their homes have been set on fire, their hands chopped off, as we saw for ourselves. Indeed, if there is something that characterises Bengal today, it is the violence. In Nandigram, there are no celebrations or bijoy michils (victory processions) by the TC—here the villages are either controlled by the CPI(M) or the TC, with those owing allegiance to one not prepared to enter the other's territory. A CPI(M) worker shows us around, pointing to the shell of the home of a TC activist: "We burnt that house, you see we were very angry that we were pushed out of our villages."
If this line continues, it won't be long before we write the CPI(M)'s obituary. Can there be a second coming for it? And who will win the final round, the Party Machine or People's Power?
