Will Cong, Left help or hinder Mamata’s effort to unite Opp?

IT was a crucial make-or-break vote that P.V. Narasimha Rao faced when Mamata Banerjee was ushered into a packed and tense Lok Sabha in a wheelchair and helped to her seat. From the press gallery above, one could see her shaking with spasm under a woollen blanket that wrapped her. The fever from malaria ran high and she struggled to control waves of rigour that come with the affliction. Eventually, Rao won the trust vote with a narrow margin. She did her duty by the Congress and contributed in her way to the early economic reforms, which usually Rao and Dr Manmohan Singh are credited with.

Now, the tycoons her vote had helped become rich with India’s topdown neo-liberal policies were switching sides. Their money power was transferred to Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s BJP. All the loot one could imagine was thrown into the massive effort to dislodge Mamata Banerjee. She though was confidently plotting the fightback for a third term as West Bengal’s chief minister. Her secular resolve and populist economic priorities can be gleaned from her modest home surrounded by lower-middle-class dwellings and shanties in a nondescript Kolkata district. The Trinamul Congress she set up was itself a critique of the Congress, which nurtured her as a youth leader but was beginning to be associated with wealth and pelf.

Trinamul means “grassroots” in Bengali, and her party’s name suggests her plain thoughts about her parent group. The results were out on May 2, the same day as Satyajit Ray’s birth centenary. Bengal has been shaped by Ray, Nazrul Islam and Tagore, by Vivekananda and Kali worship. For her to open her account in West Bengal, her worldview had to challenge the invincible Communist hegemony, much of it secured under Jyoti Basu’s watch. He had steered the state for most of the three decades of Left rule since 1977, a handy reward for steadfastly fighting Indira Gandhi’s Emergency.

After Basu retired, citing age, the party’s fortunes quickly melded with the economic chaos across India. The party evicted peasants from fields to make space for industry, a lesson they erroneously believed could be bodily lifted from China. If Nandigram and Singur were what the comrades saw as aspects of “socialism with Bengali characteristics”, the move boomeranged, and Ms Banerjee pounced on the opportunity.

During much of the post-Basu rule, Communist priorities in West Bengal dovetailed with the core quests of the Vajpayee-Advani duo in Delhi. West Bengal’s Marxist CM and the BJP’s Union home minister found common cause, really two causes, in fact. They both desired to deal decisively with the Maoist challenge, and both harboured strong reservations about a real or imagined influx of people from Bangladesh. This worked as a wedge that eventually drove many Muslims away from the party, while alienating many who opposed harsh solutions to tackle the Maoists.

Marxist CM Buddhadeb Bhattacharya went a step further in his induced aloofness from a people he had no use for. He turned down a request from a fellow partisan in Delhi to help the Progressive Writers Association host an Urdu conference in Kolkata. “Do you want me to patronise another Partition?” he had exploded.

Sunday’s results saw the CPI(M) wiped out of West Bengal’s Assembly. Self-criticism and introspection don’t seem to go well with the current crop of Leftists. They blamed their decline on state terror supposedly unleashed on the party by Ms Banerjee’s TMC. If that were true, why did the cadre switch en masse to the BJP? Did the Communists really hope to challenge the BJP had they succeeded in defeating Ms Banerjee in the recent polls? The election results showed how Left votes helped in the narrow defeat of Ms Banerjee in Nandigram.

This mindless game of revenge and short-sighted gambits to somehow crawl back to power has harmed the Left enormously. It has also dented the cause of Opposition unity that is urgently needed to arrest the erosion of India’s democracy under Narendra Modi. The party may learn from the DMK in Tamil Nadu, under whose umbrella it could win two seats in the southern state.

Ms Banerjee has periodically invited the Communists to join her struggle against the essentially anti-federal, anti-secular character of the BJP. This has also been the quest of Kerala’s Marxist CM Pinarayi Vijayan, who landed a record second consecutive term by defeating the Congress. Ironically, it’s these two parties that are holding Opposition unity to ransom, as both display a marked inability to identify selfharm in their cherry-picking of friends and foes. The Marxists offer a terrible logic of being adversaries of the Congress in Kerala and its allies elsewhere. What kind of a national messaging does that invite? Was it a good idea for them to join hands against the TMC in West Bengal, granted that they at least benefited from being together in Tamil Nadu?

Everyone has congratulated Mamata Banerjee on her fine victory against extremely heavy odds posed by the combined strength of India’s right, left and centre parties. She has shown them their place. A Shiv Sena leader called her the “Tigress of Bengal”. Arvind Kejriwal, M.K. Stalin, Akhilesh Yadav and Sharad Pawar, no small-time leaders, have greeted her with renewed hope to stall the march of fascism. The question is, will the Congress and the Left Front work with Ms Banerjee? Or will they persist with their misplaced zeal to inflict harm on themselves, and thereby on India’s struggling democracy?