• SUBIR BHAUMIK •
Veteran BBC correspondent and author, a former Queen Elizabeth house fellow at Oxford and a regular columnist with top media outlets in India and abroad.
Failure to win a single seat in West Bengal says much about the Left Front's growing irrelevance in the state as it is no longer seen capable of effective governance and job creation, neither has the organisation nor the ideas to appeal to voters.
I was recently in Kerala for my daughter’s marriage in the midst of the long seven-phase parliament elections and my groom’s large group of friends kept reminding me that the Left Front in Kerala was soon going the Bengal way – on a perpetual downslide – despite being in power.
They were vindicated when the Left Front managed to win just one seat against the United Democratic Front’s (UDF) 18. Left leaders said the Left was part of the INDIA alliance and anti Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) voters had voted UDF to strengthen the INDIA alliance. All said, winning just one seat is a dismal performance.
But failure to win a single seat in West Bengal says much about the Left Front’s growing irrelevance in West Bengal, where some of its younger leaders campaigned hard and state party secretary Mohammed Salim did inject some vigor in the campaign. But the fact remains that the party that ruled Bengal for 34 uninterrupted years has been relegated to the margins.
One corporate honcho passionate about West Bengal told me in 2011 that “Bengalis have no reason to vote Left after they refused to allow Jyoti Basu become the Prime Minister of India.” “For middle class Bengalis, land is not the issue as it is for rural folks and this Basu episode is upsetting because it denied Bengal its rightful place in national politics,” said this corporate boss.
He says this has jarred the middle class Bengali psyche ever since the turn of the century. “The party that depended on their West Bengal muscle for playing a role in national politics let the state down by denying Basu who himself called it a historical blunder,” he said.
I think my corporate friend has a point – the Basu episode did cause a disconnect between the Bengali middle class and the Left .
The Nandigram violence alienated the poor peasantry across the state and undermined the gains of the land reforms in the early years of Left Rule. The Left’s violent track record and its failure to industrialise the state comes back to haunt it.
“Oder 34 bochor khomotay rekechi. Ora ki koreche amader jonyo, rashtrer jonyo” (we kept them in power for 34 years, what did they do for us, for the state), asks cultivator Siraj Mollah in Taldih. His leader Rezzaq Mollah, once the Left Front’s land revenue minister, went over to the Trinamul Congress in 2016.
The Left, specially the Communist Party of India (Marxist) (CPI(M)), is suffering a global crisis of relevance. In India, it is not seen as the antidote to the rising tide of Hindutva – that fight has been led by the Congress and the regional parties. The Left is at best a marginal player.
There are other parties in the Left Front like the Forward Bloc founded by Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose who could have led the challenge against the BJP. But they are too happy playing second fiddle to the CPI(M), whose core ideology fails to resonate with the GenNext.
The Left Front’s voter share has shrunk from 40 percent in 2011 assembly polls to 5.67 percent in the 2024 Lok Sabha election. (Picture courtesy: Getty Images, The Edition)
The Left stands primarily blamed for Bengal’s failure to industrialise and create jobs. In Kerala and across the south, one can find Bengali migrant labour from farmland to factories, not to speak of technical talent in cities like Hyderabad or Bangalore.
My daughter, a hotel management graduate, was offered 13000 rupees at entry by the best hotel in Kolkata against 35000 rupees by Novotel Hyderabad. She now works in Bangalore and seems determined not to return to Kolkata.
The exponential rise in Durga pujas in Bangalore and Hyderabad points to a talent drain from West Bengal that can barely be concealed.
The Left Front’s voter share has shrunk from 40 percent in 2011 assembly polls to around 7 percent in the 2019 Lok Sabha election. In 2024, it slumped further to 5.67 percent .
Along with political violence, deindustrialisation, joblessness is the Left’s legacy in the state. Industrial output saw a dramatic fall in West Bengal under the Left. While India’s average rate of industrial growth was 12.2 percent from 1980-81 to 1995-96, the state grew only by 3.9 percent. From a 14 percent share in the net value added in the manufacturing sector in 1971, the state slipped to four percent in 2002.
The services sector, one of the biggest employment generators, also got choked as CPI(M) dropped English from the primary school curriculum, dealing a blow to the job prospects of millions of young people.
When India opened up its economy in 1991, the Left opposed it vehemently. It was against the introduction of computers and staged protests and bandhs against foreign direct investments. It was only when agriculture growth dropped to 2.13 percent between 1990 and 1995 that Basu, who was the co-founder of CPI(M), was forced to reconsider his stance on industrialisation. Too late, some would say.
India was in the middle of an Information Technology (IT) boom, with Bangalore, Hyderabad, Mumbai, Pune and Chennai emerging as tech hubs, but Bengal failed to leverage it despite being a state with educated talent.
The Left’s closed-door policy hurt the education sector greatly. The industry had fled, with it capital as well. Every year, hundreds of thousands of students would leave for Karnataka, Tamil Nadu and Maharashtra to study in private engineering and medical colleges.
The mishandling of the land acquisition stir in Singur and Nandigram brought industrialisation to an abrupt stop. High-handedness and coercion in acquiring farmlands alienated and angered its rural support base, leading to the party’s downfall.
The Left is no longer seen in West Bengal as capable of effective governance and job creation. Its younger leaders, some of whom led the charge this summer in the parliament polls, realised it neither had the organisation nor the ideas to appeal to voters, both new and old.
Bengal now clearly faces a crisis of choice with neither the ruling Trinamul Congress nor the BJP capable of bringing back the state’s one-time glory. But voters see the Left as the cause of the downslide and are in no mood to consider them as an option.
Can be reached at sbhaum@gmail.com
Opinions expressed in this article are of the author’s and do not represent the policy of The Edition. The writers are solely responsible for any claim arising out of the contents of their articles.
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