Why has the Left not been able to mobilise the ‘have-nots’ in West Bengal?

The CPI (M)’s failure to resurrect itself in West Bengal should not be seen as the reflection of limits of class politics in India. In fact, it can be a good reminder to communist parties about what awaits them when they abdicate the interests and sensibilities of the have-nots

The Communist Party of India (Marxist) or CPI (M)-led Left Front (LF) had an uninterrupted stint in government in West Bengal from 1977-2011. Nowhere in the world has a communist party retained power through democratic means for so long. Today the West Bengal CPI (M) faces the ignominy of having been rendered almost politically irrelevant within just 10 years of having lost power. The LF has lost more ground with every election since the 2008 panchayat polls in the state. In the 2019 Lok Sabha elections, LF candidates did not even finish second on any of the 41 Lok Sabha constituencies they contested in West Bengal.

Representational image. (ANI)

The forthcoming West Bengal elections are being held in the backdrop of the largest ever contraction in the Indian economy. West Bengal is among the poorer states in India, and it also sends out a large number of migrant workers. Both these factors mean that the state would have suffered disproportionately during the lockdown.

Why has the Left failed to capitalise on these factors in West Bengal? The Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) gave a scare to the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government in the 2020 Bihar polls by championing the promise of creating one million government jobs if it were elected to power. What is even more interesting is the fact that the crisis in West Bengal does not seem to apply to the CPI (M) led Left Democratic Front (LDF) in Kerala. After having fared very badly in the 2019 Lok Sabha polls, the LDF registered an emphatic victory in the local body elections held last year. The local body polls are considered a bellwether for the assembly polls in Kerala. Opinion polls also project the LDF as the favourite in the forthcoming state elections. What explains the inability to the CPI (M) in West Bengal to resurrect itself?

The answers to these questions are to be found in the specifics of the CPI (M)’s political evolution in West Bengal that ran into a vast gamut of contradictions after consolidating its political grip in the state in the 1980s. Here are three charts which explain this.

Economic transformation beyond land redistribution did not take off in West Bengal

The CPI (M) captured power in West Bengal on the promise of radical land reforms. It delivered on this promise by unleashing what is now known as ‘Operation Barga’ where tenants were given legal rights on the land they used to cultivate along with distribution of surplus land. An egalitarian distribution of land generated tailwinds for agricultural growth in the state and West Bengal outperformed the rest of the country in agricultural growth by a big margin in the 1980s and 1990s. However, this was not the case in the non-farm economy. In the last decade when the Left was in power in West Bengal, both agricultural and non-agricultural growth was less than what it was in the rest of India.

‘Reform or Perish’ was a result of the CPI (M)’s growing desperation to deliver economically

The fact that share of manufacturing stagnated at a lower level in the state than the rest of India was an important source of headwinds in the non-farm economy. It was this growing economic challenge which forced the LF government to embark on aggressive land acquisition for industrialisation which alienated the peasantry and ultimately led to the government’s collapse. Most commentators see Buddhadeb Bhattacharya, who succeeded Jyoti Basu as the state’s chief minister in 2000, and literally set the cat among the pigeons by asking his party to either “reform or perish” in 2005, as the man who tried to prevent the collapse, but could not. However, the acknowledgement of the compulsion of dealing with private capital came a decade earlier when Jyoti Basu’s government adopted a new industrial policy in 1994. “We are all for new technology and investment in selective spheres where they help our economy and which are of mutual interest. The goal of self-reliance, however, is as needed today as earlier. We have the state sector, the private sector and also the joint sector. All these have a role to play” the policy said.

But Buddhadeb’s ‘pro-reform’ tilt compromised the CPI (M)’s class support

While the CPI (M)’s pro-reform talk was music to big capital, it did little to enthuse its core supporters. Dwaipayan Bhattacharyya, professor of political science at Jawaharlal Nehru University has documented this using data from CSDS-Lokniti surveys in his book Government as Practice: Democratic Left in a Transforming India. The LF’s vote share among the upper classes increased from 33% to 51% between the 2001 and 2006 assembly elections, while its support among the poor went down by two percentage points. Ironical as it may sound, once protests in Singur and Nandigram blew up, the rich deserted the LF in bigger numbers than the poor.

What made matters even worse for the Left in the state was the CPI (M)’s decision to ally with the Congress in 2016. Not only did the alliance fail to damage the Trinamool Congress’s prospects, it led to the CPI (M) losing its status as the opposition party as well. Instead of having learnt any lesson from its 2016 debacle, the CPI (M) has only taken its political liquidation to the next level by allying with the newly floated Indian Secular Front of Pirzada Abbas Siddiqui along with the Congress.

The CPI (M)’s failure to resurrect itself in West Bengal should not be seen as the reflection of limits of class politics in India. In fact, it can be a good reminder to communist parties about what awaits them when they abdicate the interests and sensibilities of the have-nots.