Buddha's soul-searching upsets party

Left Front circles here have begun to wonder what has driven the chief minister to go on his repeated ‘mistake admission spree.’

For instance, it was a mistake to have forcibly occupied agricultural land for industry; to have appointed ‘our(CPM) men' in key educational spheres; to tolerate `high-handedness' of some party activists and their intervention in day-to-day civic affairs; and finally, it was a mistake to have stopped the staging of the Bengali version of George Orwell’s play.

The abolition of English at the primary level was a mistake which the Marxists had admitted during the last Lok Sabha polls. According to a senior CPM leader, an election was a “full-scale political war game and none should hand any weapon to the opponent on a platter.” The chief minister’s admission spree could send a very wrong signal to the electorate, he felt.

While some senior Left leaders agree with Bhattacherjee that mistakes needed to be rectified, they have questioned the timing, as the Opposition Trinamool Congress had been taking full advantage of this slew of admissions.

“The process ought to have started immediately after the debacle of the Left in the April 2009 Lok Sabha polls. Now, just on the eve of the Assembly elections, if we keep harping on mistakes and stressing on the need for rectifying them, the people may think that the Leftists are scared and that's why they're talking of mistakes," said a senior leader of the RSP, a ruling Left Front partner.  

Admittedly, the Opposition has pounced on this opportunity and Trinamool supremo Mamata Banerjee referred to this during a television interview.

“If someone develops the habit of making mistakes and admitting them just before the elections, then who will pay for his or her mistakes?” she wondered. “You cannot possibly shift the consequences of all your mistakes on to the people.

“If a patient learns that his physician has committed an error in diagnosing a disease, will he not look for a better doctor?” she asked.

With the electioneering touching a high pitch, some grassroots CPM workers are loathe to concede vital ‘match-points’ to the opposition.