How the Left Front has taken a back seat in Bengal

The Lok Sabha election that concluded on Sunday has raised several questions on the condition of the CPM-led Left Front in West Bengal.

Once considered invincible in Bengal, the Left Front, after ruling the state for 34 years, has failed to make its presence felt in the Lok Sabha elections and is expected to be relegated to the third or fourth place in the state.

Left Front’s decline took place simultaneously with the decline of its largest constituent, the CPM. Several factors contributed to this situation in West Bengal, where it is struggling for survival.

First, the CPM’s organisational strength has steadily decreased since the 2009 Lok Sabha elections, which showed the rise of the Trinamool Congress (TMC) for the first time.

Its famous — “infamous” to rival parties — vote machinery has withered away. According to CPM sources, the party lacks volunteers. The situation is such that in Bengal, the Left has not been able to deploy polling agents in all the booths.

The party leadership’s repeated instructions to strengthen booth-level organisation haven’t done much good. The organisational weakness and inability to counter the TMC’s alleged strong-arm tactics has resulted in a large section of CPM workers shifting their allegiance to the BJP.

These workers, feeling increasingly cornered by the TMC, leaned towards the saffron party hoping for protection from the TMC and to teach the ruling party in the state a lesson.

Despite winning only two seats in the 2014 Lok Sabha elections, the Left Front had got 29.93% of votes in Bengal.

If several exit polls are to be believed, the BJP will win between 11 and 23 seats in Bengal, while it won just two in 2014. This wouldn’t be possible without a large chunk of the Left votes shifting to the BJP.

CPM leader and former West Bengal chief minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee warned against such a situation, when he urged people not to “leap from TMC’s frying pan into the fireplace of the BJP”.

TMC’s tactic of steam-rolling the Opposition parties also created a political vacuum, which the BJP wasted no time in filling up.