How Left's hammer and sickle lost potency in Bengal bastion

The debacle has to do with the Left in Bengal lacking credible leaders in the state, and with no USP that would attract voters

Some Communist Party of India (Marxist) leaders of Bengal have publicly spoken against the party leadership’s whimsical and ‘wrong’ choice of allies. But the party that suddenly finds itself irrelevant in a state it ruled in recent history for 34 years, from 1977 to 2011, does not have an answer. It does not have a mature leadership that can answer such questions as to why it allied with the Indian Secular Front (ISF) led by Abbas Siddique, a radical cleric from Furfura Sharif.

Lost in a quagmire, the party leadership does not have the strength or the stamina to rejuvenate itself. This is an unusual story of a mighty force, almost a monolith, withering away in a mere 15 years.

Flashback to May 2006. We come across two standout numbers – 235-seats in an assembly of 294, and a 50 per cent vote share. Five years later, the Left lost out to the Trinamool Congress (TMC), but still managed 62-seats and a 40 per cent vote share. In 2016, in a desperate bid to wrest power, the Left aligned with Congress. The result shocked the Left. It bagged 25 per cent of the polled votes but won only 32-seats. The Congress with its concentration of votes in Muslim dominated districts of Malda, Murshidabad and adjacent areas won 44-seats with just 12.25 per cent vote share. The result showed that Congress might have a limited future, but the Left was fast losing relevance.

Read more: Is there anything left of the Left in West Bengal?

Taking a cue from the success of the Congress, the Left aligned with the ISF this time in a bid to reclaim the Muslim votes of South Bengal. Adhir Ranjan Chowdhury, the leader of the Congress in the Lok Sabha and the president of the party’s Bengal unit, opposed it. When the results trickled in on May 2, it became evident that the Muslims had deserted the Samjukta Morcha en masse, and only a small section of the Hindus have voted for it. The alliance that got nearly 38 per cent votes five years ago could secure just about 8 per cent votes this time. The Left’s vote share stands at about 5 per cent.

The debacle cannot be assigned to ideological reasons. The Left is still going strong in Kerala and trying hard to stay relevant in Tripura. So, what has gone wrong with it in Bengal?

Crisis of credible leadership and viable USP

This time the Left fared badly as its alliance fell out of favour with the Muslims who are 30 per cent of the total electorate. Unlike in the past, the Muslim vote completely polarised in favour of the TMC this time. It happened as the Muslims felt if they voted for TMC it would return to power and stop implementation of the National Register of Citizens (NRC) to identify Bangladeshi immigrants. There was widespread fear among Muslims that not only Bangladeshis but even Indian Bengali Muslims would be harassed if the BJP came to power. On the other hand, BJP took away 38 of 70 per cent Hindu votes, which is a significant chunk.

Also read: Don't want to see Left as zero: Mamata Banerjee on CPI(M) whitewash in West Bengal Assembly polls

The BJP has dislodged the Congress-Left from the opposition space quite grievously. It happened at a time when even the numero uno of Bengal BJP, its state unit chief Dilip Ghosh, is a face with whom the people have been acquainted only for five years. But he has surpassed in popularity top leaders of the Left who have been around for at least three decades. It reveals that the Left leaders lost their only face when Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee became physically indisposed after 2011. The rest of its leadership neither has credibility nor the ability to be imaginative enough to adapt to the changed scenario.

The crisis is all the more acute as the Left has nothing to offer to the people materially that has not been offered by the TMC or the BJP. It has no unique selling proposition (USP) that would attract voters, particularly those below forty years. Its ideology too does not carry any appeal to the common folks who have not forgotten how it went for industrialisation without caring for the farmers whose land was being acquired.

Again, after the polarization of the Muslim votes in favour of the TMC, the BJP in future will go a whole hog for the polarisation of the Hindu votes. The TMC may try to fight it with its social welfare programmes while retaining the Muslim vote bank. But the Left has almost nothing at its disposal to counter these trends. So, in all probability, for some years now, it will be a straight fight between the TMC and the BJP, which has anyway now occupied almost the entire opposition space, and the Left will remain down and out.

(Diptendra Raychaudhuri is a Kolkata-based journalist)