Wild and wilder: CPM and West Bengal

Kolkata calling : Shikha Mukerjee

Beatings and bullets seem to be the order of the day in West Bengal, converting it into the wild bad lands where scores are settled not through ballots but by other means. One Communist Party of India (Marxist) anchal committee member Niranjan Mondol is dead, killed by assassins. Another, Joydev Paik, is struggling with deadly bullet injuries. Both the attacks were in Nandigram.

In Singur, where the Tatas are racing to complete the automobile manufacturing complex, an engineer has been beaten up. There are reports of workers being intimidated by a shrill political campaign by Trinamool Congress leader Mamata Banerjee threatening to derail the project at the eleventh hour. There are conflicting reports of whether the Tatas will pull out or stay put. There are conflicting reports of the role of the now famous Krishijomi Raksha Committee (Save Agricultural Land Committee); do they want to run the resistance or do they want to enlist their cadre for work on the Tata site?

As the deadline for rolling out the Nano approaches, the campaign and the demands, contradictory as they may be, seem to have escalated. Why that should result in one death and one serious injury by armed and masked assassins in East Midnapore, miles away from Singur, where nothing industrial is likely to happen in the near future, is puzzling. If deadly warnings are being issued, then why in East Midnapore, which is vulnerable to violence post the Nandigram episode? The question therefore is, is there a sinister design in all this to plunge West Bengal into chaos?

The "situation" is, certainly, confusing. The absence of a mechanism for dialogue between the State Government, the CPI(M) and the main Opposition Trinamool Congress is only part of the problem. But mechanisms cannot work where the different parties are Luddites, determined to wreck the machine.

As the Opposition, Mamata Banerjee certainly has a responsibility to attack the CPI(M) and the State Government. But to indirectly condone the attack on an engineer working at the Tata plant is signalling a willingness to embrace wild, lawless methods that are dangerous for the polity and its suture. The connection is evident, because Mamata has plans of ramping up her campaign demanding the return of 400 acres of land to those who had been forced to give up their property to enable the Tatas to set up the manufacturing complex.

The justification of violence is as bizarre as the CPI(M) general secretary Prakash Karat's determined efforts to steer his party into the wilderness. At the public rally following the party's conference in Tripura Karat declared that he would lead the CPI(M) into a bid to set up a Third Front as an alternative coalition to the Congress-led UPA and the BJP-led NDA. He has worked out that between the Congress and the BJP, the number of Lok Sabha seats they can corner is around 280. Which leaves the remaining 265 seats up for grabs.

In other words, since regional parties are grouping and regrouping in a bewildering kaleidoscope of combinations, the CPI(M) sees it as an opportunity to emerge as the centre around which a new alliance can be formed. For a party that follows preset rules, this departure is unusual; in its rules, the CPI(M) had assessed that the time was not ripe for a Third Front.

If there is a new alliance and the CPI(M) is its lynchpin, certain things should follow. These are that the CPI(M) has sufficiently more numbers in the Lok Sabha to lead from a dominant position. That it must be prepared to provide people to serve in leadership roles. Given that the Third Front has several would be Prime Ministers and every leader of every party would want to be a Minister should the unlikely Third Front emerge as a contender for forming the Government, what will the CPI(M) do?

Since it is almost certain that the CPI(M) and its Left partners will lose seats in 2009, its capability to dominate is questionable. Since the CPI(M) does not have a prime ministerial candidate, how does it hope to lead the mismatched combination of parties? Unless Karat has plans that he has not disclosed as yet, the Third Front idea is as wild as Mamata's. In Karat's case, he does not have the eggs to make an omelette; in Mamata's she wants to unmake the omelette by magically transforming broken eggs into whole ones.

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