The mood at Alimuddin Street ~ the state headquarters of the CPI-M ~ is now one of gloom, disbelief and numbing shock. The stunning defeat the Marxists suffered in the panchayat elections in half of rural Bengal has brought home to them the truth that they have been living in a make-believe world where only the Tatas, the Salims, the Premjis and the Dhoots exist, while the nameless, faceless millions of rural poor have melted into thin air.
The Marxists need the rural people only during elections and after they are shepherded to the polling stations through all-pervasive propaganda and terror to vote for party nominees they are sent back to eke out a living whichever way they can.
This has been the CPI-M’s ethos for a couple of decades, but the panchayat poll this time around has dealt such a devastating blow to the party that their brave new world of shopping malls, flyovers, dubious industrial projects and fraudulent special economic zones has come crashing down.
The mandate of the rural elections is not so much against land grab by crony capitalists masquerading as champions of the poor as against the final betrayal by the CPI-M. Had it been simply a question of land acquisition for industrialisation, the issue would have died down once Chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee said he was accepting his guilt “with his head held low”.
Mr Bhattacharjee even went to Nandigram nine months after the brutal police firing and its “recapture” by armed CPI-M goons and sought to mollify the people there by declaring that “the state government won’t take land for setting up a mega chemical hub as the people there don’t want to part with their land”.
But the people, not of Nandigram alone, but of hundreds of villages in the state where there was no threat of land grab, had by then got the full measure of the Marxist pretenders. The CPI-M has long ceased to be a party for the poor. Once it put in place the panchayati raj structure purportedly to change the lot of the rural poor, it began to show its character as a party that loots resources meant for the people.
The CPI-M set an example before the country by spending half the state’s Budget through the panchayats. Over the years, the rural population has known what that really means. The political propaganda by the party showcasing its “achievement” ~ the panchayati raj system ~ is hogwash. The rural people are witness to the loot of the state exchequer by CPI-M functionaries at all levels. Every sector of the rural economy has been captured by the CPI-M and its partners. Even ration shops, cold storage facilities, weekly market and construction projects have not been spared by the mercenaries who pretend to be Marxists to get political licence for their plunder.The rural people have been tolerating this vicious grip of the CPI-M for so many years for the simple reason that the CPI-M has hammered into their heads the notion that there is no alternative political force and that they will have to learn to live with the CPI-M and their armed goons.
Whatever pretence the CPI-M had as a pro-poor party was there as long as the reins of leadership were in the hands of Mr Harkishen Singh Surjeet and Mr Jyoti Basu. It was shed by the new axis of power formed by Mr Prakash Karat, Mr Sitaram Yechuri and Mr Bhattacharjee. If the first two were busy basking in the comfort and glamour of pulling the strings of the Union government and acting as midwives for international finance capital despite their hypocritical denouncement of it, the third turned into a megalomaniac, insulting whoever opposed his feather-brained schemes.
Mr Bhattacharjee’s insolence became etched in public memory when he said “we are 235 and they are 30”, referring to the number of MLAs the Left Front and the Trinamul Congress have in the state Assembly.
The panchayat election verdict is a resounding slap on the face of this insolence, which marks the behaviour of all the Marxists. The people in the state have for far too long endured the insufferable arrogance of CPI-M functionaries, who have turned their ubiquitous party local committee offices into de facto police stations-cum-lower courts, which even interfere in family feuds, marital problems and in many cases force people opposed to it to accept their patently wrong and biased decisions.
The rural people have realised from their experiences that the Marxists no longer work fo their welfare, but only for furthering their own selfish interests. They have discovered that Marxist insolence has assumed such diabolical proportions that the CPI-M leadership at Alimuddin Street in Kolkata and AK Gopalan Bhavan in Delhi have no qualms about destroying their sole means of livelihood ~ small plots of land. The betrayal of the poor by those who swear by Marx and Lenin is complete.
That’s why vast stretches of rural Bengal, where the threat of losing farm land was not even on the horizon, decided to vote en masse against the CPI-M. They wanted to teach the betrayers the lesson of their life. They have no illusion about the corrupt Congress or the BJP or any other political party and treat them accordingly. But they find it difficult to come to terms with the hypocrisy of the Marxists who once established their land rights, but who are now bent on taking away their land. The panchayat election mandate is against the Left’s metamorphosis from champions of the poor into patrons of big money and corporate houses.
The CPI-M is in a bind: if it dumps its policy of industrialisation on farm land, its machinations will become clear. If it goes ahead with it, there will now be much greater resistance than what the CPI-M has seen.
But the Marxist leadership has become so used to a life of comfort and is so alienated from the people that it is incapable of mingling with the poor the way their predecessors did before they captured power in 1977. Their time of reckoning has come. Sweet talking won’t cut any ice with the poor whom they want to throw at the mercy of industrialists.
It’s intriguing that the chief minister is propagating theories about the trajectory of civilisation ~ feudalism to capitalism to socialism ~ forgetting Russia and China didn’t follow that path.Farmers know their land will give income for generations and they won’t have to retire as workers have to. The Marxists pretend not to know these simple truths.
(The writer is Special Representative,
The Statesman)
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