Mamata is exceptional among the female political leaders in India; she has had no political mentor, no well-known political connections or cash-rich parents. Mamata came up the political ranks through student politics, and in 1984 she was elected to the Parliament. The firebrand woman speaks plainly, and is popularly known by the affectionate name ‘Didi’, ‘elder sister’, to her followers in West Bengal.
TMC (‘grassroots congress’) was established by Mamata in 1997 in defiance of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) or CPI(M). During the last few years, she seized political opportunity, putting up a strong opposition to the establishment of Special Economic Zones and forcible land acquisition for industrialisation, and focusing on the pitiful state of lower castes and Muslims in West Bengal, now forgotten by the CPI(M)-backed Left Front.
Land, in particular, is at the heart of politics in riverine West Bengal. Today, West Bengal has been carved up repeatedly, and ‘separatist’ movements are underway in several parts of the State, which has India’s highest population density. Control over land in Bengal — before and after independence — is the key to social status and identity in rural areas, and the significance of giving land rights to peasants was well understood by the Communist Party in West Bengal. Throughout its history, it tried to entrench its support-base in rural areas through peasant movements. At the same time, the Communist movement also spread its tentacles among the workers in the factories and the collieries.
It, therefore, took most of the city-based intellectuals by surprise when the CPI(M)-dominated Left Front used brutal police force to acquire land from small peasant farmers to assist capitalist groups and corporations for industrial development. This frustration against the Left Front spread throughout the rural voters too, who, turning away from the Leftists, have secured an end to its three-and-a-half decades of rule.
Gaps in rural and urban development have continued for decades, and a poor understanding of rural minds and aspirations has neutralised the support base that the Leftists had built up through tenure reforms in rural areas. There is also a psychological and cultural distance between the primate city of Calcutta and the rest of West Bengal; Calcutta did and still does belong to a different time and way of life than the rural areas of the State. And the Left Front not only failed to bridge the rural–urban gap but enhanced the cultural disparity by entrenching a bhadralok rule from Calcutta, detaching itself from the growing aspirations of the rural masses.
But it is a mistake to see Mamata’s triumph as purely a ‘negative vote’ against the CPI(M). While detached from the people, the politicians of West Bengal are no more corrupt than the rest of India, nor do the CPI(M) policies very much differ from the neoliberal policies followed across the country. What set the Left Front apart was its proclivity to meddle in people’s lives: attempting to dictate thought, behaviour, moral from immoral, and more. Over decades of rule, the CPI(M) came to exert a ‘vice-like grip’ on all segments of the society.
Based on my years of living and working in semi-rural West Bengal, I could share stories of harassment, shaming and slandering and silencing of many individuals. Some of these people at one time were genuine believers in either nationalist or Communist ideology. In the sordid culture that the CPI(M) nurtured, personal agency was put under suspicion; snide personal remarks made by those in power turned ordinary individual’s reputation to dust. For example, CPI(M) propaganda before the election denigrated Mamata as a prostitute and spread offending comments about the lack of sindoor on her forehead. I witnessed how an elitist middle-class scrapped English from primary education for the general public, but sent their children to expensive English-medium schools and then to overseas universities. They did so while the overall literacy rates declined in the State; higher education stagnated as many students left for universities located in other Indian metropolises.
The wave of paribartan (‘change’) could not have toppled the bastion unless the Left Front had become internally hollow. As in the USSR, the demise of the Left Front marks an ignominious end to an egalitarian ideology and glorious radical struggle that ushered significant social, political and economic changes for the benefit of the poor. Now, the future remains uncertain; a complete hegemony of the CPI(M) prevented the flourishing in the State of any alternative Left movement. Thus it will take a long time for alternatives to emerge, but it is unlikely the CPI(M) will ever return to power, at least in its present form.
Two things have already started: violent political skirmishes among groups and party members working at the grassroots (where neighbourhood kremlins have been built from donation money and stocked with arms), and the exodus of high-level politically-appointed executives who failed to deliver. What the Leftists now need to do is rebuild, restructure and reinvent themselves in view of contemporary reality. Such a complete overhaul from the bottom-up will need the departure not only of the defeated Chief Minister but many other major and minor leaders.
Kuntala Lahiri-Dutt is a Fellow at the Resource Management in Asia-Pacific Program (RMAP), Crawford School of Economics and Government, Australian National University. An earlier version of this piece was published here at South Asia Masala.