Even the most ardent follower of West Bengal’s politics is unlikely to know that the Left Front coalition in the state comprises nine political parties, six of which came together to form this alliance in 1977. The Communist Party of India (Marxist) [CPI (M)] has always dominated the collective, including over the Communist Party of India (CPI), the once-reluctant and always muted bedfellow, which joined only in 1982. These seven parties managed the Left Front, which was in power in Bengal for three quarters, before being ceremoniously trounced by the Trinamool Congress in 2011.
What has marked the Left’s years in power was to consistently position itself as a dialectical other of ‘mainstream’ politics. At times it has no doubt boosted its image. Consider for example, the ‘electoral bond scam’, in which the Left marked itself safe from the embrace of ‘insider trading’. One can reason that the bonds were meant for those who could broker power for privileged access, which the Left, for better or for worse, can hardly claim to mobilise anymore.
One should also point out that the Left’s hunger for power has been second to none. But at the same time, there is ample evidence that the Left has remained comparatively stoic to the seductions of ‘politics-as-trade’. To have done so in the Nehruvian-Socialist era was one thing, but to have maintained a modicum of that in the era of unapologetic neoliberal greed and hoarding calls for comprehension.
But moments of glory aside, the Left’s avowed ‘otherism’ has been counterproductive, a taste of which the nation got when it pulled out of United Progressive Alliance I (UPA I), fretting over the nuclear deal. But from the very early days, the Communists had positioned themselves in opposition to the Congress, the latter being the party of its class enemy.
Earlier, this ‘ideology’ was coalesced into an alternate logic, the Left was seen to be perpetually at war with the Centre — in Kerala under E.M.S. (E.M.S. Namboodiripad) and in other southern states as well. Interestingly, this gave the Left enormous mileage from the mid-60s in Bengal, when Congress started to degenerate into chaos. In full power within a decade, the Left continued to arm itself politically as the ‘negative’ (or ‘positive’, if one is so inclined) of Delhi. But it did end up doing so even economically, which was a calamitous and protracted blunder, and which ended in the Left presiding over Bengal’s industrial decapitation. This was an error even the staunchest anti-Delhi party from the South resisted from committing.
In the process, and given its long years in power, the Left in Bengal had thrived in what political scientist Dwaipayan Bhattacharya has called the ‘party society’, in which the socio-economic conditions of a polity are ingratiatingly intertwined with the fate of the party in power. The Left took this project with utmost seriousness, as it provided heft and longevity to its holistic ambition. When this union collapsed in 2011, the state had to move on to a new party, but it is worthwhile to ask what happened to the party which was now ‘without the state’.
If only numbers are to be considered then what has happened to the Left is a tale of incremental bleeding. From a whopping 235 seats it won in 2006 (out of 294) West Bengal Assembly elections, the Left fell to 62 in 2011, 33 in 2016, and to zero in 2021. The national elections of 2014 and 2019 have more or less reflected this picture of decimation. Needless to say, this is not the case in Kerala, where it has been in and out of power since 1957, and has lately even defied the state’s avowed practice of alternating the Left with the Congress. In other words, in its two historic strongholds, the fortunes of the Left has changed and not remained always similar.
This is why the Left’s decimation in Bengal calls for a more nuanced understanding. And it points to a disturbing lack of political nous and that insistent logic of otherism. The first years in opposition were spent in vilifying the Trinamool, which is de-rigueur, but the rhetoric was personal rather than political — as if the Left had a natural life in power and Mamata Banerjee was a temporary upstart, like Oliver Cromwell.
The rhetoric of melancholic hurt at being dethroned by a political parvenu never went away, even after 2014, when an aggressive new political culture was hoisted upon this nation. Through these years, the Left has persisted with its bareknuckle opposition to Mamata, often sending the message that the Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP’s) precipitous rise in Bengal is not their concern. In fact, the lack of concern was so palpable, and the unilateral dislike for Mamata so pervasive that there has been barely suppressed allegation that the Left has clandestinely vouched the remainder of its fledgling ground support to the BJP. The Left has on its part never made any concerted attempt to counter these allegations. Even when it has shown half-hearted effort to position itself against both the BJP and Mamata, like it is doing this time, the Left has merely ended up demonising Mamata as a mirror of Modi.
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What the Left’s mistimed and misjudged politics has consistently failed to comprehend is that the Trinamool Congress is merely a political opponent, which is a necessary component of any democracy. It is to the Left what the Left was to the Indian National Congress. Mamata is also a political opponent because her party, her persistent self-importance notwithstanding, has echoed the Left in at least two ways: by having a strong ground-level presence, and by mobilising the rhetoric of welfarism.
It is noteworthy that the Trinamool Congress was never built upon any ideological foundation, nor is Mamata capable of one. It has always been a party that had seized the popular fatigue with the Left, which had metamorphosed into a groundswell of distrust after Nandigram. It is not very different from what happened in 1977. So, it would have done the Left some good to understand where it lost popular appeal and why. But the shock of loss and revulsion for Mamata got the better of any self-reflection whatsoever, whether after 2011, or since.
But in this process of being the ‘other’ of Mamata, the Left has been blind to the BJP, which is in actuality its historical and bonafide ideological other — being the closest approximation of fascism. Even a crash course in twentieth century history would reveal how fascists have hunted, haunted, and dismembered the socialists across the global political spectrum. To have given even the slightest hint that the Left were comfortable in the shadow of a BJP galvanising into a party of prominence was utterly shameful. But the Left has not only failed to parry that possibility but it may have, knowingly or unknowingly, boltered the BJP’s rise in the state of West Bengal. Even more abysmal is that the Left never understood that had it vocally channelised its political presence against the BJP (and not Mamata) in the years after 2014, it could have had eventually mobilised substantive oppositional heft, which has now gone entirely to the BJP. This inability to distinguish between a political other and a genuinely ideological opponent remains Left’s biggest oversight in its post-power years in Bengal.
The Left now resembles the case of a classic tragic irony, where a bunch of characters strut and fret their hour upon the stage, clueless to the foibles of their act, and the faultlines between them, while the audience, in knowledge of the entirety, cannot but shake their heads in helpless agony. But then, even the dignity of tragedy cannot be handed over to the Left. Their overarching clumsiness rather reminds one of T.S. Eliot’s lines because they are “Politic, cautious, and meticulous;/ Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse;/At times, indeed, almost ridiculous —Almost, at times, the Fool”.
Sayandeb Chowdhury teaches at Krea University, Andhra Pradesh. Views are personal.
