In the aftermath of the West Bengal elections, most commentators today are tracing the defeat of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) to its suicidal handling of the situations in Singur and Nandigram in 2006-07. Many have tended to discern signs of the beginning of this fall, first with the rout of CPI (M) candidates in the local-level panchayat elections that followed the public protests in those areas, and later in the 2009 Lok Sabha polls. In other words, much of the public rhetoric today holds that it was only during the last phase of CPI (M) rule, between 2006 and 2011, that the party made the serious mistakes that alienated it from the people. On the contrary, I believe the roots of the disaster can be traced back much farther; Singur and Nandigram were merely the last straw, providing the trigger for the popular explosion of anger and frustration that had been gathering steam for multiple reasons and over many decades.
In fact, rumblings of discontent against the Left Front – the grouping that ruled West Bengal for three decades led by the CPI (M) – could be heard within a few years of its assuming office, though confined to a few particular areas of concern. One such issue was human rights. Although the CPI (M)-led government after coming to power in 1977 kept its electoral promise of releasing all political prisoners (the majority being its erstwhile enemies, the Naxalites), it failed to punish the notorious police officials who were nailed for atrocities from 1970 till the Emergency period – by multiple official commissions. Under the charge of veteran Chief Minister Jyoti Basu, the government merely reinforced the old system of using the same police force and its disreputable officers to suppress demonstrations of popular protest. The following years saw the re-emergence of the police as a trigger-happy force ready to suppress all manifestations of popular discontent. In the two-year period of 1980-81 alone, there were at least 248 cases of police firing killing 62 people, including women and children. During the same period, the number of killings of undertrial prisoners in police lock-ups and jails showed an alarming increase – recalling the days of the Emergency.
Despite its atrocious human-rights record, the CPI (M) made impressive advances in the agrarian sector during its first five years of rule. During this time, it distributed land to the peasantry, ensured the rights of sharecroppers, raised the wages of daily labourers, and decentralised power through panchayats. But by the beginning of the 1980s, it had reached a dead end of sorts. Several shortcomings led to a stagnation of the rural economy, including its failure to anticipate that the small size of holdings made available to the rural poor through land redistribution would yield inadequate income; its indifference to the need for state investment in agricultural inputs and infrastructure to help these small farmers; and its lack of a long-term plan of agro-industrial enterprises to provide jobs for the unemployed rural youth. The CPI (M) leadership turned deaf ears to each of these weaknesses, the cost of which was the alienation, over the next three decades, of these large sections of the rural populace, which were becoming increasingly impoverished.
End of ideology
The CPI (M) did indeed gain popular support from villagers for its promotion of the panchayati system. For the first time, the latter were being promised participation in policy decisions at the ground level, and overcoming the rules and hurdles of a bureaucratic administration. But this system soon degenerated into an institution dominated by local CPI (M) and other Left Front cadre, who diverted government social-welfare investment to build party offices as well as to develop personal property. Inevitably, resentment grew.