The by election results in West Bengal and Kerala signal a precipitous decline in the prospects for the Left parties in India. The results suggest that West Bengal is at the edge of a precipice. A long standing one party authoritarian regime is unraveling on more dimensions than one can list. Its electoral base is now ready for other options; its fabled party machine is now fraying, and its ideological message is unclear. But most astonishingly, it is clear that the party has lost even basic governance capacities. West Bengal has been a dismal failure on so many fronts: health, education, investment. It has a state that has been living of the political capital of Operation Barga well past its expiry date. There is an extraordinary sense of lethargy amongst the party?s top leadership, almost as if they know they have been in power too long. Even the ideological debates in the party have a sense of staleness, neither connected to reality (which they seldom were), nor to any sophisticated intellectual currents.
The party?s destruction of the state is now coming home to roost. In West Bengal the lines between the party and the state had increasingly become thin. In fact, nowhere in India had the state become such an instrument in the hands of the party. Party cadres have controlled everything from appointments to teachers to permissions to setting up shops; from the movement of people to the character of the universities. So uniquely, any attack on the party also becomes an attack on the state, because those power structures are one and the same. The collapse that West Bengal faces is that the collapse of the party will be a harbinger of the collapse of the state.
This can in part be seen in the way in which West Bengal is handling the naxal crisis. In some other areas in India, including Jharkhand and Chattisagrh, the Indian state had very little substantive presence. And the Naxals have filled the vacuum. In West Bengal, the state existed, and indeed controlled much of what went on in the state. But over the years there has been a progressive self decimation of the state. To varying degrees all political parties in West Bengal use violence opportunistically. For the Trinamool violent incidents are a political opportunity to embarrass the government and demonstrate its fragility. But increasingly the Left will keep opportunistic alliances with all kinds of violent groups open to target the Trinamool, and for possible uses after the election should there be a non-Left government. West Bengal is, in all likelihood to continue to experience willful self abdication by the state. And in such a case, the economic ramifications for India will be huge.
We also know that when one party dominant regimes begin to fray, all kinds of reactionary forces come in to fill the vacuum. In fact, if the BJP and RSS had not been in such dire straits, West Bengal could have been an arena of mobilisation. They have, in the past without much effort polled 10% of the vote which would have given them a launching pad. And despite the official rhetoric of the CPM, there is enough combustible communalism still present in Bengal to cause nervousness. But the Gorkhaland agitation is now clearly picking up electoral and political steam and it is not clear that either party in the state will have the political wherewithal to manage it. Bengal has also not been served well by many of its intellectuals. For the CPM had, become, for many Bengalis, more like a symbol of ethnic identification that an ideological party. But the construction of the CPM as a carrier of a Bengali political identity so disabled clear criticism and discussion of the party?s trajectory and its abysmal record.
The Left?s ideological agenda never had much purchase on the Indian electorate. The emphasis on the social sector is easy for other parties to domesticate in their own agenda. The Left also made several big tactical mistakes. One of its big virtues was to have stayed away from the crude identity and caste politics. Ironically, just when the India electorate was looking to turn away from crude identity based politics, the Left went and embraced caste politics. While its warning against cozying up to the US was salutary, it chose to take a stand on an issue that had no purchase in mass politics. In short, the party has shown not even the slightest degree of political judgment. Moreover, for all its limitations, the Left has had people who knew the art of political compromise and wheeling dealing in the constructive sense. But the central party apparatus is now more ideological and less political.
This is a real shame because in some ways the Left was making three signal contributions to Indian politics. Its record in parliament has been exemplary, as measured by contribution to debate. Even during the UPA?s first terms it, more than the BJP, was performing the role of an opposition party. It consistently had policy positions. And it least generated a debate on India?s foreign policy and attempted to make sure that India did not unthinkingly climb on a US bandwagon. More structurally, it is impossible to imagine that capitalism can develop and be held in check without some kind of Left counterweight. One does not have to agree with many of the Left?s specific proposals to worry about the fact that Indian capital need close scrutiny and accountability. The Left could have performed a historic role by doing that intelligently. Instead it had created the conditions for its own demise, by misgoverning West Bengal and Kerala, two states that could have given it a solid basis to play an important role. The party will now need an internal revolution to salvage itself in West Bengal. But the task is not impossible.
The writer is President & Chief Executive, Centre for Policy Research