Friday, November 20, 2009

The Revenge Of The Proletariat

  • Tehelka - India's Independent Weekly News Magazine

    tags: no_tag

    • The full story of why the CPI(M) is losing Bengal after 40 years
    • SWAPAN DASGUPTA
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    • 'WHEN IT CAME TO POWER, THE CPI(M) REPLACED THE BUREAUCRACY AND POLICE AS TOOLS OF GOVERNANCE WITH ITS OWN CADRE’
      Illustration: ANAND NAOREM
    • There is a basis to the indignation of both sides. Ever since it came to power in 1977, the CPI(M) has exercised a stranglehold over the state. Its political thrust has not been confined to merely winning electoral battles but in exercising control over civil society. In rural West Bengal, the dreaded Local Committees of the CPI(M) replaced the bureaucracy and police as instruments of governance and law and order. From determining who can farm a particular piece of land and appointing the village school-teacher to imposing social boycotts of an errant “class enemy”, the CPI(M) ensured that its presence impacted on each and every individual in the village. It was impossible for a family to live in a village unless it made peace with the local CPI(M). It naturally followed that it was virtually impossible for an opposition party, be it Congress, TMC or anyone else, to operate freely in rural society. This may explain why almost all competitive politics in West Bengal was invariably centred on cities and other urban clusters; in much of rural Bengal, the CPI(M) and its allies ran a one-party state.
    • However, it would be a travesty to suggest that the CPI(M) hold on rural society stemmed from the exercise of force alone. For more than three decades, the Left prospered on the goodwill generated by Operation Barga and the decentralisation of power to the panchayats. Operation Barga, the Left Front’s most far-reaching achievement, conferred security of tenure to bargadars (sharecroppers). In practice, it made ‘registered’ bargadars de-facto owners of the land they cultivated. The devolution of power to elected panchayats which immediately followed the empowerment of the poor peasantry, together redefined rural power relations. With Left cadres and the elected panchayats taking an active interest in the actual implementation of land reforms, the social and political backbone of the jotedars, the rich farmers who made up the village leadership of the undivided Congress, was broken. For 30 years, the anti-Left opposition could not re-establish their presence in rural West Bengal. The Left would invariably lose seats in Kolkata and Howrah, perhaps even in the border districts of Malda and Murshidabad, but in the vast expanse of the rural hinterland its strongholds were almost impregnable.