Red riding hoods

Author: Editorial
Publication: The Pioneer
Date: May 7, 2003

With West Bengal's Panchayat polls round the corner, ruling Left Front bhadraloks are evidently showing their true colours. It is perhaps not an accident their ideological hue is also the colour of the blood long spilt by Left lumpens to help maintain the CPI(M)'s political stranglehold on the State. The latest victim of its reign of terror is Union Minister of State for Small Scale Industries and BJP leader Tapan Sikdar and his associates, injured in an attack in Kaipul in North 24 Parganas. While CPI(M) State Secretary Anil Biswas confessed his party "supporters" had a hand in the assault, he took pains to clarify they had "retaliated" to "provocation" from BJP activists. This customary clean chit to the wielders of razors and bhojalis cuts no ice. The assault came in the wake of several incidents of violence, including a CPI(M)-Congress clash in North Dinajpur that left nine dead. The real reason for the Left's terror tactics is not far to seek, and originates in its own fears of ceding political ground. In the last Panchayat polls in 1998, the Opposition-a Trinamool-BJP alliance and the Congress-had won 42 per cent of the votes polled, which gave it a healthy sub-district presence. This time, the Marxists are taking no chances. The smooth practitioners of scientific rigging have made a tactical changeover to brazen and bloody intimidation of Opposition candidates, not least because the Election Commission does not oversee Panchayat polls. One result: The Trinamool-BJP have been able to enter the fray for only 32,434 of the total 46,746 Gram Panchayat, Panchayat Samiti and Zilla Parishad seats, leaving the rest free for an unopposed red rampage or farcical Left-Congress duels.

The Left's Stalinisation project has long reinvented the rules of governance, and Bengal's Biharisation is one corollary. No doubt the CPI(M) enjoys ground support, or it would not have celebrated 25 years of unpunctuated rule last year. Land reforms were once a feather in its cap, and the positive effects of the feted Operation Barga are visible even now in the absence of armed extremism as found in Andhra or Bihar. But the process more or less came to a halt after the Left's first term-1977-1982-itself. The first flush of reform created a middle peasantry that became the CPI(M)'s vanguard in electoral and patronage politics. Over the last two decades, 'empowered' by Panchayat elections, this group has acquired all the trappings of a traditional ruling class: Entrenchment, anti-development rigidity, corruption. Elsewhere, under the veneer of civil administration, political dynamism has been systematically crushed, with electoral politics reduced to statistics that the goons hired by Writers' Buildings help notch up. The brutalisation at Keshpur of the BJP-Trinamool during a byelection in 2000 is only one recent example. The Congress, acting as what Trinamool leader Mamata Banerjee called the CPI(M)'s "B-Team", bears much of the blame for the lack of oppositional challenge, which itself emboldens the red assault on democratic processes. If only to preserve his own image as a positive contrast to the tired patriarchs he supplanted, Chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee must punish the perpetrators of pre-poll atrocities. Lack of action will suggest he too has not deviated from the revanchism and instrumentalist use of terror his predecessors delighted in.
 

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