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The Battle for Bengal

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A week is a long time in politics. Nine days after India’s Left parties herded 11 parties together to form a Third Front, the alliance has started to crumble. Jayalalithaa is willing to offer the CPM and the CPI one seat each in Tamil Nadu, not the six that they had asked for.

Getting seats out of Mulayam Singh in Uttar Pradesh will be tough and Naveen Patnaik is unlikely to oblige in Orissa. By the time polling starts on April 7, the Left could find itself contesting only its traditional states of Kerala, Tripura and Bengal.

Bengal’s 42 Lok Sabha seats make it the third largest in terms of electoral importance, after Uttar Pradesh’s 80 and Maharashtra’s 48. Andhra Pradesh also used to have 42 seats, but now it will have 17 in Telangana and 25 in Seemandhra.

Bengal is supposed to have decisively ejected the Left in 2011. The general expectation is that the Left will be decimated in the Lok Sabha elections in Bengal. Is that right?

Though Bengal practices electoral democracy, its politics is essentially undemocratic, involving a great deal of violence and coercion in rural Bengal. And Bengal is largely rural. Earlier, the CPM used to send out goons to capture entire areas – villages, mohallas, districts – in what is called ‘elaka dokhol,’ which loosely translates as turf capture.

By 2010, the Left started losing its goons, who migrated to the Trinamool Congress (TMC) sensing which way the wind was blowing. Once Mamata had her own army of goons, it was easy for her to use the CPM’s own tactics back on them, winning the state in 2011.

Dwaipayan Bhattacharyya and Kumar Rana, who analysed the 2013 panchayat polls in Bengal for The Economic and Political Weekly last year, used an innovative way to measure the degree of elaka dokhol going on in Bengal.

They took panchayat poll data and calculated the number of seats that had been won uncontested by the ruling party of the time. Coercion is more common in the small confines of panchayat polls rather than in the broad canvas of Lok Sabha elections. And any seat won without contest would mean that rivals had been forced to stay out.

What they found was illuminating. In 2003, when the Left won panchayats, they won 11% of all seats without contest. In 2008, when they won again, this number – and possibly elaka dokhol and intimidation – actually fell to 5%. By 2013, when the TMC swept panchayat polls, they number climbed back to 11%. So yes, Mamata is playing the Left’s own tune back to them.

People say that the TMC is extremely popular in rural Bengal, where they win big. This has huge regional disparities. The TMC indeed wins big in south Bengal, which is densely populated, heavily cultivated and has fewer Dalits and Muslims than rural Bengal’s average of 57%.

The coercion is also more intense in south Bengal. In the 2008 panchayat elections, the degree of elaka dokhol was spread more or less evenly across Bengal. By 2013, it had become concentrated in south Bengal, where the number of seats won without contest doubled from the 2008 figure in the same area.

In the western districts that are loosely called Jangalmahal, the TMC has expanded fast, after offering jobs and incomes to the poor of this area. During Left rule, this area was largely ignored and was the site of violent confrontations among the CPM’s goons and Maoists.

The TMC has little presence in the northern and central districts of Murshidabad, Malda and north Dinajpur, largely controlled by the Congress. And in four districts, Birbhum, Nadia, north and south 24 Parganas, the Left is no longer a pushover.

The Bengal Left has gone through a near-death experience after being wiped out in the 2011 elections. Has it learnt anything from the experience?

Abdur Rezzak Mollah, a plain-speaking, often blunt CPM leader recently said that it had become a party of managers, dominated by ‘Brahmins and Kayasths,’ who lorded over Dalits and Muslims. This is a thinly veiled barb at his bete noire, former chief minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee.

On Wednesday, the Left front announced its candidates for all seats in Bengal. It got in 26 new faces, including more than 10 people who are less than 40 years old. Somewhat mysteriously, it also roped in Subhasini Ali, a former MP of Kanpur, to contest the Barrackpore seat. The seat is now held by TMC’s Dinesh Trivedi, a former railways minister.

So yes, the Left is trying to signal that it is intent on change. And, the 2009 Congress-TMC alliance that boosted the latter is no longer functional. Bengal will have a three cornered contest, with the Left, TMC and Congress squaring off against each other. Historically that helped the Left. But will it, this time?


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