A look at the just held Contai (South) Assembly by-poll result will throw a great deal of light on the political shift that is taking place in rural Bengal. Contai is in West Medinipur. The undivided Medinipur district, and after its division the East and West Medinipur districts, has been a traditional stronghold of the CPI-M.

Contai is in West Medinipur. In the Contai (South) by-poll last month, the TMC won by polling 95,369 votes. The BJP came second, polling 52,843 votes. The Left Front fielded a CPI candidate who came a distant third with 17,423, while the Congress finished fourth with a vote tally of just 2,270. Both the CPI and the Congress forfeited their security deposits. In the 2016 Assembly elections, the TMC had polled 53.7 per cent votes while the Left Front and the Congress, fighting together, had got 34.2 per cent votes. The BJP had polled just 8.75 per votes. This time the BJP increased its vote share to 31 per cent – a rise of 22 per cent. Where did this extra tally of votes come from? From the Left and the Congress camp, of course.

The people of Medinipur started turning against the Left during the last part of the CPI-M rule when the Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee Government tried to acquire ten thousand acres of land forcibly in Nandigram for setting up a Special Economic Zone (SEZ) for the benefit of the Salim Group of Indonesia. The people built up a strong resistance movement against the forcible eviction from their land. The police shot dead 14 persons and wounded about 70. That marked the beginning of the end of the CPI-M influence in Bnegal. Now, lower level CPI-M workers are deserting their party and joining the BJP. And not in Nandigram alone.

In the nearby port town of Haldia, a CPI-M stalwart, Lakshman Seth, reigned supreme as the uncrowned king. He was the chairman of the Haldia Development Authority. His word was the law. He was the CPI-M MP from Tamluk from the 11th to the 14th Lok Sabha. He was the alleged mastermind of the Nandigram violence and his name is often mentioned in connexion with the ‘disappearance’ of six persons during the Nandigram movement. He built a huge personal empire at Haldia including a medical college. Differences broke out between him and the CPI-M shortly after the party lost power in 2011.. In October,, 2016, he joined the Bharatiya Janata Party with a great deal of fanfare.

This is the general picture everywhere in rural and semi-urban Bengal. The CPI-M grassroot level workers are deserting their party and joining the BJP. Since they are thoroughly conversant with the nitty-gritty of polling at the booth level, the BJP is getting a trained army of workers for electioneering. This is the reason for the phenomenal growth of the BJP in West Bengal.

A pertinent question may be asked. How is it that the cadres of a highly ideologically motivated party like the CPI-M found it so easy to join a communal party like the BJP with so little compunction? The answer is simple. From 1967, when the CPI-M first came to power in West Bengal by aligning with Ajoy Mukherjee’s Bangla Congress, which broke away from the Congress, the CPI-M started metamorphosing into a party in power – a ruling party.

All sorts of people started joining the CPI-M, not to advance the cause of communism, but to make money in umpteen ways that association with a ruling party opens up. Teaching of the basics of Marxism-Leninism was replaced by practical training of winning elections by every means possible, fair or foul. The class character of the CPI-M gradually changed. Ideology was given the go-by. It became a party of the rural and urban middle class, interested only in feathering their own nests. Naturally, such people found no difficulty in migrating to the BJP when it suited them. Some of them had earlier joined the TMC and cornered the old TMC leaders and workers who had built the party. It is the conflict between the old and the new TMC people that often leads to group fighting – sometimes with arms.

Today the leaders of the West Bengal CPI-M unblushingly give the excuse that because they are not being able to protect their workers from the ‘terror’ of the TMC, their men are joining the BJP. If they had read the history of the international communist movement during the past 150 years they would have known that the communists had struggled every inch of their way forward by fighting State terror. But today it is no longer necessary to read the history of the international communist movement or to study communist theory. The overpowering necessity is to save one’s skin by any means, by aligning with anyone. So it is that the BJP is co-opting the CPI-M, cadres. And so it is that more and more Shakhas of the RSS are coming up in a State which had a long tradition of anti-imperialism, secularism, nationalism and Leftism.
(IPA Service)