The tide turned for the Marxists in 1977 when it won massive victories in West Bengal and Kerala. But those were the result not so much of its own popularity as a backlash against the Congress for the Emergency of 1975-77. Perhaps that undeserved success led to the party's undoing, whose impact is now being felt. In 1977, the CPI(M) seemed to have convinced itself that it had achieved all that it had set out to do when it broke away from the CPI in 1964.

Having established itself as the first among the communist parties, it automatically became the leader of the Left Front in West Bengal and Kerala and also at the national level. Since the CPI(M)'s rise coincided with the Congress's decline, especially in West Bengal, the Marxists acquired the attributes of arrogance and swollen-headedness, of which they are now being accused.

If the party did not become so haughty in Kerala, the reason was that it had to share power alternately with the Congress-led UDF. In West Bengal, however, it became the master of all it surveyed. As a result, it became the victim of the inevitable consequences of corruption and proclivity to a bourgeois lifestyle, which are now being recognized.

But these flaws, which are common to all ruling parties, do not fully explain the repeated setbacks it has suffered from 2008, two years after the Left Front's comprehensive victory in the assembly elections. The reason for the sudden and precipitous decline in the CPI(M)'s popularity was undoubtedly the Singur and Nandigram episodes, which brought to the fore all the disturbing features of the party's highhanded ways.

As long as it unleashed its cadres only on the party's political opponents, whether in the towns or the villages, and left the overall scene, especially the questions of property, undisturbed, the CPI(M) did not experience too much difficulty. But trouble began when the state government decided to acquire agriculture land for industrial projects without securing the consent of all those involved. The government and the party had evidently presumed that it could quash all opposition by the usual rough-and-ready method of a combined police-cadre operation. But land was too valuable a commodity to be surrendered so easily.

For the first time, therefore, the CPI(M) faced genuine resistance. The fact that there was no unanimity within the party about the wooing of the private industrialists must have also weakened its resolve. The other Left Front partners were also uneasy about this deviation from Marxist tenets. Even then, if the CPI(M) had not depended so heavily on its Stalinist instincts - “they have been paid back in their own coin”, gloated Buddhadev Bhattacharjee after the “invasion” of Nandigram by the motorcycle-borne Marxist militia - it might still have been possible to defuse the situation.

This low-key approach was what Jyoti Basu tried when he negotiated with Mamata Banerjee and helped to bring her and the government together under the aegis of the Governor, Gopal Krishna Gandhi. But the Marxists were still too swollen-headed to calm down. They also did not desist from making disparaging comments about the Governor. This was the CPI(M) with which the people of West Bengal had long been familiar.

But the party had run its course. Apart from Singur and Nandigram, its moral and ideological bankruptcy was evident from the Rizwanur Rahman and Taslima Nasreen episodes. That the bigwigs of the Kolkata police could intervene in the private matter of a love marriage between a Muslim boy and the daughter of a Marwari businessman showed how the professionalism of the force had been undermined. Similarly, Taslima Nasreen's eviction from Kolkata following protests from a Muslim organization was a pointer to the hollowness of the party's secular pretensions.

It is now too late for the CPI(M) to make amends. What is more, any effort in this direction is liable to be seen as an acknowledgment of its mistakes. For instance, the belated granting of a university status to Presidency College confirmed that the party had undermined its autonomy, as it did of other major institutions by controlling all appointments from Alimuddin Street, the CPI(M) headquarters.

The CPI(M)'s ascent was due to the quirks of circumstance - the Emergency eroding the Congress's base and the presence of the charismatic Jyoti Basu at the helm giving the party a special aura. But after the deaths of Promode Dasgupta, Benoy Chaudhury and others, and Jyoti Basu's failure to live up to his image, the party passed into the hands of men of straw. Its decline and fall, therefore, were inevitable.(IPA Service)