To recapitulate, the first indication that the communists were forces of the future was evident during the food agitation of 1966 when they were successful in calling for two days and even three days of bandhs at a stretch with P.C. Sen’s government a helpless spectator. Not surprisingly, when Sen’s government fell a year later, there was dancing in the streets.

But politics does not always follow a straight line. Some of the events of those days are worth remembering because their echoes can be felt in the political field today more than four decades later. For a start, the communists were a divided force in 1967. In fact, they contested the assembly elections in that year under two rival formations - the United Left Front (ULF) led by the CPI-M, and the PULF (Progressive United Left Front) comprising the CPI, the SUCI and others.

This division was repaired in 1977 when the Left Front, minus the SUCI, came to power. But the latent rifts have remained. It is noteworthy that the CPI-M is seemingly all alone at present in its battle against the Trinamool Congress. Little is heard of its allies. Similarly, the CPI-M was alone when Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee launched the industrialization drive and bore all the brunt of the ignominy of the Singur and Nandigram events just as it is facing all the criticism about the latest incident of its supposed high-handedness in Netai, where seven villagers were killed in firing in front of a CPI-M office. In fact, the industrialization drive starkly exposed the rupture within the Left Front when the CPI, the Forward Bloc and the RSP formed a mini-front within the ruling alliance against the CPI-M’s pro-private sector line.

The point is that the Left Front was never quite the ideal combine which the Marxists claimed. It was only the force of Jyoti Basu’s personality which held it together despite the inter-party clashes which preceded, and occasionally even followed, its formation. There is little doubt that the front started unravelling under Bhattacharjee. There is every possibility, therefore, that it will not survive the Left Front’s defeat in the forthcoming assembly elections, which is almost a certainty.

For the communists, such a denouement is worrisome. The reason is that their doctrine no longer has the appeal it had earlier. At one time, it could be said with a fair degree of accuracy that every Bengali household had at least one communist. Virtually the entire intelligentsia was Left-oriented. This is no longer so. The disillusionment among this section, which influenced the articulate middle class and whose impact percolated lower down, began as the Left’s years in power showed that its stirring rhetoric did not match either its deeds or even the lifestyle of the commissars.

Samar Sen, well-known poet and editor of the Left-leaning Now and Frontier weeklies, expressed his disenchantment in his typical acerbic manner when he said that the workers will ask for overtime payment if the revolution continued after 5 p.m. Among the others, Mahashweta Devi may have remained a Leftist, but has distanced herself from the CPI-M after Nandigram. Actually, Nandigram was some kind of a watershed because, for the first time, the Leftist intellectuals were shocked by the brazenness of the Marxist militia as it “invaded” the area and evicted the Trinamool supporters.

Bhattacharjee, who subsequently regretted his comment after the “invasion” that the Marxist cadres had paid the Trinamool supporters back in their own coin, should have realized from that episode that the party’s recourse to violence could have hugely damaging consequences. He has again belatedly called upon both his party men and their political rivals to exercise restraint. But the continuing acts of violence in which both the sides have been involved and which was described as “political tandav” by the former governor, Gopal Krishna Gandhi, will harm the CPI-M more if only because as the party in power, it has greater responsibility for maintaining peace.

Unfortunately, the CPI-M’s instincts have remained what they were in the ’60s. The party has learnt nothing and forgotten nothing in the intervening decades. The earlier aggression, which it saw as an expression of the party’s revolutionary temper, is seen today as the muscle-flexing tantrums of a bully. The Trinamool, on the other hand, carries the tag of the underdog and victim. (IPA Service)