A humiliating CPM poll defeat has been predicted by the US-based A C Neilson, the world’s largest market research agency. Neilson’s 2011 West Bengal legislative assembly poll survey has given the Marxist party less than 80 seats out of a total of 294. It predicted around two-third majority for TMC. The pre-poll forecast has taken the sails out of the CPM yacht, demoralized the party satraps as well as the party rank and file and might have directed the huge swing votes from the undecided millions towards the surging Trinamool bank.

The opinion poll survey is probably the biggest American coup to dislodge the world’s longest lasting communist regime using a vibrant multi-party democratic order in a state brimming with population strength of over 91 million. Curiously, the opinion poll carrying a huge district-wise sample size was launched shortly after the LF announced its list of candidates. Other political parties, including the Congress, did not even launch their poll campaigns in full gear when Neilson took up the task in the last week of March. The survey result was uncorked within a fortnight of its launch, even before the political parties and contestants made much progress in wall writing. Nominations of candidates were yet to be filed. The CPM was still hopeful to do well in view of the nation-wide public out-cry against corruption and the corrupt under the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government at the Centre, of which TMC is an important ally. It was then that the Neilson dropped the bomb in the form of its poll survey report – in time with devastating effect on millions of partly left-minded, partly undecided fence-sitters.

The poll campaign itself was then on a low key, following multiple restrictions imposed by the Election Commission on holding political meetings and the use of micro-phones by contestants and political parties in view of the on-going state-wide final school-leaving examinations. Apparently, the exam schedule was deliberately fixed around the poll time by the Marxist state government mainly to restrict the Trinamool Congress’ hi-pitch election campaign programme, a clever tactic which the Election Commission failed to notice before the CPM’s main opposition made it a big issue.

Unfortunately for the CPM, nothing worked as the Neilson report came like a US Drone attack on Pakistan-Afghanistan border region, sudden and on target. The survey report was sharp and to the point. The people of West Bengal had expected that the Left would lose in the 2011 assembly election, but few had any clue about the extent of public support the CPM lost in districts in both North and South Bengal. The Neilson report said it all and had forecast the fall of all Left stalwarts, barring Chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharyya.

With the poll campaign in Kolkata and South Bengal due to end at 5 pm on April 25, just 48 hours before the end of the third round of elections in the state, the Left’s election prospects are getting dimmer. In fact, barring some heavy rigging, Buddhadeb would lose his Jadavpur constituency seat to Manish Gupta, the former chief secretary to the West Bengal government, with a good margin. Neilson’s second pre-poll survey is less sure about the Jadavpur winner.

The state chief minister, instead of playing the role of a star campaigner for the party in districts, confined himself in Jadavpur addressing scores of meetings at street corners and small parks and labyrinthine by-lanes of the former East Pakistan (Now Bangladesh) refugee settlement, mostly forcibly occupied and unplanned, for the most part of the campaign period. Jadavpur has over 2,55,000 voters. The chief minister held a rally and some 40 street and park meetings. The public response was hardly encouraging.

On the other hand, Manish Gupta had walked some 450 kilometers through Jadavpur since March 23rd on his door-to-door campaign, promising its residents better tap-water supply, one dozen schools for boys and girls and two large modern government general hospitals. Jadavpurites, who returned Buddhadeb in five previous elections since 1987, are badly neglected by their CM in terms of providing basic needs, social infrastructure and employment for educated youth. Under the CPM rule, a number of industrial units in the area such as Sulekha, Bengal Lamp, Dabur, Annapurna Glass and Usha Engineering were permanently shut down. While thousands of local people lost jobs, the realtors and property developers made hay by putting up high-rise residential buildings on the factory land. Jadavpur’s government-run TB hospital land has been sold to a NRI investor from the US to run a medical college and hospital. Another government hospital at Jadavpur’s Baghajatin Colony is in terrible condition and put on sale to a private party. Jadavpurites, a vast section of them having little access of treated and piped municipal water supply, are naturally angry. Gupta’s promises are like heaven-sent.

If Buddhadeb and his government’s finance minister Asim Dasgupta lose the election, the Left movement in the state will receive a severe jolt and its future recovery would appear to be most difficult, if not impossible, in the current context of socio-economic changes and the march of consumerism that is taking place in other parts of the country. Asim, an economist and MIT doctorate, is pitted against the secretary general of the Federation of Indian Commerce & Industry (FICCI), Amit Mitra, who resigned from the cushy job only last month to join Trinamool under the leadership of firebrand politician and Union Railway Minister Mamata Banerjee. A C Neilson has already predicted Mitra’s victory. Mitra too walked door to door spreading the message that his first task would be to bring massive investment in West Bengal from local as well as external (FDI) sources and create thousands of jobs. Asim, who too did little for his old Khardah constituency, had no answer to Amit’s aggressive marketing of investment and employment in this impoverished, neglected and job-starved traditional industrial belt along the river Hooghly.

The just-in-time Neilson West Bengal assembly poll survey report is most likely to come close to the real picture when the results are out on May 13th. However, many questions are bugging the Bengal intelligentsia as to who commissioned Neilson for such a large-scale pre-poll survey since the entire media had picked up and published the damaging report to the state CPM to influence all general voters. Did Neilson do the survey on its own and sold the report in the open to media houses? Was the Neilson exercise a purely commercial decision? Its second study was said to have been commissioned by the ABP group for an exclusive use. Could there have been a ‘foreign’ hand in the first Neilson poll survey? If the Neilson forecast comes true, Bengal’s communist citadel will fall. The proverbial ballot box will do the job of the bullet. Clever marketing, indeed! (IPA Service)