When Ms Banerjee went to meet the Planning Commission in Delhi, 20-odd CPM activists held a demonstration at Gate 1 of Yojana Bhavan with police permission. The police advised her and her finance minister Amit Mitra to enter the building through Gate 4, where there were no protesters, and offered to escort her.

As if spoiling for a fight, she refused the offer, and insisted on going through Gate 1 in a private car. She was heckled. A melee ensued, during which Mr Mitra’s shirt was torn. Nobody was injured. The CPM politburo promptly issued an apology. But Ms Banerjee cancelled her meeting with finance minister P Chidambaram, abruptly returned to Kolkata saying Delhi isn’t “safe”, and spent three days in hospital.

Worse, she vengefully threatened that “10 lakh Trinamool supporters” would descend on Delhi to fight the Left. West Bengal governor MK Narayanan implicitly legitimised her conduct by condemning the “premeditated” attack. The signal was enough for TMC activists to ransack and set on fire hundreds of CPM offices in West Bengal. They also vandalised the Baker Laboratories at Kolkata’s prestigious Presidency College (renamed University).

Ms Banerjee’s tantrum further put off West Bengal’s urban middle class, dominated by Bhadralok upper-caste Brahmins, Kayasthas and Baidyas, who despise her for her lack of good education, her coarse language and boorish manners. But she has partly succeeded in diverting attention from Sudipta Gupta’s tragic death, and in turning the tables on the Left on the eve of West Bengal’s now-imminent local body elections.

The CPM is paying dearly for its indiscretion in staging the Delhi protest and allowing it to turn sour, although not violent. With scores of its members arrested in West Bengal, the CPM is on the defensive, but doesn’t know how to counter the repression it faces without inviting overwhelming violence. As politburo member Sitaram Yechury admits, it has “lost some ground” thanks to the TMC’s “politics of terror”.

Ms Banerjee is on a collision course with state election commission on the polling dates and deployment of Central police forces during the panchayat elections. The elections are of singular importance to her party in demonstrating that its hold over the state, clearly shown by its sweeping victory in the May 2011 Assembly elections, remains unbroken, especially in the villages.

Whichever way the dispute with the election commission is resolved, one thing is clear. The TMC will do its utmost to intimidate village-level CPM cadres to ensure that they don’t file nominations in about a third of all panchayats.

In this, ironically, the TMC will be seen by many as replicating what the CPM often did when in power: muzzle and paralyse the opposition. This has long been an institutionalised part of the state’s politics. To understand the irony (and its limits), one must recall the polarised nature and violent past of Bengal politics.

Bengali nationalism was never fully integrated into the larger Freedom Struggle. Gandhi had very little influence on Bengal’s nationalist movement, which was dominated first by “revolutionary terrorists”, and later by Subhash Chandra Bose’s militarist anti-imperialism. The Congress was historically weak in Bengal, one of the few Indian regions where it didn’t share power in the British-era legislature.

West Bengal’s post-Independence politics has been polarised and volatile. It saw stable Congress rule for less than 15 years under BC Roy before plunging into popular agitations for food and other forms of social unrest. 1967 saw the Congress’s exit from power.

Then followed two United Front governments, mainly composed of Left parties, and led by Ajoy Mukherjee of the breakaway Bengal Congress. These were preceded and followed by President’s Rule. The period 1968-71 saw immense turmoil, industrial unrest, a rash of workers’ gheraos of managers, more than 7,400 arrests without trial, over 400 “political disturbances”, 450 inter-party clashes, and 1,771 political murders, besides nearly 200 deaths in police firing.

The Naxalite movement, born in 1967, spread especially to the cities. Industrial capital began to flee West Bengal. Violence prevailed. Yet more violence was to come with President’s Rule in 1970-72, the SS Ray-led Congress government of 1972-75—which came to power through rigging and fraud—and the Emergency that followed.

Egged on by Indira Gandhi and aided by the Congress-led Chhatra Parishad and business-financed goondas, Ray unleashed severe repression against the Left, arbitrarily arresting, beating up and even killing hundreds of its activists, and crippling democratic politics. The TMC is the direct heir of the Chhatra Parishad and its lumpenism.

Between 1970 and 1972, an estimated 600 CPM members and 320 Naxalites were killed in prison. Some 25,000 Left activists were arrested in 1971-75. Hundreds of young men suspected to be Naxalite members or sympathisers were pulled out from their homes or public places and killed in broad daylight. Many more were illegally detained and tortured.

A particularly gruesome incident was the Cossipore-Baranagar police massacre of more than 150 Naxalite sympathisers during President’s Rule. As a reporter saw it, “dead bodies were everywhere—bodies with heads cut off, limbs lost, eyes gouged out, entrails ripped open…They were carried in rickshaws and handcarts and thrown into the Hooghly…”

The state cynically exploited intra-Left rivalries to eliminate its opponents. The Naxalite movement was effectively subdued and the parliamentary Left weakened through mass-scale human rights violations and brute goonda power by the state. The period 1967-1977 in West Bengal was the most violent decade in any Indian state since 1947. It inflicted a heavy burden price on Indian democracy.

It’s only when the Left Front, mainly comprising the CPM, Communist Party of India, Revolutionary Socialist Party and Forward Block, came to power in 1977 that law and order was re-established and the democratic process resumed in Bengal. The Front released political prisoners and put the police on a tight leash. It adopted a stance of political moderation, or what many would call India’s version of Social Democratic politics—notwithstanding its rhetoric of a revolutionary overthrow of the “bourgeois-landlord” order led by the “big bourgeoisie”.

The Left Front initiated land reform through Operation Barga, which registered tenants and gave them tenure security and certain rights, pioneered panchayati raj in India, and greatly decentralised governance. It also worked for balanced Centre-state relations. Soon, however, the reform momentum ran out. By the late 1980s conservatism set in, particularly in the CPM.

The CPM’s cadre base expanded enormously, and had to be accommodated in power structures. The party machine was lubricated through commissions earned on various state contracts. Party supporters were placed in key institutions as a reward for loyalty. Ossification set in and corruption and bossism grew. In the mid-1990s, the Front government adopted a new industrial policy without inner-party discussion, which favoured the main designated class enemy: the “big bourgeoisie”.

Aggressive land acquisition followed, alienating small and middle peasants, the CPM’s core support-base. West Bengal’s social development indices fell as the Front criminally neglected health, education, food security and other public services in favour of an elitist “industrialisation-at-any-cost” obsession. But the state didn’t attract much industry. Unemployment and unrest soared.

To sustain these policies, and maintain its own hegemony, the CPM marginalised the other Left parties and increasingly resorted to coercion against its opponents/critics—a tactic it had learnt in 1970-76, perhaps in self-defence. It also courted the middle class and businessmen.

The Left Front’s support among the poor shrank. Yet it could repeatedly win elections—setting a world record of 34 years of uninterrupted democratic rule—because the opposition was weak and got further divided with the 1997 Congress-TMC split. By 2006, the Left had 235 of the Assembly’s 294 seats, TMC a mere 30. The Left’s arrogance grew, as did its reliance on violence.

This became starkly evident in Singur and Nandigram (2007-8). The Left’s base started eroding rapidly, especially among small peasants, landless workers and Adivasis. Muslims, strongly supportive of the Front because of its secularism and successful containment of communal conflict, started drifting away after the Sachar Committee exposed their low status and under-representation in government jobs in West Bengal relative to other states.

In 2008, the Left withdrew support to the United Progressive Alliance, paving the way for a TMC-Congress coalition, which swept the 2009 Lok Sabha and the 2011 Assembly elections.

The TMC is trying to shore up its fortunes through violence. It’s tempting, but wrong, to see the CPM and TMC as mutual clones. The CPM drifted or was forced into violence, and has used it selectively. The TMC is quintessentially violent, and knows no other politics. (IPA Service)