The party bosses at Alimuddin Street have a standard excuse: we have failed to protect our workers against the terror of the TMC. So they are joining the BJP to save themselves. This is a ridiculous excuse. The history of the international communist movement for the last 150 years bears testimony to the fact that from their very inception in Europe in the nineteenth century, the Communist Parties the world over, India included, grew, expanded their organization and won over hundreds of thousands of toiling people by fighting State terror at every step. But they never compromised, never deserted the party, never crossed over to the enemy camp.

In India, the workers of the undivided Communist Party organized the famous Telengana peasant movement in Andhra, the Tebhaga movement in pre-partition Bengal, series of food movements in West Bengal, faced torture, persecution and long years of imprisonment, but they never wavered, nor their loyalty to the party and its ideals ever flagged. In 1948, the CPI was banned in West Bengal and a large number of leaders and workers either went underground or were imprisoned. But they did not desert the CPI.

But today they are. Why? Because in the 34 years the CPI-M was in power in West Bengal, the character and quality of the members of the party underwent a qualitative change. There was a massive and rapid expansion in party membership. From a party of the masses, the CPI-M became a ‘mass party’ throwing its doors wide open to anybody who wanted to join it. And many did join the CPI-M because it was the ruling party and associating with it meant both money and power. The newcomers knew little and cared even less for knowing the basics of communism. They had not read any communist literature. They came to make money and acquire property which they did merrily.

Thus started the process of the party’s alienation from the people and the people’s disenchantment with the party. The Communist Party came to be sarcastically called kamiye nis (make money) party. In 1977, when the Left Front under the CPI-M’s leadership first came to power, the slogan of the Front was Bam-front Sarkar, sangramer hatiyaar (the Left Front Government is the instrument of struggle). By the mid-eighties that slogan of ‘struggle’ was no longer being heard. The then Chief Minister and party patriarch Jyoti Basu started saying that since the party was being voted to power by the people again and again, some benefit had to be given to them. Still later, the party leaders started saying that being in power, how can we organize any movement because that would be a movement against our own government.

As the CPI-M started losing public support, it began to depend more and more on terror tactics and muscle power. Criminals and lumpen elements were taken in the party and publicly eulogized as being ‘assets of the party’. The party, with the full backing of the administratie machinery, started packing the educational institutions from primary schools to universities with ‘loyal men’ whether or not they had the requisite educational and teaching qualifications. The party’s student wing, the SFI, started flexing its muscles to capture school and college unions and denying rival student bodies to file nominations in school or college elections..

Unwittingly and unknowingly, the CPI-M started yielding the political space to its opponents. The year 1998 saw the split in the Bengal Congress. Mamata Banerjee came out of the party and formed her Trinamool Congress. In thirteen years, she routed the once formidable CPI-M and ousted it from power. But ironically, the TMC refused to learn its lesson from the experience of the CPI-M and soon resorted to the same tactics.

Criminals and lumpens took no time in migrating from the CPI- M to the Tinamool camp and started the same anti-social activities they were doing earlier. Meanwhile, the factional feuds between the old Trinamoolis and the new ones who had supplanted them intensified. Armed clashes between two groups of TMC men have now become a matter of daily occurrence, discrediting the party and its supremo. The involvement of party bigwigs in the Saradha chit fund scam, further brought down the party’s reputation.

People are now also getting disillusioned with the Trinamool Congress and its charismatic leader Mamata Banerjee. But the antipathy for the TMC has not generated an iota of sympathy for the CPI-M. The obvious beneficiary of this situation is the BJP which is fast becoming the major challenge to the TMC. With their pathological hatred for Mamata and her party, hapless CPI-M leaders are getting a vicarious pleasure at BJP’s rise to take on the TMC. (IPA Service)