The state assembly elections in West Bengal are only a few months away. As elsewhere in India, the Hindutva juggernaut appears to be running out of steam, and therefore we once again find the ruling Trinamul Congress (TMC), and the opposition led by the Communist Party of India (Marxist), cast in the leading roles. This is the way it has been for the past nearly 20 years, and this is the way it will be again this year.
The election campaign is already well underway, but so far it mostly resembles a rerun of the election campaign in 2011, when 34 years of communist rule in West Bengal came to an end, or of that in 2006, for that matter, where the CPI(M) had one of its best electoral performances ever. Then, as now, it is all about industrialisation.
In 2006, the CPI(M), led by Buddhadeb Bhattacharya, went to the polls with a promise of bringing a large number of new industrial jobs to the state: “Agriculture is our base, industry our future,” they proclaimed. The result was the disasters in Singur and Nandigram and in 2011, an ignominious electoral defeat against Mamata Banerjee, who promised voters “industry with cheers, not tears.”
Now the time has come for Mamata Banerjee to try to convince at least some of her voters that there has been a boost in industrial development during her reign. There is no doubt that she has invested much time and energy trying to make herself attractive to India’s industrial elite in the hope of getting them to invest in West Bengal. Among other things, she recently held the second Bengal Global Business Summit, which reportedly resulted in pledges of investments to the tune of Rs250,000 crore. This is not small change. But, according to the opposition, such lavish promises almost always remain precisely that -- promises that lead to few real investments.
In this context, the former Chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharya, who was otherwise left holding the bag after the massive fiasco in 2011, has suddenly made an unexpected political comeback. Recently, he was among the main speakers at a large CPM meeting in Singur, where he proclaimed that if his party came to power in 2016, they would bring industry to Singur so that Tata Motors’ long-abandoned car factory site could at long last be used for something sensible.
He added that agriculture in itself will not be able to ensure all the jobs that were needed to provide employment for the many educated youngsters in the state. This is, word for word, the exact same argument he used a decade ago when he, unsuccessfully, tried to convince the voters that industrialisation (with the associated land acquisitions) was the way forward.
But this time, the roles are reversed: In 2011 it was Mamata who used Singur to oust the CPI(M) and now it’s the other way around.
As in 2011, Congress may once again have a role that is much bigger than the party’s electoral support would indicate. In 2011, it went into the elections in an alliance with TMC. That worked well, and Congress performed well at the hustings. But the alliance did not last for long, and the TMC has long since gone solo. Now, Congress will have to consider whether to enter into an alliance with the CPM and the other parties in the Left Front ahead of the election later this year.
“Come and join us. Every opposition party should come and join hands to dislodge this undemocratic government,” Buddhadeb Bhattacharya said in Singur, addressing Congress. Congress is a house divided and will have a tough time pondering whether to accept the invitation. But seen from TMC’s point of view, a CPI(M)-Congress alliance surely constitutes a much larger threat than the BJP, whose fortunes appear to be dwindling.
The most recent indication of this came just a few months ago, when the BJP put in a disappointing performance at a series of municipal and civic polls, including in Kolkata. Some observers believe that BJP will struggle to even make a double-digit seat tally in a house of nearly 300.
The stage thus appears set for an election campaign that will in many ways resemble those we have seen over the past 10 years or more. Ever since West Bengal’s industrial decline began in the 1950s, policy-makers have been discussing how to reverse the trend. The last 10 years have shown us that this kind of structural problem is not easily solved by a change of guard at the helm.
