The media exhorts onward the Trinamool Congress and its allied spectrum, from the explicitly allied Congress to the tacitly alliedaoists. They wish to use all their might to remove the Left Front from the state government in West Bengal. Excited by the prospect of victory, they nonetheless perspire with the fear that their calculations might have gone horribly wrong. Their standa Mrd is Mamata Banerjee, whose authoritarian populism oscillates between rhetorical concern for the masses and genuine collaboration with the Chambers of Commerce. Her morality is indignation at the continued governance of the Left Front; there is nothing else she can offer. No programme, no sense of what Bengal must face if her party comes to power. It is this lack of an alternative and the positive record of the Left Front that signals the poor mathematics: could it be that after all this drama, the Left Front wins for the 8th time?
It is clear to us that a victory of the TMC and its allies presages a U-turn for West Bengal's social development. High on the cards will be the end to the land reforms that have positively marked the lives of those who live and work in agrarian Bengal. By all indications, land reforms continue on the agenda of the Left Front; till January 2010, the seven Left Front governments have distributed over 11.3 lakh acres to 30.4 lakh poor peasants, and provided security of tenure for 15 lakh sharecroppers. The social effects of the land policy, and of the provision of social services, results in West Bengal having a death rate (6.2 per thousand) and birth rate (17.2) below that of the Indian national average (7.3 and 22.5), and an infant mortality rate at 33 in 2009, lower than the national average of 50. The TMC's paribartan (change) is to reverse course and welcome with open arms the takeover of agriculture by big capital that has doomed farmers from Vidharba to Warangal. It would be a travesty.
Mamata Banerjee and her allies focus attention on the land acquisition battle at Singur and the confrontation and police firing at Nandigram as talismans to attract the independent Left. It is hard to take seriously the commitment of someone like Mamata Banerjee to both the rights of the people to land and the rights of the people to civil liberties. The panchayats governed by Ms. Banerjee's party give us an indication of the systematic corruption and the eagerness to transfer land to avaricious private hands. Ms. Banerjee's own loyal servitude to Sanjay Gandhi's Youth Congress during the Emergency might be a harbinger of her authoritarian attitude in office. The TMC led alliance is not an alternative to the Left Front; it is its negation. She has pried open a scab and tried to bleed it for her political ends. Feverish in anticipation of political and personal economic gain, the TMC would prefer to let gangrene set into West Bengal than consider the well-being of its people.
What resides under the scab named Singur and Nandigram? The Left Front has clearly admitted that it moved too hastily on land acquisition for industrial projects, following the massive electoral mandate it received in 2006. Even the most generous compensation package is not sufficient unless people are truly convinced that their well-being and that of their fellow citizens will be improved by the sale of their land to the state. In Singur, while a majority of land owners voluntarily sold their land, there were many who were not convinced that the sale was a good idea. In Nandigram, a notice served by a local authority provided the opportunity for the opposition to spread panic that land will be taken away forcibly. The fact remains that not an inch of land was acquired in Nandigram.
Should the policies and administrative practices of the Left Front be judged solely on the basis of Singur and Nandigram? No. If it were, then it would have lost its moral compass. In fact, the Left Front has adjudged these to be valuable lessons on a number of fronts: it has learnt that a general mandate is not the same as a particular mandate; it has learnt that all decisions must be democratically arrived upon involving the people from below; it has learnt - at a very high cost - the destructive potential of the combination of ultra-left (Maoist) and ultra-right (TMC) reaction and its own vulnerabilities. These are valuable lessons. The Left Front comes before the people having taken these lessons to heart.
Really? This must be simply propaganda, the writings of an expatriate whose commitments exceed his own rational analysis. Hardly. The Left Front is composed of political parties whose programmes emerge out of democratic discussion in numerous internal forums and with close interaction with millions of people who develop and lead struggles through their mass organizations. The Left Front is committed to democracy and to democratization, and is willing to see not only that every single one of its initiatives will be a success, but that every error must be recognized and dealt with. In the Indian political scene at large, the Left is a crucial pillar of rational politics, and a singular hopeful sign for the future. Every other party has sold itself to the rancid politics of neo-liberalism, with its claustrophobic social effects and its hierarchical economic policies. Without a strong Left, the Indian polity would be morally weaker. It is programmatically committed to the widest forms of democracy and to the promises of social justice. A dent in West Bengal would not only be detrimental to the people of West Bengal, but it would also do great damage to the cause of justice on the national level.
(Vijay Prashad is Professor of International Studies at Trinity College, Hartford)
It is clear to us that a victory of the TMC and its allies presages a U-turn for West Bengal's social development. High on the cards will be the end to the land reforms that have positively marked the lives of those who live and work in agrarian Bengal. By all indications, land reforms continue on the agenda of the Left Front; till January 2010, the seven Left Front governments have distributed over 11.3 lakh acres to 30.4 lakh poor peasants, and provided security of tenure for 15 lakh sharecroppers. The social effects of the land policy, and of the provision of social services, results in West Bengal having a death rate (6.2 per thousand) and birth rate (17.2) below that of the Indian national average (7.3 and 22.5), and an infant mortality rate at 33 in 2009, lower than the national average of 50. The TMC's paribartan (change) is to reverse course and welcome with open arms the takeover of agriculture by big capital that has doomed farmers from Vidharba to Warangal. It would be a travesty.
Mamata Banerjee and her allies focus attention on the land acquisition battle at Singur and the confrontation and police firing at Nandigram as talismans to attract the independent Left. It is hard to take seriously the commitment of someone like Mamata Banerjee to both the rights of the people to land and the rights of the people to civil liberties. The panchayats governed by Ms. Banerjee's party give us an indication of the systematic corruption and the eagerness to transfer land to avaricious private hands. Ms. Banerjee's own loyal servitude to Sanjay Gandhi's Youth Congress during the Emergency might be a harbinger of her authoritarian attitude in office. The TMC led alliance is not an alternative to the Left Front; it is its negation. She has pried open a scab and tried to bleed it for her political ends. Feverish in anticipation of political and personal economic gain, the TMC would prefer to let gangrene set into West Bengal than consider the well-being of its people.
What resides under the scab named Singur and Nandigram? The Left Front has clearly admitted that it moved too hastily on land acquisition for industrial projects, following the massive electoral mandate it received in 2006. Even the most generous compensation package is not sufficient unless people are truly convinced that their well-being and that of their fellow citizens will be improved by the sale of their land to the state. In Singur, while a majority of land owners voluntarily sold their land, there were many who were not convinced that the sale was a good idea. In Nandigram, a notice served by a local authority provided the opportunity for the opposition to spread panic that land will be taken away forcibly. The fact remains that not an inch of land was acquired in Nandigram.
Should the policies and administrative practices of the Left Front be judged solely on the basis of Singur and Nandigram? No. If it were, then it would have lost its moral compass. In fact, the Left Front has adjudged these to be valuable lessons on a number of fronts: it has learnt that a general mandate is not the same as a particular mandate; it has learnt that all decisions must be democratically arrived upon involving the people from below; it has learnt - at a very high cost - the destructive potential of the combination of ultra-left (Maoist) and ultra-right (TMC) reaction and its own vulnerabilities. These are valuable lessons. The Left Front comes before the people having taken these lessons to heart.
Really? This must be simply propaganda, the writings of an expatriate whose commitments exceed his own rational analysis. Hardly. The Left Front is composed of political parties whose programmes emerge out of democratic discussion in numerous internal forums and with close interaction with millions of people who develop and lead struggles through their mass organizations. The Left Front is committed to democracy and to democratization, and is willing to see not only that every single one of its initiatives will be a success, but that every error must be recognized and dealt with. In the Indian political scene at large, the Left is a crucial pillar of rational politics, and a singular hopeful sign for the future. Every other party has sold itself to the rancid politics of neo-liberalism, with its claustrophobic social effects and its hierarchical economic policies. Without a strong Left, the Indian polity would be morally weaker. It is programmatically committed to the widest forms of democracy and to the promises of social justice. A dent in West Bengal would not only be detrimental to the people of West Bengal, but it would also do great damage to the cause of justice on the national level.
(Vijay Prashad is Professor of International Studies at Trinity College, Hartford)
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