West Bengal Elections: Didi At The Gates

At seven in the evening, Suvendu Adhikari looks like he just got ready for the day. The 41-year-old Lok Sabha member from Tamluk sports a crew cut and a well-groomed appearance. Adhikari is just about to begin a little durbar at the Contai municipal office, about 150 km from Kolkata. But before that, he switches on the television to watch himself on a private channel viciously attacking the Communist Party of India (Marxist), commonly known as the CPM, which has ruled West Bengal for so long that its ways have seeped into the genetic code of the state.

“The people of West Bengal will throw the Left out in the coming elections,” Adhikari tells Forbes India with undiluted venom in his voice. Adhikari belongs to the Mamata Banerjee-led All India Trinamool Congress party (TMC) and was the party’s spearhead in the Nandigram campaign against forcible acquisition of agricultural land by the state.

After a four-year siege, the TMC and the Congress Party are preparing for the final and most ambitious political assault on the Left fortress that has held for nearly three-and-a-half decades. Many in the state believe that TMC has a fair chance this time, not so much because voters favour them, but because of a simmering discontent among an entire generation of Bengalis that has not seen anything other than the increasingly arrogant CPM in power.

The Left government led by Jyoti Basu that came to power in 1977 vanquished Bengal’s landowning elite with reforms ensuring security of tenure to over 1.5 million sharecroppers and redistributing land among peasants. Jyoti Basu went on to become India’s longest-serving chief minister until he stepped down in 2000. “There is no before and after situation for the youth,” says D. Bandyopadhyay, widely known as the designer of Operation Barga, India’s most successful land reforms ever. Bandyopadhyay, who is now a TMC supporter, says they see Banerjee as an alternative. Also, land is back at the centre of West Bengal’s electoral politics but this time, it is the TMC that holds the trump card.

It is ironic that perhaps Banerjee’s fortunes turned for the better on the day that the cricket-loving Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee was sworn in as chief minister in 2006. The now 67-year-old Bhattacharjee’s first announcement after taking over was the Tata Nano plant in Singur. The 1,000-acre piece of land earmarked for the factory immediately became her political platform from which she whipped up a campaign that took the state by storm, helping her avenge TMC’s decimation in the assembly polls as well as in the Lok Sabha elections earlier.

In the 2004 Lok Sabha polls, didi (elder sister), as she is popularly known, was the only one from her party to make it to Parliament. But the Singur and Nandigram upheavals helped the TMC come back strongly, winning 19 Lok Sabha seats in 2009 and later sweeping the civic body polls in 2010, capturing major corporations such as Kolkata and cracking open the red bastions of Hooghly and North 24-Paraganas. “It is appreciated that Banerjee is honest, a fighter and a self-made woman,” says Abhirup Sarkar, who teaches economics at the Indian Statistical Institute (ISI) in Kolkata.

Banerjee leads an austere lifestyle. Always clad in simple cotton saris without any jewelry or make-up, she is known as much for her tantrums as her political fortitude. She once threw her shawl at Ram Vilas Paswan in Parliament saying he had ignored Bengal in his Railway Budget. On another occasion she caught a Samajwadi Party Member of Parliament (MP) and dragged him out of the House for opposing women’s reservation. Her rough and tumble politics, she has said, is the only answer to the CPM, whom she accuses of using state power and violence to crush opposition.

Gautam Deb, a CPM central committee member and minister of housing in the state is known for openly criticising some of his party’s ways. He says the CPM suffered because of its high-handedness, corruption and ignoring the opposition. “You cannot ignore the opposition when 50 percent of people voted for them,’’ Deb says, smoking a Navy Cut that he has bummed off a colleague. “In a democracy, we should have the courage to engage with others.’’

CPM Politburo member and state industries minister Nirupam Sen says that the land acquisitions did create some confusion among farmers. “There was a sense of alienation among minorities and workers of the unorganised sector,” says Sen, a lanky man with a thoughtful demeanour who joined the party 45 years ago.

The discontent could well catapult the TMC to power but its vision for the state is still hazy. Banerjee herself is a mercurial leader and not known to be a great administrator. The Indian Railways has performed poorly on her watch and its finances have deteriorated. Many fear she could be more left than the Left. Some Kolakata-based Gujarati businessmen and traders whom Forbes India spoke to, say that they did not know what to expect from her. “I oppose the Left Front but I am not against the Left ideology,’’ she said in February.

Partha Chatterjee, the portly leader of opposition in West Bengal, says the party’s focus will be on information technology and services. The TMC continues to oppose forced acquisition of land which means it will not be easy to set up large factories.

“The size of land required for a plant will be decided by the government,” Chatterjee says. While we are there, a middle-aged woman has come to complain about her elder sibling who has thrown the family out of the family house. The local police have done nothing because he is a CPM member. He instructs his aide to talk to the authorities and sort it out. It may not be as easy for Chatterjee, who may land the industries portfolio, to solve the state’s problems.

Much of the initial push will come from the public sector, especially from about 16 major Railway projects that Banerjee has doled out to the state as union minister. One of the reasons for that is land for these projects has already been acquired. “Those projects will give a big impetus and are very good for employment generation,” says ISI’s Sarkar, who was initially tipped to be the finance minister though he himself denies it, saying that he cannot leave teaching. A top TMC leader told Forbes India that the other possibility could be Sugata Marjit, director of the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences. However, Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry chief Amit Mitra, who has been an advisor to Banerjee on Railways, has been pitted against incumbent finance minister Asim Dasgupta in Khardah, spawning speculation that he could inherit that position should TMC form a government.

Sarkar, however, agrees that it will not be easy to convince people to invest in Bengal unless the government demonstrates its commitment. He is pinning all hopes on the railway projects to do that.

In TMC’s scheme of things the government will seek a detailed blue-print from those interested in setting up factories in the state. They would be required to submit detailed plans on the number and nature of jobs. “The government will train and supply the required manpower to them,” says opposition leader Chatterjee.

It is not that the CPM did not have an economic vision when it came to power with Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee at the helm. The government knew that Bengal had to invite private industry to compensate for stagnating agriculture growth and a moribund public sector. Still, it seems, the Chief Minister could not convince his own party. “Buddhababu could sell his dream to the people, but not to his team,” says a top industrialist from the state who did not wish to be named.

Minister Sen says that the process of industrialisation has to go on. “If you have to industrialise, you need private capital,” says Sen, perhaps the only Blackberry-carrying member of the state cabinet. He says land acquisition will not be a problem. “We have acquired 11,000 acres of land in the past three or four years,” he says. The government appears to have learnt its lessons as all those purchases were negotiated paying market prices. 

Sen says that it will be a very different Left government if it returns to power. For starters, the party is fielding 150 new faces, raising the number of women contestants from 34 to 46 and dropping nine sitting ministers. There has also been a purge in the party.

“About 23,000 people have been dropped from party membership,” says Gautam Deb. He says at least a third of the CPM candidates in the upcoming election will be new faces. All that may not be easy to compensate for 35 years of insipid governance.

Banerjee is acutely aware of the vested interests in her party and her allies, according to those who know her well. For instance, a senior TMC leader privately raised doubts about Amit Mitra’s ‘political acumen’ with Forbes India, hinting that he may not be a very acceptable person within the party.

Similarly, the Congress Party is hoping to expand its base in the state, which Banerjee is loath to allow. Her calculation is that if TMC crosses the magic mark of 147 by itself, then Congress will become irrelevant. The Congress Party is well aware of this gambit. That is why it is insisting on winnable seats. It wants some leverage over Banerjee in the state so that she is not able to hold the government at the Centre to ransom. An ideal situation for the Congress would be a TMC government in Bengal that is crucially supported by it.  

Banerjee also realises that she will have a tough job at hand as chief minister. However, leaders such as Nitish Kumar, Naveen Patnaik, Shivraj Chouhan and Narendra Modi have proven that you need not have always run a state to provide good governance. Others such as Mayawati in Uttar Pradesh and J. Jayalalithaa in Tamil Nadu have shown that they could rule with an iron hand, without letting political rivals get under their skin. Mayawati, Jayalalithaa and Banerjee have suffered even physical assaults by uncouth rivals, a remarkable pattern that reveals how high the odds are stacked against women politicians in India. Yet, it is a tribute to democracy that all of them have emerged stronger.

People close to her say Banerjee understands that unless she is able to perform as chief minister, it will only be a matter of time before the CPM reclaims its territory. That means a witch hunt may prove counterproductive. If she, however, manages to find empowered bureaucratic talent to focus on governance and law and order, she could very well turn out to be the chief minister West Bengal so badly needs. The state can certainly do with a change of guard. As for the CPM, a party leader put it succinctly: “A few years out of power would do the party a world of good.”