On May 16th, 2009, some 60 percent of India’s 714 million
eligible voters delivered a definitive victory to the Congress-led
United Progressive Alliance (UPA), awarding it a commanding
262 seats in the country’s 543-member lower house of parliament.
The UPA’s principal opponent, the National Democratic
Alliance (NDA), led by the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata
Party, took a serious beating, dropping to 159 seats from the 181
it had claimed in 2004.

A gaggle of small parties rushed to offer the new government
unconditional support, raising the UPA’s working tally of
322 seats, a comfortable margin that has firmly reversed the prediction
India was headed for a weak coalition government in which
the Left Front – an alliance of Leftist parties led by the Communist
Party of India Marxist (CPM) – would play an authoritative
role, possibly one of “kingmaker” status.

Indeed, the Left Front emerged as a key player following the
2004 election, when it garnered 59 seats. The UPA, which won
218 seats, was able to form the government only when the Left
agreed to support it externally (the Left refused to formally join
the government, and thus was not part of its cabinet). The Left
maintained its alliance with the UPA for four of the five years it
was in office, gaining considerable sway over the government’s
policies and priorities. It was expected to do even better in the
2009 election, and fortify its influence in national politics. When
the results rolled in, however, it was clear that the Left had lost
all such potential.

The Left suffered a sound hammering, losing in even its bastion
states of Kerala and West Bengal. Nationally, the Left won
only 24 seats, a decline of 35 since 2004. The picture appeared
even more dismal at the state-level : the Left won a dismal 4 of
Kerala’s 20 constituencies (down from 15 in 2004), and a shocking
15 of West Bengal’s 42 (down from 34 in 2004). This was
the worst showing in 32 years for the Left Front in West Bengal,
which has governed the state without pause since 1977.

The Left’s stunning electoral defeat is, without question, related
to the abject performance of its frontrunner party, the CPM,
which bagged only 16 seats nationwide, down from 43 in 2004.
The Left’s second most important party, the Communist Party of
India (CPI), dropped to 4 seats from 10 in 2004. Indeed, some of
the smaller parties on the Left together – such as the Revolutionary
Socialist Party and the All India Forward Bloc – did better
than the CPM and CPI, and held on to their usual 2 to 3 seats.

The Left’s battering has provoked a number of important
questions : first, how might these losses be explained ; second,
will they be enduring, and third, how might they be reversed ?
While it’s probably too early to provide definitive answers, this
essay makes an attempt to do so. It argues that – contrary to
speculation in the mainstream media – the Left’s defeat is not the
consequence of a sudden swelling of support for the Congress,
and the “political stability” this “national” party supposedly represents.
Neither does it stem from a wholesale rejection, by the
electorate, of the issues and concerns championed by the Left.

Rather, the Left’s defeat is owed chiefly to the blunders of its
principal party, the CPM, at the state-level, and that too, mostly
in West Bengal. It also owes to a number of errors of strategy –
again committed mainly by the CPM – at the centre. Consequently,
revival of the Left’s electoral fortunes will hinge, to a
very large extent on the CPM’s recovery in West Bengal where
the party must rethink its priorities. A reimagining of its electoral
strategy in national politics will also be vital.

This certainly appears a moment of triumph for the Indian
National Congress (the Congress party), the 124-year old organization
born out of India’s freedom struggle. On its own, the Congress
has won 206 seats, its best performance since 1991 (the
Congress won no more than 150 seats in the last four elections,
leading to speculation of its permanent demise as a “national”
party). Manmohan Singh, a former economics professor, is the
first Prime Minister in 48 years to be voted back after completing
a full five-year term.

In India, the verdict is being widely read as a vote for political
stability, national unity and “development” ; the refreshing
ability of a “maturing” electorate to look beyond the divisive
politics of region, religion and caste. It’s also being seen as a
personal victory for the “level-headed” D^r. Singh, and for Rahul
Gandhi, the 38-year old scion of the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty
(India’s first Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, was his great
grandfather). Gandhi’s glamorous looks, candid manner, and
“natural” political savvy are seen as central to the Congress’s
surprising resurrection, and have set off rumours that Gandhi will
replace the elderly Singh as Prime Minister within a few years.
Yet this narrative of the Congress’s sweep to victory does
not stand to challenge.

In an insightful analysis on Sanhati (a website devoted to
“fighting neoliberalism in Bengal”) [1] Deepankar Basu points out
that although the Congress has won 206 seats – a gain of 61 seats
from 2004 – its share of the votes polled (28.55%) has increased
only marginally, by less than two percent. In fact, the Congress’s
vote share has declined in several crucial states, such as Orissa,
Chattisgarh and Andhra Pradesh. Basu also suggests that, despite
appearances, regional parties have done well in terms of vote
shares, though these gains have not always translated into seats,
thanks to India’s first-past-the-post electoral system. He points
out that the combined vote share of the Congress and BJP – considered
the country’s two “national” parties – has actually declined,
from 48.69 percent in 2004 to 47.35 percent in 2009. This
contradicts the notion that Indian voters are on their way to looking
beyond the politics of region and locality.

Basu’s analysis of changes in the Left parties’ vote shares is
also illuminating. He says that, at the national level, the CPM’s
vote share has declined only marginally, from 5.66 percent in
2004 to 5.33 percent this year. The CPI, on the other hand, has
registered a marginal gain, from 1.41 percent in 2004 to 1.43
percent this year. The Left’s also managed to increase its vote
share in a number of states, such as Andhra Pradesh, Madhya
Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh. “Going by national figures,” says
Basu, “there is no evidence of any nationwide wave” against the
Left.

The key to the story of the Left’s defeat, as Basu suggests,
lies in explaining its losses in Kerala and West Bengal, two stronghold
states where “the loss of vote share [has] wreaked havoc for
the Left parties.” In Kerala, the Left’s vote share has declined
from 39.41 percent in 2004 to 37.9 percent, leading to the vanishing
of 9 parliamentary seats. In West Bengal, the Left’s vote
share has declined from 50.72 percent in 2004 to 43.3 percent
this year, leading to a massive loss of 19 seats. Indeed, the Left’s
vote share has plummeted in all but 3 of West Bengal’s 42 constituencies.
Basu argues that the Left’s “debacle in terms of seats”
owes to the fact that “the bulk of the decrease in [its] vote share
was concentrated in the electorally important states of Kerala and
West Bengal,” while increases were “spread out electorally across
states where the Left parties are marginal.”

 SOMETHING’S ROTTEN IN THE STATE OF WEST BENGAL…

With a population of more than 80 million, West Bengal is
India’s most densely populated state. The state has been ruled for
32 years by the CPM-led Left Front, making it the world’s longest-
running democratically elected Communist government
(though many would argue that the Left Front is social democratic
rather than communist). On the other hand, Kerala’s Left
alliance – known as the Left Democratic Front – has always alternated
in power with the Congress-led United Democratic Front.
Given this, the Left’s kick-in-the-teeth in Bengal is far more serious
than its setback in Kerala. So what happened in West Bengal ?

Here, two words are significant : Singur and Nandigram.

Let’s turn, first, to Singur, a tract of prime agricultural land
in Hooghly district that the state government attempted to hand
over to one of India’s leading private conglomerates, Tata Motors,
for the production of its $2,500 car, the Tata Nano. The
controversial decision, made public in 2006, was immediately
opposed by a storm of farmers, who faced potential displacement
by the project. It was most fiercely resisted by landless farmers,
many of who are migrants from neighbouring states. These “tenant
farmers” and “daily-wage labourers” stood to benefit little
from the compensation packages offered by the government
(which went to farmers who could prove their title or longstanding
connection to the land). Singur soon unleashed a wave of protest
that was championed not only by Mamata Banerjee – the firebrand
leader of the CPM’s main opposition in the state, the
Trinamool (“Grassroots”) Congress – but also by high-profile
environmentalists and intellectuals associated with the Left, such
as Medha Patkar, Vandana Shiva, and Arundhati Roy. It’s noteworthy
that the sharpest decline in the Left’s vote share in West
Bengal (35%) was in Hooghly district.

The story was similar at Nandigram, an area of fertile agricultural
land in Purba-Mednipur district, where, in 2007, the state
government nodded through a proposal allowing an Indonesian
multinational (Salim Group) to set up and operate a complex of
chemical industries as a “special economic zone” (SEZ). This
decision, too, was fiercely opposed, and resulted in clashes with
police that left 14 villagers dead and triggered allegations of police
brutality. As a portent of things to come, in January, 2009,
the Left was roundly defeated by Trinamool in a by-election to
the state assembly from Nandigram.

The CPM-led government defended these ventures on the
grounds that they would promote industrialization and expand
higher-income, formal sector jobs in the state (only 8 percent of
India’s workforce is employed in the formal economy). The government
also hoped that the funds raised through the leasing of
land to private entrepreneurs would help with the resuscitation of
underperforming (“sick”) publicly-owned industrial units, as well
as settle unpaid wage-bills. Not surprisingly, the government
was supported, for the most part, by the trade unions aligned with
the Left, and, indeed, it was expected that labour’s backing would
translate into votes for the Left in the state’s urban areas. This,
however, did not happen.

Writing in Sanhati, Dipanjan Rai Chaudhri explains why the
Left did not do better with urban voters : “The slow pace of industrialization
in West Bengal has hampered the formation of
truly urban towns centred on consolidated groups of industrial
workers...The so-called urban centres, including the poor quarters
of Kolkata, retain strong links with the countryside and their
inhabitants have intense sympathy with rural folk and their problems.”
Thus, even in the urban areas, the “CPM’s justification of
industrialization by acquiring agricultural land” was “rejected,”
along with the Left’s attempt to “portray Mamata Banerjee as an
opponent of development.” Only a small section of the middle
class and students, who have “no links to the villages,” accepted
the CPM’s rationale. One should point out, in this connection,
that the main Left-aligned trade unions are seen by many critics,
like Chaudhri, as catering to the interests of upper-caste Hindu
men in the urban lower-middle class rather than to the concerns
of the urban poor, the bulk of whom work in the informal economy,
have deep rural roots, and are Muslim, Dalit (the lowest Hindu
castes once known as “untouchable”), and women.

Anjan Chakrabarti, an economics professor at Calcutta University,
makes a valuable point in Radical Notes – “I have a thesis :
no party can win elections in West Bengal if it is not seen as
Leftist in orientation…First through social reform and then
through long decades in which the Left played an instrumental
role, the ‘poor’ have come to acquire a voice ; an assertive political
voice [in West Bengal].” He points out that, over the years,
Mamata Banerjee tried many tactics to outmanœuvre the Left –
but she failed every time because “the symbolic authority of the
Left Front remained intact.” Though charges of petty corruption
and bullying were always around, the Left managed to preserve
its image as guardians of the poor and marginalized. Singur and
Nandigram changed all of that. Chakrabarti states, rather dramatically :
“The sight of the CPM working in tandem with the
police to evict farmer from land, shooting constituents (including
women) and abusing citizens, and that too for a bunch of
abrasive capitalists, snapped the psychic relation of the people
with the Left Front. It was as though the father had turned his
gun on his mother and children.”

Ultimately, then, the Left did not lose in West Bengal because
voters rejected leftist politics, but because they perceived
the governing parties of the Left, along with their fossilized, outof-
touch unions, to have swung too far to the right. As Siddharta
Vardarajan argues in the pro-CPM newspaper, The Hindu, “The
Left Front paid the price in West Bengal for the ‘rightism’ of its
policies, which allowed Mamata Banerjee to emerge as a defender
of the peasantry’s right to till the soil.” Indeed, Banerjee successfully
projected herself as more left than the Left Front ; a veritable
messiah of the poor who was willing to die for the cause
(she undertook a highly publicized hunger strike over Singur).

The damage to the CPM’s reputation resonated even in Kerala,
where party bosses, such as P. Vijayan, were also seen as too
“pro-capital,” along with being highly corrupt (a deep rift surfaced
in Kerala’s Left government between Vijayan, the secretary
of the state party unit, and the “incorruptible” chief minister,
V.S. Achuthanandan).

 THE LEFT HELPS THE CONGRESS WIN – MISHANDLING THE DELHI CONNECTION

There’s no denying that the sustained buoyancy of the Indian
economy helped the UPA. India grew at roughly 8 percent
per annum for four of the five years the UPA was in power, and
even now, amid a severe global slump, it is the world’s second
fastest growing economy. Yet for the poor, who are the bulk of
India’s voters, such claims to affluence are meaningless if there’s
no direct impact on their lives. Exit polls indicated that the aspect
of “development” that mattered most to UPA-supporters had
to do with the government’s redistributive interventions in the
economy, such as the National Rural Employment Guarantee
(NREG) scheme, which guarantees the poor 100 days of paid
work, and a loan-waiver plan for indebted farmers.

But it is to the Left that the Congress owes the pro-poor tenor
of its economic strategy, a fact that Congress heavyweights, such
as Jyotiraditya Scindia, have acknowledged quite openly. It was
at the Left’s behest that the UPA adopted the NREG and loan
waiver schemes, as well as some social security legislation for
the country’s impoverished non-unionized workers. It was the
Left, furthermore, that prevented pro-market hardliners in the
Congress from pursuing privatization and other liberalizing reforms
too aggressively, particularly in the financial sector, thus
shielding Indian banks from the toxic assets that felled global
giants such as AIG and Lehman Brothers.

Most interestingly, however, the Left helped improve the
UPA’s standing among lower castes and Muslims. The Left advocated
persistently for the Central Education Institutions (Reservation
in Admission) Act, which was passed in 2006. The Act
provides for the generous “reserving” of seats – about 50 percent
of the total number – for lower caste students in educational institutions
run by the central government. This was precisely what
lower caste parties, such as the pro-Dalit Bahujan Samaj Party
(BSP) have wanted for years (the BSP is among the Congress’s
most formidable rivals, especially in the key state of Uttar
Pradesh). The slow pace of privatization further buoyed the UPA’s
popularity among lower castes, since caste-based job reservations
apply (thus far) only to government-run companies.

The Left also backed the government’s appointment of the
Sachar Committee in 2006, which was set up to inquire into the
continued marginalization of Indian Muslims. This helped offset
some of the harm later done to the UPA’s relations with Muslims,
when the Singh government endorsed the re-introduction of the
draconian Prevention of Terrorism Act (POTA) in the wake of
Mumbai attacks of November, 2008. The government successfully
spun its renewed stress on “national security” as “patriotic”
rather than anti-Muslim, even though hundreds of Muslims were
targeted, rounded up and held without due process in and around
Mumbai. The Left, for its part, did little to challenge the UPA’s
blatant hypocrisy. In fact, to complete the irony, the Sachar
Committee’s report named West Bengal as among the three worst
states in India when it came to the issue of adequate Muslim representation
in government employment. This, along with Singur
and Nandigram – where many landless farmers are Muslim and
Dalit – sullied the Left’s pro-minority image considerably.

It is a tragedy, indeed, that the Left’s stint in national politics
will be remembered not for the weight and focus it lent to the
UPA’s progressive policies – for which failed to claim sufficient
credit – but for its vehement opposition to the civil nuclear cooperation
treaty sealed between the Singh government and the United
States. Raising a bigger stink over the “nuclear deal” than it had
ever done over the Singh team’s neoliberal proclivities, the CPM
high-command ruptured the Left’s alliance with the UPA in July
2008, stating that it could not, as a matter of principle, allow the
“Congress government to surrender before U.S. imperialism.”

While this stance was popular inside the party, it rang hollow
with the Left’s voters, especially in the face of the events already
underway in Singur and Nandigram. The Left’s decision to leave
the UPA so late in the day was also a tactical error on its part,
since it prompted the Congress to forge a transparently opportunistic
alliance with the CPM’s main rival in West Bengal, Mamata
Banerjee (many Congress stalwarts were consistently contemptuous
of Banerjee’s “irrational” campaign at Singur). Banerjee’s
Trinamool Congress ran as part of the UPA in West Bengal, delivering
it 19 of the 26 seats it won in the state. Now part of the
UPA cabinet, Banerjee is advocating for issues traditionally important
to the Left, such as halting privatization.

 WHAT IS TO BE DONE ?

Writing in the Marxist periodical Mainstream, Sobhanlal
Datta Gupta calls for rejuvenating changes at the party-level : “The
problem is that the Stalinist mindset of the partners in the Left
Front does not allow them to recognize any brand of Marxism
other than the official version, resulting in the alienation of a
section of the intelligentsia over issues like Nandigram and
Singur… The result is that, while the champions of official Marxism
consider the propagation of any other version of Marxism a
threat, the dissenting voices feel that their space for autonomy
and freedom is under attack.” He argues for the relinquishing of
bloody-minded “Stalinist dogmatism” and the infusion “in the
mindset of the Indian Left” of “fresh inputs from the revolutionary
humanist legacy of Marxism, associated with not just Marx,
Engels and Lenin, but also Gramsci, Rosa Luxembourg and many
others who have never figured in the official discourse of the
Indian Left.”

Others, like Vardarajan (in the Hindu), argue for a shift in the
Left Front’s electoral strategy. Vardarajan excoriates the Left for
joining the “Third Front,” an alliance, he says, that was based on
no program “other than the desire to establish a non-Congress
and non-BJP government.” The short-term electoral gains yielded
by such unprincipled alliances, he says, are not worth the damage
done to long-term political goals. Vardarajan presses the Left
“to be critical of its preference for conjuring up expedient topdown
coalitions rather than organic, bottom-up alliances based
on the kinds of struggles and movements the communists know
best.” Unless it does so, “the parliamentary communist movement
will find itself increasingly squeezed by Maoist extremism
on the left and the electoral machine of the bourgeois parties on
the right, against which it cannot easily compete.”

Indeed, the burgeoning discussion among India’s left-intellectuals
indicates that the road to recovery will be long, complex,
and possibly fraught with conflict. What’s also certain, however,
is that the left will never be irrelevant in the context of India’s
egregious poverty and gaping inequalities. Populists such as
Mamata Banerjee know this all too well, and, from time to time,
successfully appropriate the language and appearance of left politics.

They can never compare, however, with the cohesion of principle,
passion of commitment, and power of genuine achievement
that parties such as the CPM are known for. It is time the
CPM reclaims the grassroots struggles that made it great, and
once defined its soul.