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STATES, WEST
BENGAL
Marx to Mamta
The
first real challenge to the CPI(M) in it's rural bastion leads to a bloodbath,
with Trinamool supporters and Marxists fighting virtually bullet for bullet
By
Sumit Mitra
and
Labonita Ghosh
Last
Wednesday, when Trinamool Congress (TC) MPs met President K.R. Narayanan
with the request to impose his rule in Marxist-governed West Bengal, where
men are dying like flies in "state-sponsored violence", the
President asked the delegates what the reason for such wanton mayhem could
be. The cause of so much political bloodletting in the state -- 230 people
have been killed in Trinamool-CPI(M) clashes since the party led by Railway
Minister Mamata Banerjee was born in 1998 -- is written in clear words
in a recent leaflet issued by the West Bengal state committee of the CPI(M).
It says, "Why should there be a change in government in the state?
Why should there be change for the sake of change? Do we taste poison
some day because we are tired of the daily diet of rice and curry?"
Octogenarian
Marxist leader Jyoti Basu's "rice and curry" regime, installed
in 1977, seemed poised for an unchallenged silver jubilee celebration
until Mamata broke away from the Congress in protest against its cosy
relationship with the CPI(M). More recently, her TC has taken the battle
into the Marxist citadel -- rural Bengal.
The CPI(M)
had become impregnable electorally in nearly two-thirds of the state's
294 assembly constituencies, which are rural, by distributing "surplus"
land among landless peasants and by making tenant farmers virtually unevictable.
In exchange for their votes, of course.
The formula
could not work indefinitely, particularly in a densely populated state
like West Bengal where 56 million people live off just 13 million acres
of cultivated land. As family sizes multiply, the prices of fertilisers
and pesticides rise and aspiration levels soar, the loyalty to the party
of even the staunchest of the "proletariat" cannot but flinch.
If anyone
realised this natural limitation of stretching distributive justice, it
was Mamata. She began spreading her appeal among the dispossessed and
the disgruntled in Midnapur, Bankura, Birbhum and Hoogly -- the four districts
that account for over half of the land vested during Left Front rule.
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UNCIVIL
WAR
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23 years the CPI(M) has thrived by distributing land to the landless.
Now population growth has outpaced land.
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Since the TC's birth in 1998, 230 people have been killed in TC-CPI(M)
clashes. Since the Panskura bypoll in June, TC has lost 26 men,
CPI(M) four.
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The CPI(M) hardliners are adopting an aggressive stance, unmindful
that it may be alienating the very rural middle class the party
has created.
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Mamata says rural reforms have only helped a chosen few who vote
for CPI(M).
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The massacre of Muslim members of the TC has embarrassed the CPI(M).
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Mamata's principal worry would be the ability to translate popular
appeal into vote mobilisation in the assembly elections of May
2001.
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Mamata's
charm worked, with the margins of victory of the Left Front candidates
coming down sharply in the rural areas between the 1998 and 1999 Lok Sabha
polls. The CPI(M) bosses at their headquarters in Calcutta's slummy Alimuddin
Street, however, sat up in bewilderment when, in the June 5 byelection
to the Panskura Lok Sabha constituency in Midnapur district, TC candidate
Bikram Sarkar won by a margin of over 42,000 votes. The reversal of the
Left Front's popularity in the rural constituency came within eight months
of victory in 1999.
And now
Banerjee has announced that the "Panskura line" is her central
strategy for the assembly elections, due in May 2001. Sarkar, a retired
IAS officer who was director of land records and survey when the Left
Front began its land reforms drill, explains that his leader's Panskura
line is a way of making the rural poor aware "they have remained
as poor as before, while only the CPI(M) functionaries have enriched themselves".
However,
the strategy is anything but Gandhian. Nor are the Marxists resisting
it by merely publishing pungently written leaflets. At Keshupur, the rural
town in Midnapur that is the hub of the CPI(M)-TC battle in the district,
the "liberated zones" of the two parties are separated from
each other by a road, a culvert or a sliver of paddyfield. Within the
zone, the enemy-supporter is simply not permitted residence. He must move
out or run the risk of life.
The TC area
at Keshupur starts within a furlong of Jamshid Bhavan, the most impressive
building in the town where the CPI(M) office is located. "We avoid
straying into their areas," says Imtaz Ali, secretary of the Keshupur
zonal committee of the CPI(M). And Imtaz is no faint-hearted comrade.
The "tough guys" of the TC in the adjoining areas have reluctant
admiration for his ability to mobilise muscle and munitions.
Imtaz's
pre-eminent counterpart in the TC camp is Mohammed Rafiq, the 38-year-old
Midnapur district general secretary of the party's youth wing. He graduated
into political "adulthood" though with the Panskura byelection,
when his "boys" took control of several booths spread across
five of the seven assembly segments. The result spoke for itself. In the
Keshupur segment, where the Left Front candidate had trailed by 6,500
votes in the 1999 polls, the gap grew to 18,500. In the Pingla segment,
the TC was behind by 1,100 votes in 1999 but was leading by a margin of
30,500 in June last.
An embarrassed
Dipak Sarkar, district CPI(M) chief, says he carried the boothwise results
to the district collector and asked him to explain the numerous booths
where his party polled exactly a single vote, out of over 800 eligible
voters in each. "I pointed out to the officer," says Sarkar,
"that even if my party had just one household on its side, there
would have been more than one vote."
The fact
that the Marxists would not give up without a battle became clear in a
carnage on July 27 at Sonchpur village in Birbhum district, 100 km north
of Keshupur. In a morning attack on the farm of a CPI(M)-turned-TC local,
Bacchu Mian, an army of Marxist supporters clubbed and speared to death
11 people. The victims were described by the police as TC supporters who
had been working in the field. The eyes of many of them were gouged out
and the bodies were dumped in the paddies.
Bacchu angered
the local Marxist leadership after he shifted allegiance to the TC in
1998. His family originally owned 300 acres of land, very big by West
Bengal's pocket-handkerchief size of holdings. It was whittled down to
70 acres after the Left Front came to power, but Bacchu's proximity to
the CPI(M) helped him save the rest of the land. When he deserted the
party, most of his land got declared khas, or vested, by the local land
administration, which is an extension of the CPI(M) in every sense.
On the fateful
day, the man had collected a gaggle of pro-TC workers from the adjoining
villages to work on a newly vested plot of merely 1.2 acres in a show
of "liberating" it. The local reds wouldn't stomach such "arrogance",
the mayhem followed.
The Sonchpur
incident added a new dimension to Mamata's campaign. To throw an extra
egg on Basu's face, all but one of the 11 butchered at Sonchpur were Muslims.
Leaving her Parliament House office, Mamata rushed to Bolpur, to go to
the morgue. She did not fail to underscore the political message, "The
CPI(M) never tires of calling us communal because we are in a coalition
with the BJP. Yet, our supporters who have been killed are from the minority
community."
Mamata's
demand of President's rule became more and more strident after that. Within
the NDA it did not have much support. Nonetheless, the Birbhum carnage
is the first indication that Alimuddin Street is no longer the supreme
and all knowing Kremlin of Bengal. While CPI(M) state Secretary Anil Biswas
claimed that the victims of Sonchpur were dacoits who were "resisted"
by local people, Panchayat Minister Suryakanta Mishra admitted after visiting
the area that the slain people were "poor and landless peasants".
Deputy Chief
Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharya almost confirmed his cabinet colleague's
version when he stated in the Assembly that "except one person, the
victims had no criminal record". The difference in perception between
Alimuddin Street and Writers' Building, between ideological seminary and
ruling party, became obvious.
Having held
power for 23 years, the CPI(M) too has bred its own ministerial class,
which has a bigger stake in holding on to power than its organisational
comrades -- men like Biswas and his fellow politburo member Biman Bose.
Biswas recently called Mamata the "dacoit queen". Bose is known
to be the brain behind the party's recent campaign against the "capitalist"
mass media for its "pro-Mamata tilt". The organisation Marxists
are not ready to discard armed struggle as a bad dream, nor purge the
party of its local overlords. On the other hand, the ministerialists have
a lot to lose and another five years to win.
As Mishra
says, "We have allotted vested land to 2.5 million families and registered
1.5 million families as tenant farmers. The present correlation of classes
is in our favour, not in favour of those who oppose us. We must win over
the vacillating sections and fight the battle politically." Men like
him do not wish to trigger a chain of violence like the one that routed
their party in 1972.
At that
time, the Congress rode back to power on the crest of an Indira wave.
This time round, it can well be a Mamata maelstrom if the Marxists shake
mothballs off their closed textbooks and try to match her bullet for bullet,
or corpse for corpse.
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