Monobina Gupta’s Left Politics In Bengal is a critique of the Left Front government — more specifically, of the Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPI-M) — in West Bengal by a (former) fellow traveller, a one-time activist and journalist who feels for Calcutta (never mind that new name) with a passion that is difficult to brush aside and who sees in the evolution of the organised Communist movement in India a sense of betrayal.

It is possible to disagree with Gupta’s politics, to question her economic and political postulates and yet appreciate her book as an honest enterprise. Her sense of hurt, emblematic of many of those who worked for the CPI(M) in the 1970s and early 1980s and rejoiced in its early victories, before it became a vote-collecting machine, is genuine.Even so, nostalgia is often more rose tinted than it should be. In 1977, Gupta writes: “Jyoti Basu had inherited a badly messed up state from his Congress predecessor, which had to be cleaned up fast. Expectations were running high. Communists, yet to metamorphose into ‘power junkies’, had a clean and pro-poor image, unlike their predecessors... The education system had to be overhauled on a priority basis. Bit by bit university examinations reclaimed their schedules on the academic calendar. Students received degrees in time for them to appear in competitive examinations outside the state. The power situation started improving. Summers became bearable as fans and lights stopped playing whimsical pranks. Street lights came on and stayed that way. Lanterns were tucked away; candles were brought out only on special occasions. Calcutta moved from ‘darkness to light’ and the term ‘load shedding’ gradually lost its currency in conversations... However, an apprehension that load shedding could return with a vengeance once factories started functioning lurked somewhere at the back of the mind”.
At one level, there is nothing wrong with that paragraph. By the end of the 1980s, Calcutta University results were being declared in 12 odd weeks, not the 12 odd months (if not longer) it took a decade earlier. Even so, the best of Bengal’s human capital was fleeing the state, at various stages: after school, after college, after getting a job. Calcutta University, ruled by party apparatchiki with an iron hand, exemplified the ossified intellect and barren society the CPI(M) presided over. The state had lost its vitality.
Gupta is at her best when describing the motivations of the CPI(M) as it swept to power in 1977, convinced this would be a short stint in office: “Given its past experience of President’s Rule and sudden dismissals of state governments by the Congress at the Centre, the Left Front was looking at a short run on the pitch. Its aim was simple: initiate landmark policies carving out a political and electoral niche as a buffer against storms in the future; an investment necessary to pay dividends later”.
This was the genesis of Operation Barga, of offering sharecroppers the rights of permanent tenancy. However, the Left’s “land reforms” need to be seen in a context. The sharecroppers (and their families) were obliged to stay on in the village, as a captive votebank for the CPI(M). In parallel, English was discouraged as a medium of education and outlawed from government primary schools. Finally, as Gupta records, “Ostrich-like, the [CPI(M)] trade union had a habit of walling itself in every time workplaces reinvented themselves... Failing to anticipate the rush of technological innovations, Centre of Indian Trade Unions (CITU) in the 1980s slammed the door on computers and modernisation of factories, chanting instead the tired old slogans”.
Once sowed, what did these dragon’s teeth reap? Gupta outlines the framework of the Singur-Nandigram agitation 30 years later, but without quite making the connection: “Over the decades the gap had widened between English-speaking, public-school educated purveyors of the knowledge-based economy and the rustic, village-school educated people, ruthlessly pushed out of the competitive market race”.
This inequality, this criminal negligence of the needs of a modern society, this refusal to equip generations of Bengalis for a 21st century economy is the CPI(M)’s lasting legacy. It paid for it in Singur and Nandigram and will perhaps pay again in the 2011 Assembly election; unfortunately West Bengal will continue to pay much more and much longer.
Gupta is astute in depicting what she calls the “Forked Tongue”: the promotion of economic liberalisation by Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee in West Bengal and the dogged opposition to similar policies by Prakash Karat and the CPI(M) central leadership as they held the United Progressive Alliance government to ransom in the period 2004-2008. Her sympathies are obvious. She thinks well of Jyoti Basu, mourns his prime ministry that never was, and is over-sympathetic towards red rebels such as Somnath Chatterjee and Saifuddin Chowdhury.
Even so, she refuses to indict Basu for the failures of the 1980s, Bengal’s lost decade. In his approbation of political violence, in his arrogant and overbearing manner, in his willingness to impose the angularities of a cabal of ideological experimenters upon an entire state and seek to determine its destiny, was Basu any different from Bhattacharjee? Gupta’s book provokes the question. Someday, West Bengal will need to confront it.