After being defensive for a period after the poll debacles for his penchant pro-capitalist market economy (in the mould of the China model), which had left a section of the party ranks confused and angry, former West Bengal chief minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee has started asserting that his government had been on the right track in rooting for the market as a means to Bengal’s economic metamorphosis. Mr Bhattacharjee and those in the state CPI(M), who thought like him, seem to be staging a comeback.
Mr Bhattacharjee’s job has been greatly simplified by the unabashed wooing of the market and investors by his successor Mamata Banerjee. The message that Bengal’s economic future depends on following the trajectory traced by other more successful states has been delivered loudly and clearly by the new government. Even if the Trinamul Congress is not acknowledging it openly, there is a consensus within the political class on the market as the means to Bengal’s redemption.
That Mr Bhattacharjee is defending his policies during the district conferences, is the clearest indication that the controversy within the party circle and outside over his desperate industrial drive is conspicuously less than earlier. Significantly, in the post-Lok Sabha period, Mr Bhattacharjee’s desperate and open drive to project Bengal as an investment destination had raised a storm within the party circle that Mr Bhattacharjee was pursuing a pro-capitalist path. The party ranks were confused and negative, particularly over his aggressive land acquisition policy which a section of party sympathisers believe had proved to be the nemesis of the Left Front government.