Exit The Dragon

The Left in West Bengal had seen it coming. Didi’s winning hook to the Left wasn’t a surprise to the party. Marxists’ bhadarlok had had this sinking feeling all along. Especially since the Nandigram/Singur days.

The West Bengal Assembly poll results can only be termed as a rout. Trinamool Congress won hands down. Bagging 226 out of 294 seats, it has marginalized the Front as a shameful entity.

How did the Didi manage the coup?
It is almost a sphinx –like rise for this women in white who was all but decimated in the 2004 Lok Sabha poll, surviving as the only MP of Trinamool from the state.

In the final reckoning it seems that the Left’s rout was it’s own doing. The party had become complacent. It had taken people for granted. Its cadre had turned mafiaso, its leaders inward- looking and the Front had got stuck in a time warp.

But it wasn’t the case always. The rot had slowly set in . The Front came to power in the state in 1977. Riding the wave of Congress misrule and Emergency excesses, it gave people new hope.

And it did wrought positive changes in the socio-political mileu. Land reforms were actualized, panchayati raj institutions were democratized, agriculture got a fillip and communal harmony was maintained.

But as years passed by the Front Rule became Stalinesque. Its effect showed on the state.
Industrialization stagnated and jobs for the bhadralok became scarce. Disenchantment of the masses grew.
The middle class Bengali who saw the Front more as a Bengali cultural outgrowth than as a political party started looking for change.

Then Nandigram and Singur happened. It was the single most major blunder of the Marxist rule for which now the party thinktank and bosses are ruing.

However, it was a godsend for Didi. In 2007 she jumped on the Nandigram bandwagon and managed to appropriate it. The shrewd fighter that Mamta Banerjee is, in no time she won the sympathy of peasantry and the intelligensia.

However, the winds of paribortan was started by the wily lady way back in 2007 when she dumped the BJP and embraced the Jamait and the SUCI. Poll results showed that the rural elecorate had started dumping the Left in favour of the Trinamool and its allies.

Mamta read the signs and kept on consolidating her electoral gains. She wooed the Muslims and whitled down the loyal vote bank of the Front. Afterall Muslims form 26% of the state electorate which no party can ill afford to overlook.

Nandigram onwards the Left Front fought Mamta with its back to the wall. But so set was its ideological groovings that the party manadrins failed to take corrective steps. Steps which might have compelled them to review their policies. And they became a sitting duck for Mamta.

Also the anti-corruption wave of the nation made Didi look like an austere saint in white. Someone who can resist the lure of the lucre and wrought honest changes in the socio-economic and political fabric of the state.

Now that the Bengali bhadralok and the peasantry have got what they wanted , namely paribortan, its time to test Didi’s agenda which she has held as a salve for the wounds of West Bengal. Wounds of Maa, Maati aur Manush.