CPI-M gets the boot in West Bengal

The drubbing of the Communist Party of India - Marxist (CPI-M) in the recently concluded parliamentary elections in India came as a major surprise for any watcher of the country's politics.

The CPI-M leadership is yet to arrive at a conclusion as to whether deserting the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance (UPA) on the Indo-US civilian nuclear deal or the land acquisition issue in West Bengal is the main reason for the debacle, the worst since the late sixties.

This statement, however, pre-supposes that the citadel of the CPI-M led Left Front is in West Bengal, where they are in power for over three decades now.

The state leadership of the CPI-M, however, chose the easy way of identifying a Congress wave, in favour of stability and 'secularism', which, according to Left stalwarts like Biman Bose, the Trinamool Congress rode, being the major partner of the Congress-Trinamool Congress alliance.

There is an element of escapism in the argument and it also suffers from naivety. The assumption of the CPI-M making such a statement probably emanates from a sense of denial (of the land acquisition drive taken by the state government).

Whatever may be 'petty' political argument for such a debacle, one could argue and analyse it from a systemic point of view, loosely drawing from the Gramscian analyses of Marxian "domination" vis a vis "hegemony".

The Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci in his famous book - Prisons Notebook (1929 -1935) had defined the "normal exercise of hegemony" as "being a combination of force and consent, which balance each other reciprocally" and the underlying assumption is that consent (of the majority) predominates the use of force.

Domination on the other hand in Gramscian definition means subjugation by force over social consent.

One could argue that although the Left Front has been in power for over three decades now, it failed to become a hegemonic force in the Gramscian sense and relied on domination to rule over the majority.

Drawing from the above argument one could state that the trouncing of the Left was more because of the exhaustion of its policy of domination by dishing out favour, to remain in power and thereby create a class of direct and indirect beneficiaries who for their own interest would uphold the domination of the party - CPI-M in this case, through exclusion.

In support of my argument, I would state that right from land reform to the much talked about industrialisation drive, through the loose claim (much bluff in it) of being "first in agriculture", the CPI-M has always followed the exclusionary path and acted in a socially divisive way.

However, in the post Washington Consensus era of neo-liberal globalisation - with the agenda of good governance put forward by the Bretton Woods institutions like the World Bank and the IMF, development (mainstream) has come to become inclusive and pluralistic in nature.

In fact, Capitalism to maintain its domination as an ideology, following the years of negative growth after the demise of Keynesianism and the subsequent advent of monetarism - which finally made way to Neo-liberalism, has transformed itself from being exclusionary (and also being physically much oppressive) to being inclusive and also upholding pluralism.

The lack of pluralistic principles within the CPI-M leadership (becuase of the Stalinist principles they follow) resulted in violence (state sponsored terrorism) in Singur and Nandigram,
brow-beating by the CPI-M cadres, intrusion into private lives to ensure political (lumpen) domination etc.

This became even more pronounced after Buddhadeb Bhattacharya assuming power and swinging on an industrialisation drive to establish his intellectual and political supremacy. This destabilised the low level social equilibrium, despite being with serious deficits, which prevailed from 1977 to 2001.

I think the pople of Bengal didn't vote so much for the opposition but it rejected the exclusionary and the socially divisive policy of the Left in an outright way.

In fact the exclusionary policy of the Left exhausted over time as the party couldn't continue to cope with the ever-increasing middle class (with increased aspiration and hence frustration as the Left Front government didn't deliver during the past three decades), who were exposed to liberal thinking as a result of globalisation and the rapid expansion of the information technology.