It took thirty-four years for people of West Bengal to get rid of Left Front hegemony from the state. Albeit the target was a achieved with a kind of Aila cyclone in the state. the new Government under Chief Minister-In Waiting Mamta Banerjee has to walk on thorny bushes in the state.
By providing such a big margin to Trinamool Congress the masses have vented out their anger against the autocratic rule in the state. However the final coffin was sealed when chief Minister Buddhadev Bhattacharjee himself lost the Jadavpur seat by around 25,000 votes to Manish Gupta, who once worked under him Chief Secretary of the state. Interesting from this seat he was contesting since 1987 and in the year 2006 he won by margin of 58,000 votes showing the peak of his popularity and the support base that his party had.
But what happened after that? Why did the party which continued to dominate for so long suddenly lost its direction in the wave of tide? Or was it a Singur and Nandigram affect? How can a CM who was widely a popular still a year ago suddenly lost a grip even from his constituency? These are some of the tough questions that Left leaders might be pondering upon these days.
To add fuel into the fire the country had witnessed too much of violence and killings by CPM’s harmad bahini which finally turned out to be our moderate Red leaders greatest blunder of them all. You cannot win elections by terrorizing your own people. They must have realized by now that the ultimate power of democracy lies with citizens of this country.
The only solace for the Left left now is that they are still holding their dome in Tripura and lost quite marginally in Kerala. Perhaps another reason for their shoddy performance this time was the tug of war among its top leaders. It seems there was no unity among their ranks. When Tata was setting up a factory in Singur for the manufacture of Nano cars Buddha babu was more than willing to help them, but inner scuffle within the party and mass protest by Mamta and her supporters forced the Tata group to shift their base at Sachivalay premises in Gandhinagar.
When Prakash Karat was asked to lead CPM it was hoped that he will provide new energy to the leadership as well as party cadres. And so he did in 2004 General elections when the party had won more than fifty-nine seats for the first time in its history and went on to become king maker when they supported UPA-1 Government from outside. But then they soon widraw from the Government as they were against Union Government’s decision to sign a Nuclear deal deal with US. Perhaps that very decision by the comrades was the beginning of Left Front’s downfall, as most of the people were supporting the bill at that time. Then came couple local bodies elections when they were completely trounced by Trinamool Congress members.
Now the so called top comrades need to do some soul searching if they want get back to power in next general elections in West Bengal and Kerala. However if they fail to read the writings on the wall, we might soon see an end of a communist era in India and another in the world.
No comments:
Post a Comment