‘CHANGE IS good’, is the slogan of a famous advertisement on television. In most cases, we agree, as we do when it comes to bring change to a state government after 32 long years of rule by a coalition of parties who have publicly admitted intrusion of corruption at some administrative and party levels and accepted having made mistakes in many cases. Yes, I am talking about West Bengal, the state which is running through a unique and peculiarly tough time these days amidst the ‘wind of change’. As the electronic as well as the print media from the different media houses are busy doing the commentary from their respective angles, this article is an honest effort to analyse where Bengal is heading to, observing the current and past incidents closely, as they happened and were reported by the different sections of the media.
In West Bengal, the ruling Left Front led by Communist Party of India (Marxist) tasted defeat in several seats in the 2008 Panchayat and 2009 Lok Sabha elections owing to different reasons ranging from arrogance and lack of sensitivity at the grassroot level to incompetence and lack of pragmatism among its central leadership. In Panchayat elections 2008, the Left struggled as its grip over rural Bengal had become a real casualty after the series of unwanted and unfortunate incidents in Singur and Nandigram that largely occurred because of the state’s often misinterpreted pro-industry policy that was improperly communicated, sometimes due to hastiness of administration and sometimes deliberately by a section of people who deserve specific discussions later on in this article.
But for the Left Front government which had clean swept the 2006 assembly elections for a record consecutive seventh-time with nearly 80 per cent seats (235 out of 294), the unpopular act of land acquisition for the sake of industries proved to be at the cost of a large chunk of rural voters who had been voting for the Left so long, after getting lands and thus being benefitted by the Left Front government’s famous land reform programme named ‘Operation Barga’ offering them a right over their cultivated lands for the first time since independence.
However, the story was a bit different on May 16, 2009, when barring a few over-enthusiastic Prakash Karat supporters, any rational being with least little political sense was either expecting or fearing a debacle for the CPIM led Left in the 15th Lok Sabha poll results as the obvious consequences of the series of incidents that started nearly a year ago when Karat, desperate to pose an anti-imperialistic, revolutionary image for himself and his party jeopardised the stability of the United Progressive Alliance-I government by withdrawing support on the Indo-US nuclear deal issue.
The party bosses did not want the ‘controversial’ nuke-deal to be signed, as they had some obvious concerns about possible consequences of the pact that it could intervene with India’s sovereignty in nuclear research and could ultimately make India dependent on the National Security Guard (NSG) regarding supply of nuclear fuels. Rationalism says, when they were so much clear and confident about the justification of their protest, they should have launched a nationwide awareness campaign and debate to discuss the pros and cons of the deal instead of trying to destabilise the government, that too, with the help of Mayawati, who is better known for her scandals, corruption charges and own statues at the expense of taxpayers’ money. Karat joined by some ‘party hard liners’ like M K Pandhe asked the speaker of the 14th Lok Sabha Somnath Chatterjee to resign from the prestigious post of the speaker to vote for the no confidence motion against the government moved by the oppositionA renowned lawyer and respectable figure of Indian politics, Somnath Chatterjee, who is also known for his political integrity and firm conviction befitting for his ‘best parliamentarian’ title declined to bow to their pressure even at the cost of being expelled by the party which once used to be his own. The so-called ‘party hard-liners’ led by Karat, already suffering from an image-crisis for failing to stop the in-fighting in party’s Kerala unit, took it as a matter of their prestige to ensure the fall of the government at any cost. They couldn’t stop the deal, wasn’t able to cause fall of the government either. In the whole process, all they managed to do was to alienate many of their own party colleagues, workers and supporters who could not dare to raise questions about Karat’s authority for the sake of a so-called ‘communist party discipline’. The result was cataclysmic reductions in the Left’s Lok Sabha seats from 61 to 24 for the party’s decisions were rejected all over India, as it were in Bengal.
Remarkably, though Bengal’s statistical percentage of vote share division didn’t show differences more than just a few decimal fractions between the ‘loser’ Left and its opponent Mamata led ‘Mahajot’ (both around 49 per cent), a ‘wind of change’ seemed to blow for the section of people who see a ‘better’ alternative to the Left and their government in Mamata Banerjee and her Trinamool Congress.
And it is exactly here from where we are going to dig into the past and present to find out the raw facts that would truly ‘define’ her to help us understand how ‘better’ she is, as a section of media calls her the ‘next CM of Bengal’. While doing so, we take references from several reports appeared in all sections of the media, firstly the one which Mamata and her aides now finds ‘impartial’ and then the other, who have failed to satisfy them with their ‘impartiality’ and ‘for obvious reasons’ had to and are still having to pay a ‘heavy price’ for it. Just for the sake of differentiating it with the ‘impartial’ camp we will call the second section as ‘Not so Impartial’ from now on in this article.
