West Bengal: Collapse of the Left Front government and the way ahead for India's left

We are hearing much about the defeat of the Left Front government in West Bengal and, predictably, about the collapse of socialism and socialist parties internationally. The People's World ran a dispiriting article, for instance. The following comes from Dipankar Bhattacharya, general secretary, Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) Liberation, by way of Links. I believe that that this article has strong implications for our own movement here in the US.   

May 24, 2011 -- The inevitable has finally happened. The Left Front government of West Bengal, the longest-serving government in India’s parliamentary history [34 years], has been trounced quite miserably in the recent assembly elections. The defeat certainly has not come all of a sudden – all recent elections, including the 2008 panchayat elections, 2009 Lok Sabha [national parliament] elections, 2010 municipal elections and several by-elections had clearly revealed that the Communist Party of India (Marxist) led dispensation had been losing ground quite alarmingly. The April 18-May 10, 2011, state assembly elections marked the culmination of this process of decline of the CPI (M) in West Bengal.

Large sections of the mainstream media, in West Bengal as well as elsewhere, have tended to treat the defeat of the CPI (M) and its allies in West Bengal as a turning point signifying an end of sorts for the left in India. They also understandably rush to attribute it to the left’s dogmatic opposition to neoliberal policies and Indo-US strategic partnership. The advice naturally follows that if the left has to stay relevant it will have to shed its dogma and reduce left politics to just providing better governance without challenging the policy environment and the politico-economic direction chosen by the ruling elite.

'Brand Buddha'
The problem with this analysis is that it has nothing to do with what has actually happened in West Bengal. In fact, the Left Front government of West Bengal had precisely begun to follow this much advised path of ruling-class wisdom. A few years ago, West Bengal Chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee was the greatest darling of the corporate media, much like Chandrababu Naidu [chief minister of the state of Andhra Pradesh from 1995 to 2004] in his heyday or Narendra Modi [current chief minister of Gujarat state, from the Hindu-chauvinist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)], Naveen Patnaik [chief minister of Odisha state] and Nitish Kumar [chief minister of Bihar state] in their current phases. Some media houses had even enthusiastically elevated Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee to a new brand of left politics in India, "brand Buddha" as they fondly called it. The CPI (M) has not gone down in West Bengal resisting the LPG policies, it has just paid the price for daring to implement those policies by trampling upon the rights and interests of the rural poor and the labouring peasantry.

Let us look at the context and circumstances of the CPI (M)’s ouster in West Bengal. Its government has not been toppled by a hostile central government. Nor has the ouster been scripted by the Tatas [the Tata Group is a huge Indian multinational conglomerate company headquartered in Mumbai] or some major corporate lobbies for being denied entry into West Bengal or being driven out of West Bengal through militant trade unionism.

Read more here.