By Liz Mathew, IANS
New Delhi : Is the Left Front, India’s oldest political alliance, set to split? Yes, says the Forward Bloc as the police killed five of its members in West Bengal amid an ugly row between the dominant Marxists and its smaller allies.
With differences between the Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPI-M) and its long-time ideological partners finally spinning out of control, the Forward Bloc fears that the Left Front that has ruled West Bengal continuously since 1977 is inching towards a divorce.
A policeman and five activists of the Forward Bloc, the second largest constituent of the CPI-M-led West Bengal government, were killed Tuesday after the police fired at a party gathering in the small town of Dinhata.
The clashes in Cooch Behar district were the outcome of simmering tensions in the nine-party Left Front, which has increasingly come under strain due to what the smaller parties say are the CPI-M’s corruption, hegemony and sheer high- handedness. The Marxists refute the charges, but there are few takers for their pleas for innocence.
The Forward Bloc has already decided to go it alone, for the first time, in the Feb 23 elections in Left-ruled Tripura. Another ally, the Revolutionary Socialist Party (RSP), is going public over its differences with the West Bengal government’s industrialisation policies.
On Tuesday, the Forward Bloc unleashed a “civil disobedience” movement against the CPI-M’s “capitalist policies and corruption among its leaders”.
“Our fight is against the high-handedness and policies of the CPI-M,” a furious G. Devarajan, the Forward Bloc’s national secretary, told IANS here. “The front is leading to a split in West Bengal.”
For decades, the Forward Bloc, the CPI-M, the RSP and the Communist Party of India (CPI) – the main allies in West Bengal – have contested and won elections together.
Despite frequent allegations of high-handedness directed at the Marxists, the alliance has remained one entity, a rarity in India’s volatile politics. But the situation is changing.
Both in West Bengal and Tripura, the other three parties allege that the CPI-M is slowly trying to make them redundant. Similar infighting has also erupted in Kerala, the other communist bastion.
The Forward Bloc has said it will contest 15 seats in Tripura’s 60-member assembly after the CPI-M refused to allot more than one seat to it.
“It shows the CPI-M’s arrogance and high-handedness. We do not want to compromise on our ideology even if we do not get electoral advantage,” Devarajan said.
The Forward Bloc has 23 legislators in the West Bengal assembly and the RSP 20.
Both the RSP and the Forward Bloc are also miffed with the CPI-M over its green signal to the central government to go ahead with negotiations with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in connection with the India-US civil nuclear deal.
The Left grouping, which supports Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s government, has opposed the pact with Washington. But in November, the Left, under CPI-M pressure, modified its stand.
The CPI, the Forward Bloc and the RSP also distanced themselves from the CPI-M over the violence in West Bengal’s Nandigram area where clashes between the Marxists and those opposed to takeover of farmland for industry left around 35 people dead.
In Kerala, where the CPI-M leads the ruling Left Democratic Front, differences among the allies have been hogging the headlines.
CPI-M leaders are, however, optimistic that the Left alliance will remain intact.
“Differences are there,” Basudeb Acharya, a CPI-M veteran in the Lok Sabha, admitted. “But discussions are on to solve them. I am sure we will be able to resolve them.”
He said the allies had the “freedom” to adopt their own individual programmes.
“As a political party, everyone – be it the Forward Bloc or the RSP – has the right to have its own programmes and struggles. But they should not take law into their hands,” he warned.
For now, the CPI-M’s smaller allies are not listening.