By Sirshendu Panth,
By IANS,
Kolkata: The young speaker was ranting about how the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund were forcing the government to bow to foreign multinational companies at the cost of small farmers and traders.
It was a speech delivered in impeccable style, liberally laced with statistics, references to China and the evil designs of the large corporations.
The usual stuff, one would think, in political gatherings in West Bengal where communists have a large base.
Wrong.
The speech was delivered at a Trinamool Congress street corner meeting.
The differences in the political lines between the opposition Left Front and the ruling Trinamool Congress have blurred with the Mamata Banerjee-led party vying with the reds in projecting a leftist image, especially after quitting the UPA government at the centre for allowing foreign direct investment (FDI) in multi-brand retail.
For people of this eastern state – brought up over the years on doses of communist thoughts and jargons blared out from street corners, factories, colleges, villages, round-table talks and big rallies in the city’s sprawling Maidan – the Trinamool exhortations sound all too familiar:
“In a big pond, big fish devours the small. Similarly, the global multinational retails chains will finish off small traders and then dictate prices to the consumers.”
“If there is majority FDI in insurance, the foreign multinationals will rule the roost and then the country’s sovereignty will be endangered”.
“The pension bill (Pension Fund Regulatory and Development Bill, 201) will throw open the pension fund to private players and foreign investment. Lives of retired employees will become uncertain,” he added.
The only two ways to distinguish Trinamool rallies from Left rallies nowadays are the presence of a large number of party flags and once-in-a-two-minute references – almost with a religious zeal – to Banerjee’s “honesty”, “sacrifices” and “guts”.
With Banerjee practically hijacking the leftist slogans, the Left Front has seen in the move the hand of its favourite whipping boy – the United States.
“Suddenly we are seeing that a right-wing party like Trinamool is opposing retail FDI saying they are concerned about the farmers and small traders,” said Left Front chairman and Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPI-M) state secretary Biman Bose some days back.
“On the one hand, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is visiting the chief minister at the state secretariat, and on the other hand they are opposing retail FDI,” he said.
“This is nothing but a tactic to fool the masses about the authenticity of the Left. She (Mamata) has been advised by the US to oppose retail FDI so that people become confused,” he said.
The Congress, after its divorce from Trinamool, both at the centre and the state, has called Banerjee a copycat of the communists.
“Somebody has provided her copies of speeches delivered by (former West Bengal chief minister) Jyoti Basu and other left leaders. She has read those, mugged those, and is now delivering them. Hers is now the voice of Jyoti Basu and other CPI-M leaders,” state Congress chief Pradip Bhattacharya told IANS.
But amid a race for capturing the leftist space, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), now a miniscule force in the state, is fancying its chances.
“The people had voted for the Trinamool as they were angry with the CPI-M. But now the masses are realising that nothing has changed. She is following the same policies, using the same slogans. This has opened up great opportunities for us to move ahead,” state BJP president Rahul Sinha told IANS.