By Amulya Ganguli, IANS,
When the Communists withdrew their support to the Manmohan Singh government on the nuclear deal issue last summer, it probably thought that its combative, anti-imperialistic ideological position would give it a boost during the next general election.
To consolidate its position, it moved quickly to enlist the support of Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) czarina Mayawati to compensate for the defection of the Samajwadi Party from the Leftist ranks to the Congress.
Then, the comrades virtually teamed up with their supposed adversaries in the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) to vote against the government and tomtom Mayawati’s chances of becoming prime minister, presumably with the BJP’s help.
In the event, however, all these calculations went awry. Not only did the government survive – and that too fairly comfortably – the ruling Congress subsequently improved its position with election victories in Delhi and Rajasthan. Now the Congress looks forward to the general election with much greater confidence than before.
The Left, on the other hand, is in considerable trouble because of the difficulties faced by its leading component, the Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPI-M), in its two strongholds of Kerala and West Bengal.
In the first, the longstanding feud between Chief Minister V.S. Achuthanandan and state party chief Pinarayi Vijayan has taken a nasty turn with the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) alleging financial irregularities by Vijayan in a hydel project deal with a Canadian company in the 1990s when he was Kerala’s power minister.
While the CPI-M is claiming that the CBI’s action is politically motivated, Achuthanandan is saying that as chief minister, he has to follow the constitutional process in the matter of sanctioning official action against Vijayan, and not party diktat.
How much of Achuthanandan’s stance is guided by his personal animus against Vijayan and how much by respect for norms and conventions cannot be said for certain. But this crowning episode of the known rivalry between the two Marxist stalwarts is bound to damage the party’s prospects in Kerala.
In any event, the charges of malfeasance against Vijayan have shown that the Marxists are not as lily-white as they claim to be. The recent finding, therefore, by a body called the National Election Watch that seven of the CPI-M’s 43 MPs have an unsavoury background will seem credible.
There may not be any factionalism in the CPI-M’s other bastion of West Bengal. But the party there is yet to recover from the blow which the Trinamool Congress leader, Mamata Banerjee, inflicted on it by forcing the Tatas to leave their small car factory in Singur and move to Gujarat.
There hasn’t been much evidence since then about Chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee’s industrialisation plans making any headway. Although he recently referred to the setting up of a chemical hub in Nayachar, an island on the Hooghly-Bhagirathi river, Mamata Banerjee has predictably expressed her opposition to the project.
After her successful show of strength in Singur as well as in Nandigram, where she stalled a similar chemical complex, few will take her threat lightly even if her anti-development plank hasn’t enhanced her popularity. In fact, it is because she has seemingly lost many of her middle class supporters that the Congress has been wary of aligning with her. West Bengal state Congress president Pranab Mukherjee has also voiced his support for Bhattacharjee’s industrialisation plans.
However, since the Congress does not have the strength to fight alone, it is likely to have an understanding with the Trinamool Congress. Such an alliance will give a tough time to the Left. After all, there was a minimal difference in the percentage of votes between the Left Front and its opponents in the 2006 assembly elections.
Whereas the Left secured 50.2 percent, its opponents got 49.7 percent. Of the second figure, the share of the Trinamool Congress (26.3 percent) and the Congress (14.9 percent) was 41.2 percent although they were not allies. Now, if there is an alliance, their combined percentage is bound to go up.
One reason why the Congress used to falter in West Bengal was the absence of a leader of stature who could challenge the charismatic Jyoti Basu. Although Basu had stepped down before the last election, Bhattacharjee aroused the hopes of a new beginning with an industrial revival.
But now, while Bhattacharjee’s leadership flaws have been exposed by Mamata Banerjee’s admittedly reckless tactics, Pranab Mukherjee has gained in stature because of his performance at the centre, which has drawn L.K. Advani’s praise for guiding the government in troubled times after the Mumbai mayhem and Manmohan Singh’s heart surgery.
As a chief ministerial candidate, therefore, he will be a formidable figure vis-�-vis the fumbling Bhattacharjee.
After the Left had withdrawn its support to the Manmohan Singh government on the nuclear deal, Amartya Sen, the Nobel Prize winning economist, had said that the Communists were “not very pragmatic” since he did not think that the nuclear deal was reason enough “for pulling a government down”.
Seven months after the event, it is clear that the Left has hurt itself rather than the government.
(21.2.2009-Amulya Ganguli is a political analyst. He can be reached at [email protected])