Jyoti Basu in 108: Different Views on the Left Front Government of West Bengal (1977-2000)

On the occasion of Com. Jyoti Basu’s 108^th birth anniversary, let us observe the different views regarding his tenure as Chief Minister of West Bengal from 1977 to 2000. The excerpts given below express the views of CPI(M), CPI(ML)Liberation, Prabhat Patnaik (Frontline) and Thomas Crawley (Jacobin). The various statistics shown should be considered within the tenure of 1977 to 2011.  

A. Excerpts from “Thirty Years of the Left Front Government in West Bengal” - CPI(M); 2007:

Original article: https://www.cpim.org/content/thirty-years-left-front-government-west-bengal

‘…While assuming office in 1977, the Left Front government was aware of the limitations of a State government in implementing pro-people policies within the existing Constitutional set-up. While the major responsibility of delivering services to the people was with the State Governments, financial resources were concentrated in the hands of the Centre. Keeping in mind this constraint, the Left Front government embarked upon a programme to provide immediate relief to the people and implementing alternative policies in spheres where the State government had some say. The major initiatives of the first Left Front government were to carry out thoroughgoing land reforms and establishing a vibrant Panchayati Raj. These historic initiatives broke the back of landlordism in the rural areas, empowered the poor peasantry and agricultural workers immensely and decisively changed the correlation of class forces in favour of the rural poor. Large sections of the rural poor, especially the dalits, adivasis and minorities, gravitated towards the Left and the CPI (M). This section continues to be the most stable mass base of the CPI (M) and the Left Front till date. Several other pro-people initiatives were also undertaken regarding workers’ rights and social sector development, which benefited different sections of the people: factory workers, unorganised workers, government employees, school and college teachers, students, youth, women and the refugees. Through their experience, the majority of the people of West Bengal came to recognise the Left Front government as a pro-people government, a custodian of their rights and a fighter for their cause. Therefore, since 1977, neither did the people ever look back nor did the Left Front government.’

‘…The land reforms initiated in West Bengal had three major components: (i) effective imposition of land ceiling and vesting of ceiling surplus land (ii) redistribution of vested land among the landless cultivators and (iii) securing of tenancy rights of sharecroppers (bargadars) through a system of universal registration of tenant cultivators (Operation Barga). As a result of this thoroughgoing land reform programme, West Bengal today has the most egalitarian land ownership pattern in the entire country. While West Bengal accounts for only around 3% of agricultural land in India, it accounted for over 21% of ceiling surplus land that has been redistributed in India till date. The total number of beneficiaries of land redistribution in West Bengal is over 28 lakhs, which is almost 50% of all beneficiaries of land redistribution in post-independence India. The security of tenancy rights provided to the sharecroppers under Operation Barga was also unprecedented in India. The total number of recorded sharecroppers had reached over 15 lakhs, which accounted for over 20% of the total agricultural households in the State. Over 11 lakh acres of land was permanently brought under the control of sharecroppers and their right to cultivate land was firmly established.’

‘…Following the onset of the neoliberal policies in the decade of 1990s, whatever land reform measures were undertaken in most Indian States in the post-independence period were sought to be reversed. However, in West Bengal an additional 95,000 acres of land was acquired in the 1990s under the land reform legislation and 94,000 acres redistributed. These figures for the decade of the 1990s account for almost all the land acquired and over 40 per cent of the land redistributed in the entire country.’

‘…Reorganisation of the system of local government was one of the most important of the institutional changes brought about by the Left Front government. In the process, West Bengal has created a history of participation of the common people through the process of decentralisation, which is unique in India. A system of democratic elections to local bodies at anchal, block and district level was instituted: gram panchayats at the anchal level, panchayat samitis at the block level and zilla parishads at the district level. Elections to these local bodies were held in June 1978. The newly elected panchayats were involved with the execution of land reforms. Panchayats took the initiative in exposing benami land holdings, ensured the identification of excess land and the declaration of vested land and were also given charge of ensuring the legal rights of recipients of vested land and bargadars over land. The panchayats were also involved in arrangements for the provision of institutional credit for the beneficiaries of vested land and for bargadars.  After the rural development projects were devolved to panchayats for implementation, the beneficiaries of land reform were given priority in the receipt of benefits from these projects. This was possible because through the panchayat election of 1978, a new leadership was established at the helm of the rural bodies from less privileged socio-economic backgrounds. The erstwhile village elite, including landlords and moneylenders, lost their dominance over the newly elected local bodies. The new leadership after 1978 came out of the tradition of peasant upsurge and struggle for land reform of the past three decades.’

‘…West Bengal was the first state in the country to make a serious effort at devolving funds from the state government level to the lower tiers of administration.’

‘…The proportions of dalit and adivasi panchayat representatives in all the three tiers were over 37% and 7% respectively, well over their share in population. Since 1995, one third of the seats and positions of chairpersons in the panchayati raj institutions have been reserved for women.’

‘…In the late 1990s, the Panchayat Raj system in West Bengal was further strengthened by introducing gram sansads. These are the general councils of voters in every ward, that are required to meet twice a year with a minimum quorum of 10 per cent of voters to discuss the work done by the panchayats and utilisation of funds.’

‘…This “walking on two legs” strategy of the Left Front government; implementing land reforms and the establishment of an effective panchayati raj in West Bengal; has not only led to the political empowerment of the rural poor but has also brought about a rejuvenation of agriculture in the State. Since the Left Front came into office in 1977, foodgrains production in West Bengal has grown at the rate of 6 per cent per annum, which is the highest among seventeen most populous States of India.’

‘…In the backdrop of the neoliberal policies being adopted by the Centre since early 1990s, agricultural growth has slowed down across the country. While agriculture grew at less than 2% in India during the Tenth Plan period (2002-2007), the growth rate of agriculture in West Bengal has been over 3.5%.’

‘…For most parts of its lengthy tenure, the Left Front government has had to encounter hostile governments at the Centre. There was a conscious effort on the part of successive Central governments, particularly those run by the Congress, to discourage industrialization in West Bengal since it was a Left ruled State. This was done both through a denial of public sector investment as well as licenses for setting up private industries. During Indira Gandhi’s tenure as the Prime minister in the early 1980s, a proposal for setting up an electronics complex in Salt Lake near Kolkata was shot down by the Central government on security grounds, because West Bengal was a border State! Permission for the Haldia Petrochemical project was withheld by the Central government for 11 long years. Moreover, the freight equalization policy for coal and iron ore robbed West Bengal, along with the other states in the Eastern region of India, of its locational advantage of being the most mineral rich region of the country. Following these discriminatory policies pursued by the Centre and the vitriolic anti-Communist propaganda carried out by the bourgeois media, which led to some degree of capital flight, West Bengal experienced industrial stagnation during the decade of the 1980s. Traditional industries like tea, jute and engineering were on a decline. This aggravated the unemployment situation in the State, especially in the urban areas, besides causing hardships for the workers in the sick industries. The need was felt to make special efforts to reverse the trend towards industrial stagnation and re-industrialize West Bengal.

Meanwhile, a big policy shift had come at the national level when the Narasimha Rao led Congress Government adopted the “New Economic Policies” in 1991 following the dictates of the IMF and the World Bank. The neoliberal “economic reforms” initiated by the Central government abandoned the earlier emphasis on public sector investment, devised a strategy of liberalizing and deregulating the economy and laid emphasis on private capital, both domestic and foreign, as the main driver of economic growth. On the one hand these policy changes were clearly in the rightwing direction, which was opposed by the CPI (M) and the Left. On the other hand, it also meant an end to the discriminatory policy regime of the Central government, based upon licensing and freight equalization policy, which had caused enormous harm to the economic interests of West Bengal. It was in this backdrop that the he Left Front government had to devise its industrialization strategy. In September 1994, Comrade Jyoti Basu announced the Industrial Policy of the Left Front government in the changed scenario, which stated: “we are all for new technology and investment in selective spheres where they help our economy and which are of mutual interest. The goal of self-reliance, however, is as needed today as earlier. We have the state sector, the private sector and also the joint sector. All these have a role to play”. Following the adoption of the Industrial Policy, the industrial scenario in the state witnessed a turnaround, with important projects like Haldia Petrochemicals and Bakreshwar Thermal Power plants finally being set up.’

‘…The number of schools in West Bengal has seen a substantial increase in the post-1977 period, with the number of secondary and higher secondary schools registering a four fold increase, from 4600 in 1977 to over 22,500 in 2006. Accordingly, the number of students appearing for the secondary board examination has increased from a little over 2 lakhs in 1977 to over 7.5 lakhs in 2006.’

‘…The West Bengal Minority Development Finance Corporation, which was formed in 1996, provides training as well as soft loans for self-employment and scholarships for meritorious students among Muslims. The reforms brought about in Madarsa education in West Bengal are also noteworthy, especially the modernisation of curriculum including introduction of vocational courses and computer training and bringing the recruitment of teachers in madrasas under the purview of the School Service Commission. It is significant that 65% of students studying in the madarsas of West Bengal are girl students and 12% of students are non-Muslims.’

‘…the Left Front government was the first State government to announce a sub-plan for minorities at the state level to implement the recommendations of the Sachar Committee.’

B. Excerpts from “The Many Faces of the Indian Left” - Thomas Crawley; Jacobin, 2014:

Original article: https://www.jacobinmag.com/2014/05/the-many-faces-of-the-indian-left

‘…In West Bengal, where the party has long been dominated by the Hindu bhadralok (or the well-educated, culturally refined, upper caste “gentlemen” of the state), the decline of the CPI(M) has been more precipitous. The party was in power from 1977 to 2011, a period of uninterrupted rule that spawned an entrenched patronage network that guaranteed the party’s winning electoral formula at the expense of more thoroughgoing change.’

‘…As threats to its hegemony gained forced, the West Bengal government increasingly resorted to violence, intimidation, and repression. This coincided with the government’s embrace of neoliberal policies in the 1990s. The fact that it was a “Communist” party did not stop it from pursuing a policy of rapid liberalization (an irony not unknown in nearby China). The CPI(M) embraced public-private partnerships, attracted foreign investment by trumpeting its low-wage workforce…’

C. Excerpts from “Left in government” - Prabhat Patnaik; Frontline, 2006:

Original article: https://frontline.thehindu.com/cover-story/article30209599.ece

‘…The remarkable turnaround in this situation which the Left Front achieved within a few years of assuming office in 1977 would appear unbelievable to anyone who had witnessed the earlier situation. Indeed the dynamics of that turnaround are still not very clear and require a substantial theoretical endeavour. There is only one thing, however, that can be said about it with certainty, namely, that at the core of it was the overcoming of the agrarian crisis.

Lord Cornwallis' Permanent Settlement had left two important legacies in Bengal's economy. First, since the revenue accruing to the colonial government was fixed, the rate of return to the government from any investment in irrigation was nil, or at any rate way below the minimum rate of return which the colonial government insisted on earning on all its investments. Hence Bengal saw very little irrigation investment in the colonial period. There was an additional reason for this: following the report of the Royal Commission on Agriculture (1926) a view had gained currency that the problem of Bengal agriculture arose from too much, rather than too little, water. This neglect of irrigation from the colonial period, though slightly reversed after Independence, continued to haunt West Bengal's agriculture.

Secondly, as is well known, the Permanent Settlement had spawned a large parasitic class of rent receivers living off a pauperised peasantry. At the very top were the zamindars; but between them and the cultivators were several layers of parasites, up to 27 in some places, which obviously discouraged any productive investment on land. Post-Independence land reforms had removed the top layer of zamindars but already by the time of Independence, as the Bengal Provincial Kisan Sabha had pointed out in its memorandum to the Floud Commission, a new and powerful class of intermediaries, the jotedars, had emerged, so that zamindari abolition, far from freeing the peasantry from the stranglehold of these parasites, had the paradoxical effect of strengthening the latter. The disincentives to productive investment on land therefore continued, as did the abysmal state of the cultivators.

The Left Front confronted both these constraints head on. Land reform measures, initiated by the short-lived United Front governments earlier, were carried forward, through the recording of sharecroppers under Operation Barga, through the conferring on them of rights to land, and through the distribution of ceiling-surplus land. This was followed by the setting up of an alternative institutional mechanism in the countryside, the panchayats, which not only entailed decentralisation of power and decision-making, but also provided an alternative to the traditional power-structure dominated by the jotedars. The balance of class forces was altered in the countryside in favour of the oppressed peasantry and against the jotedars, which, apart from strengthening democracy, also encouraged productive investment by the peasantry, and hence the development of the productive forces. At the same time there was a substantial step-up in public expenditure on rural development in general and on irrigation in particular. A sea change occurred in the cropping intensity and in the cropping pattern. Areas which for centuries had witnessed single cropping now started growing three crops. Local level plans began to be drawn up with the help of the democratically-elected representatives of the people serving on the panchayats.

Agricultural growth in West Bengal began to pick up. To some extent, even before the Left Front came to power, the potentials of, and the scope for, multiple cropping had become evident in small pockets in districts like Bardhaman and Birbhum, where potato and boro rice had been cultivated as a third crop, in addition to the aman and the aus. But what had remained confined to small pockets now became the common practice over large tracts of the State, so much so that in the decade of the 1980s West Bengal witnessed the highest rate of growth in agricultural production among all the States in the country. In the 1990s, the growth rate came down everywhere, a result inter alia of the neoliberal policies adopted by the Centre which squeezed the peasantry even as they forced a curtailment of public investment in rural development. Even so, among the States, West Bengal continues to be a high performer.

Rapid agricultural growth, together with increased government expenditure in the countryside, enlarged the rural market in the State, both for food grains and for a variety of simple industrial goods. It is interesting that among all the States in India, West Bengal and Kerala were the only two that witnessed a steady increase in the per capita cereal consumption by the rural population in the 1980s and the 1990s (It is not yet clear if, in the first five years of this century, as the effects of the neoliberal policies of the Central government have begun to make themselves felt, and the public distribution system has begun to be whittled down, these two States have succeeded in sustaining their remarkable record).

The increased demand for simple industrial goods in the countryside brought about a remarkable "industrialisation from below" in West Bengal, with substantial employment effects, whose reach and significance have been inadequately appreciated till now. And with rising incomes, the State government's revenues also rose, making possible enhanced social sector expenditures, and a general improvement in the quality of life of the people, at least until the Centre's neoliberal policies started hurting the State.’

‘…As the tax-gross domestic product ratio of the Centre declined over the 1990s (the States did much better in this regard), the Centre not only cut back its own expenditure, especially rural development expenditure, but passed on the burden of its fiscal crisis to the shoulders of the State governments, through reduced transfers to the States and exorbitant interest rates (even exceeding the rate of growth of Net State Domestic Products) on its loans to the States. The States thus became the victims of this fiscal squeeze, and West Bengal was no exception. The Centre used this fiscal squeeze in turn to force the States to fall in line behind its pursuit of a neoliberal agenda.’

D. Excerpts from “Twenty-Five Years Of Left Front Government In West Bengal: Solemn Promises and Sordid Performance” - CPI(ML)Liberation; 2002:

Original article: http://www.archive.cpiml.org/liberation/year_2002/june/specialfeature.htm

‘TWENTY-FIVE years back, in 1977, the Left Front led by Mr. Jyoti Basu of CPI(M) came to power in West Bengal. The Front defeated the Emergency-tainted Congress Party, which had been unleashing a ‘semi-fascist’ terror, particularly against the revolutionary left, the Naxalites, although in this course, even the leftist ranks of the parties of the Left Front were not spared. Democracy became the crying need of the people; the mood and temper of the people of West Bengal was such that to defeat the Congress they would vote for any party or alliance that promised minimum democracy to the people. The Left Front promised to give them a better life and a better economy apart from democracy – in a nut-shell, ‘better governance’. In the Front’s parlance it would be ‘alternative rule’ by a combination of left parties. What has happened to that promise today? The promises and proposals made in the 1977 charter (they were 36 in all, with a number of sections and sub-sections appended to each) have all vanished into thin air…’

‘What they promised in 1977 Where we stand in 2002

(The number in brackets indicate the serial number in the original 36-point charter)

1. To nationalize all the core industries. To abolish the power of monopoly capital. To take effective steps to stop infiltration of the multinational corporations. (Point No. 1)	1. One such big industry, termed as the ‘pride of Bengal’ is Haldia Petrochem, which was built in joint collaboration with Purnendu Chatterjee of Soros Group and the Tatas. Now the West Bengal government has sold its shares to Mr. Chatterjee, retaining no stakes in Haldia Petrochem. The Tatas have also withdrawn their shares. Haldia Petrochem has now become the ‘native pride of the foreign capital’. The other big industry is Bakreswar Thermal Power Project. It was built on B.O.T. basis. The Japanese Mitsubishi, the Microsoft, the IBM, all are welcome here, because “we want capital”. “We are a capital-friendly government” – now this is the mantra of the ‘improved Left Front’. The process started after their much celebrated ‘Industrial Policy of 1994’ took shape during Mr. Jyoti Basu’s tenure. The ITC, Videocon, Hindustan Lever, Lafarge, are all being accorded red carpet welcome. This is the ‘alternative’ of abolition of monopoly or checking multinationals.
2. To provide jobs for all the able-bodied hands, and social security and unemployment allowance to the unemployed youth. (Point No. 3)	2. The number of unemployed youth has shot up to a registered 66 lakh figure. If the unregistered unemployed youth are also to be counted, the number would cross the ten million mark. When the Left Front government came to power in ’77, the number of registered unemployed youth was not more than 10-11 lakh. Yes, of course, the government has started an unemployment allowance in ’79, but the amount is a meagre Rs. 50 per month. Now the government has decided to offer the unemployed a one-time sum of Rs. 5000. You take this allowance and your employment exchange card will be seized. Nor would you be allowed to sit for public service commission examinations. To those having no employment whatsoever, what kind of social security would the government offer? Would they get free medical service, free education, free food and free travel? If not, what comes under this social security? This year, the ‘improved Left Front’ government has introduced an examination fee for clerical exams. The unemployed youth have to pay Rs. 250 to Rs. 500 for these exams.
3. To fix the remunerative/support prices of cash crops like jute and cotton so as to protect the interests of the primary producers, and to purchase these produces on support price (if possible, with a bonus to the small producers) to check distress sale or black-marketing. (Point No. 4)	3. Distress sale of jute is a common phenomenon in North Bengal, and also in North and South Dinajpur and Nadia districts. Last year the Jute Corporation of India stopped purchase of jute due to paucity of funds. The state government has no institutions to purchase jute. The only course they have is to blame the central government for the crisis of the jute-growers. This year the producers are selling Aman and Aous (local seasonal varieties) paddy at much below the government-declared support prices, i.e., Rs. 530 to Rs. 550 per quintal. The sale is going on at Rs. 320 to Rs. 340 per quintal. Bonus to small producers of paddy is ‘not possible’ due to ‘resource crunch’. West Bengal has not yet gone the Andhra Pradesh way, but if you pursue Chandrababu’s path, how long can the incidence of suicides be kept at bay?
4. To solve the bustee (settlers’ colony) problem and arrange for sufficient aid from the Center to provide shelter to all, particularly to the weaker sections. (Point No. 7)	4. Around 20,000 people, most of them coming from erstwhile East Pakistan in the late 1960s, have been bulldozed for the ‘developmental purpose’. Altogether 10 lakh people in Kolkata and its suburbs are under the threat of eviction. They are now becoming ‘developmental refugees’. Not only in Kolkata, even in Siliguri the weaker sections residing at the bank of river Teesta have received ‘eviction orders’. No alternative shelters are being promised. Be it Narmada project or the Metro Rail Project in Kolkata, the new dictum of development schemes is: the poor have to make sacrifices for city’s development.
5. To immediately open all the closed industries, lift lock-outs and lay-offs in all cases, stop retrenchments and reinstate all the penalized workers and employees. (Point No. 10) To ensure need-based minimum wages, pension and other social security schemes for all… (Point No. 12) To provide job-security and abolish the contract system. (Point No. 14)	5. The number of closed and sick industries in West Bengal has reached 66,000. The ratio of lockout to strikes in 1998-99 was 2:1. Thus West Bengal has become a ‘peaceful’ state for capital investment and also for capital flight! The Dunlop owned by Manu Chhabria is a case in point. The blue-eyed Brailly of UK siphoned off Rs. 100 crore from 4 jute mills in West Bengal. West Bengal’s industrialists top the list of PF/ESI/Gratuity defaulters. According to an approximate estimate, PF defaults amount to Rs. 120 crore, ESI defaults Rs. 80 crore and Gratuity to Rs. 50 crore. No, the private sector industries are not the only culprits. The state government is no less responsible with PF/ESI dues in state PSUs amounting to over Rs. 10 crore. Following the footsteps of the central government, the LF government of the state has left 1,00,000 posts vacant. It is even planning for e-governance with a declared aim to introduce a better ‘work culture’ among the government employees. This step is being opposed even by the coordination committee led by CPI(M).
6. To acquire ceiling-surplus and benami land and distribute the same free of cost to the landless, poor peasants and agrarian labourers. To radically change the land reform legislations so as to do away with all modes of re-centralisation of land ownership and provide adequate benefits to the bargadars, landless peasants and agrarian labourers. (Point No. 16) To arrange for round-the-year work for agrarian labourers and payment of adequate livelihood wages to them. (Point No. 20)	6. Out of the 10 lakh acres of land acquired for distribution, only 2.5 lakh acres of land has actually been distributed during the entire 25-year period. Most of the ceiling surplus land was captured by the peasants themselves during the turbulent days of Naxalbari movement in the late 1960s and early ’70s. Cases related to 2,50,000 acres of so-called disputed surplus land are still pending in the court. Obviously, the erstwhile landholders are benefited by these ‘disputes’. Out of 30 lakh bargadars, only 15 lakh got registered in the early days of Operation Barga. Now the operation has been wound up. Rather the reverse process has gained momentum. Poor bargadars with no means to sustain their livelihood settle with the landowners for a paltry sum of money and become landless agrarian labourers. In Bardhaman district alone at least 70,000 such cases have been noticed by the district land revenue department. Such incidence is also noticed in North Dinajpur, Maldah, and Midnapore districts. Following the 2nd and 3rd land reform acts and their amendments, at least 19 lakh acres of land has become ceiling surplus. But the poor landless agrarian labourers are not getting even a few bighas of land. The minimum wage fixed by the state government for the agrarian labourers is Rs. 62.10, with some regional variations. But to get it in reality remains a dream for agrarian labourers everywhere. Generally they get Rs. 28 to Rs. 35 plus 2 kg. of rice, and in some places the wages are as low as Rs. 20 to Rs. 25 only. Most of the agrarian labourers (their total number being more than 70 lakh) are getting jobs for only 100 to 130 days a year. The ‘food for work’ programme, under which 100 days work is to be provided by the panchayats, is very much absent in many areas. Wherever the scheme is being implemented, it is marred by partisan sectarianism, nepotism and corruption. From the Karanda killings in Bardhaman in 1993 to the recent episode in Suchapur in Birbhum, or Chhota Angaraia killings in Midnapore, show that contradictions are maturing in rural Bengal between the neo-rich and the agrarian labourers. The CPI(M) machinery is throttling the assertion of the agrarian labourers to get organized as a class for itself. The recent incident of burning of houses and properties by CPI(M) goons in Dhanekhali block in Hooghly district is a pointer to this.
7. To institute a proper enquiry into the killings of citizens and political activists including Hemanta Basu (a Forward Block leader) during and before emergency and to punish the culprits. (Point No. 31) The Left Front proposes to set up an enquiry commission regarding the incidents of police torture on political leaders and cadres in the police stations, jails and other places and the killings of political prisoners inside the jails. The ministers, officers and others responsible for all these dastardly acts would be invariably punished in an exemplary way. (Point No. 32 A) The Left Front proposes to set up another commission to search out persons (ministers and corrupt officials included) responsible for the autocratic measures, corruption and crimes against people and ensure that they are duly punished.	7. The less said is better in this regard. The large-scale genocide perpetrated against revolutionary communists and the ranks of left parties (even CPI(M) lost 1,200 cadres in the genocide) in the 1970s has still not been investigated and none of the perpetrators of these crimes has been punished. The two enquiry commissions set up to investigate them were dismantled midway. Thereafter, not only the Naxalites but all the progressive forces in West Bengal have appealed to the government and our Party has even organized a successful statewide bandh to press the demand for setting up such a commission. But all this has fallen into the deaf ears of the government.’

E. Excerpts from “The Great Bengal Verdict and After” - CPI(ML)Liberation; 2011:

Original article: https://www.cpiml.net/liberation/2011/06/great-bengal-verdict-and-after

‘Rather than unleashing a fresh wave of class struggle, the CPI(M) since 1977 relied on state-sponsored relief and reform to broaden its own social base and the Left Front Government (LFG) from day one emphasised moderation and class peace.

The most renowned reforms undertaken by this government was the Operation Barga-Panchayati Raj duo. These two together led to the rise of the middle strata – known to be the best vehicle for conciliating antagonistic class interests – to a new prominence in the social hierarchy of rural Bengal, providing the LFG with a broad and stable social base. The next logical step in Operation Barga (OB) would be to transfer ownership to sharecroppers and thereby implement the basic slogan of land reform, “land to the tiller”. But Jyoti Basu and his colleagues deliberately avoided it, apprehending intensification of class contradictions. Abandoned midstream, OB lost momentum and by late 1980s reversal of land reforms started. Meantime, Panchayati Raj had generated its own vested interests and increasingly came to represent an oppressive, dictatorial party power.

The other face of LFG was unveiled, barely two years after its inception, in Morichjhanpi, an island in the Sunderbans. A cruel evacuation drive was launched against Bangladeshi refugees who were trying to settle there and the scale of repression was incomparably larger than what was to be witnessed later in Nandigram. The morning really showed the day: there would be scores of cases of police brutalities on agitating workers (for example, six striking dock workers in Kolkata were killed in police firing in a single incident in 1979 itself), peasants and others throughout the whole tenure of the LFG. Basu’s message was stern and straightforward: any serious opposition to “the people’s government” would be crushed immediately and ruthlessly.

An Indian model of social democratic rule was thus built up over the years, one that based itself on class collaboration rather than class struggle and preferred stability of government power over turbulence of mass movements. In addition to the reform package, the LFG’s rural base was also bolstered by a coincidence which it efficiently utilised: the spread of the so-called green revolution to the rice growing areas of Eastern India. The resultant enhanced productivity (whatever the long-term negative consequences) benefited rich and middle peasants substantially and there were some trickle-down benefits for the poor, too. The broad support base thus developed and a well-knit, efficient party organisation provided the twin pillars for the fabled stability and ‘invincibility’ of the Left Front government.

But how come the ruling classes did not attempt to destabilise and oust this government the way it did in Kerala in the late 1950s and in West Bengal in 1967 and 1970? In fact such an apprehension was haunting the CPI(M) in the initial years, particularly after the return of Indira Gandhi to power in 1980. Gradually, however, it transpired that the ruling elite were not finding it necessary to tread the beaten track. There were at least two major reasons behind this.

For one, the counterrevolutionary credentials of the CPI(M) in office had already been established by the way the UF government unleashed the armed forces of the state to smash the so-called Naxalite movement in the late 1960s. Largely on this basis there developed a Jyoti-Siddhartha-Indira axis, thanks to which CPI(M) leaders (with the exception of Jyotirmay Basu) remained at large during the emergency period even as many prominent leaders of the bourgeois opposition found themselves behind bars. Of course, there was a quid pro quo: the CPI(M) did not build any struggle worth mentioning in opposition to the emergency and by the party’s own subsequent admission remained largely immobilised. Thus at the highest level the party had earned the political trust of the Congress, and of the ruling classes for that matter, well before 1977.

Secondly, unlike the UF governments of late 1960s, the LFG was not a product of class struggle and did not operate in an atmosphere of mass militancy. The CPI(M), as noted above, was now a thoroughly and visibly mellowed lot with no streak even of its militant economism of yesteryears.

In such conditions Ms Gandhi, made wiser by the harrowing experience of the mid-1970s, started her second innings with a new and improved strategy: allow the country’s largest left party (and its allies) to operate within the confines of constitutionalism but keep it under constant pressure and work for its complete assimilation in the bourgeois state system. But for this intelligent policy shift – pursued and perfected by all subsequent governments at the centre – the “world record” of the longest serving “communist government” in a bourgeois set-up would not have been possible.’

‘…To be sure, the metamorphosis could not have come about in a day or two. The process started back in late 1980s, when the CPI(M) changed its self perception from a party leading a “transitory government” (committed to a modest programme of relief to the working people and functioning as a weapon of struggle) to a stable and “responsible” one (obliged to compete with and excel over other state governments in the matter of industrialisation and growth) and began to introduce a whole series of policy changes. The original emphasis on the state sector and cottage and small industries was replaced by a policy of industrialisation in the joint (public-private) sector in the 12th Congress of CPI(M) (1985); the state government adopted a brand-new industrial policy in 1994 mirroring the policy of economic restructuring introduced by the central government in 1991…’