Left, Right or Centre, the old order should fade away

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If electoral deliverance and degree of popular support are taken to be the litmus test of performance in the context of democratic politics, there are a few heads in India which ought to roll.

Who will take the blame for the Left Front's miserable capitulation in West Bengal? We know Marxists in India do not pin responsibilities for failure on individuals. But something went terribly wrong within a short span of time that reduced the Left tally from 235 in 2006 to 61 in 2011.

Buoyed by the thumping mandate of 2006, former chief minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee embarked on his industrialisation drive. His trusted lieutenant and former state industry minister Nirupam Sen played a key role in convincing Bhattacharjee. The state CPI(M), led by Biman Bose, was absolutely certain that the electoral mandate pre-empted any trouble in the land acquisition process. The trio of Bose, Bhattacharjee and Sen were oblivious of the fact that the most dangerous moment for an arbitrary government comes when it tries to reform itself.

The government unilaterally announced land acquisition for the Tata Nano project in Singur, 42 km from Kolkata and the villagers started an anti-land grab protest movement. It was a clear sign but both the party and the government leadership saw it as an innocuous Opposition attempt to garner some headlines.

Things started going out of hand when the government announced acquisition of the entire Nandigram Block 1, a Left citadel till then, for setting up of an SEZ. The state government's decision to acquire land was unilateral. People at the grassroots were never consulted. This was the biggest political blunder. The party leadership failed to take its own cadres and supporters into confidence. Bose, at the helm of party affairs, was an abject failure. That the party leadership has lost connection with the ground was evident from Bose's statement on May 12, 2011, a day before the results were announced. The statement claimed that the Left Front would form the next government. Realpolitik has been an absentee at Alimuddin Street since Bose's takeover.

Bose should also be held accountable for allowing the party's file to be flooded by people with questionable ideological and ethical moorings. Many of these elements like Lakshman Seth, Majid Master and Sushanta Ghosh rose to become MPs, ministers and local party heads.

Thirty four years of continued rule ensured that the CPI(M) became a platform to be used to increase personal wealth and influence, to land new contracts and to arbitrate in domestic disputes. The party was omnipresent but somewhere down the line, the politics it once represented and it still claims to practice got watered down. These unscrupulous elements aligned themselves with the party for the goodies.

In true Stalinist tradition, the party leadership decided to quash dissent by brute force in an age where 24 hour news media is constantly looking to improve their TRP ratings. People watched the police open fire on unarmed men, women and children of Nandigram on May 14, 2007. Left-minded artists and intellectuals, newspapers, TV channels changed tracks overnight. A non-political protest rally saw more than 1,00,000 people march on the streets of Kolkata. There were software engineers, medical representatives, shopkeepers who joined that march that day.

While the writing was clear on the wall, the party and government continued to think of the anti-land grab agitations as handiworks of the Trinamool Congress. Eighty five per cent of the agitators in Nandigram were active CPI(M) workers and supporters. Among the old, there were people who have been party wholetimers even prior to 1965 when the undivided Communist Party split.

If the state leadership was out of touch with the reality on ground, the less said the better about the Central leadership. Its hammer master Prakash Karat was busy renouncing it all as anti-Left propaganda and devoted more and more time to sue reporters, editors and publishers for the alleged disinformation campaign.

Karat's sidelining of VS Achuthanandan, starting from the latter's suspension and removal from the Politburo to denying the former Kerala CM a ticket to contest elections, would have been suicidal for the Left in Kerala. The party bowed to pressure from its cadres and VS was finally allowed to contest. Under VS' leadership, the LDF ran a neck-to-neck race which it narrowly lost to its opponent. Karat's handling of Kerala does not show any political acumen.

Power corrupts but 34 years of power in West Bengal has blinded the party and government leadership. It is high time the blind old men leave the freeway to younger people with less dogmatic hangover to take over. That will only benefit the Left.

The tears of the Left do not bring cheers to the Right either. BJP, the largest national Opposition party, has proven to be a non-entity in these elections. The party has failed to corner the Congress in spite of the UPA reeling under the expose of multiple scams and irregularities.

Leader of the Opposition Sushma Swaraj's statements are routinely contradicted by party patriarch LK Advani. The way AB Vajpayee and LK Advani came to represent BJP, there is no such figure today. Advani would do well to emulate Vajpayee's example and clear the decks for the new captains of the fleet.

BJP's irrelevance in the national political context stems from its failure to brand its post-Hinduvta image. Having LK Advani, the posterboy of the Mandir campaign, around is not helping the party's cause.

Another case in point would be the DMK patriarch Muthuvel Karunanidhi. Not only has he failed to win electoral respectability for his party but he has also failed to rein in his party leaders from indulging in financial irregularities.

What started out as a blowout in the Union Telecom Ministry has now engulfed the DMK. Even the Karunanidhi household has not been able to evade the backdraft. Investigators looking into the 2G Spectrum scam have found Karunanidhi's daughter Kanimozhi to be involved as well. They have found that Rs 200 crore was paid as bribe to Kalaignar TV, in which Kanimozhi has a substantial stake. The evidence was strong enough for her to be refused bail and arrested.

Karunanidhi's last tenure as chief minister also saw a massive increase in the number of licences being granted to liquor shops. The revenues generated were funnelled into financing the populist projects like distribution of free television sets and sale of rice at a ridiculously low price.

Large and medium landowners in the state found no local hands to till their land. So, as the people of Tamil Nadu ate rice at Rs 2 a kg, drank alcohol that was readily available and spent the day in front of the TV sets their government had provided them, labourers from Andhra Pradesh, Orissa, West Bengal, Bihar, Jharkhand and Chhattisgarh rushed in to fill the vacuum.

Karunanidhi's predicament is accentuated by the fact that the very person he groomed to be the next face of the party, Kanimozhi, has turned into a factor of taint and shame for the DMK. With A Raja out of the fray, one has serious doubts if Karunanidhi's son MK Alagiri has the charisma or the support to lead the DMK out of trouble. Dayanidhi Maran appears better suited for the role.

If he quits politics now, this would certainly not be the most graceful bow-out for an 87-year-old man who has served five terms as chief minister. But one wonders if he should wait for a further fall from grace.

When was the last time you heard of or from Bal Thackeray? You can safely assume that till Pakistan or Pakistanis come to play cricket in Mumbai, you will hear his sound of silence. The senior Thackeray should call it a day. Not so much because he could not keep his Sena flock together (Read Raj Thackeray and MNS) but rather because his politics is irrelevant and has been rejected by an overwhelming majority of Maharashtrian people.

India has one of the largest young populations in the world. It should only be natural that the old order fades away and makes way for the new.