Each of the six successive victories of the Left Front is premised upon a positive record of accomplishments rather than on the negative images evoked by the Opposition.
FEW generalisations have been able to sustain the test of empirical validity in the turbulence of political contestation in India. But the theory that the incumbency disadvantage is an immutable condition of political life has generally stood up rather well. Ever since the Congress' hegemonic claim to popular allegiance crumbled in 1967, it has been rare for a political force to emerge winner after once serving a full term in office. The exceptions whether at the Centre or the States, clearly prove the rule.
Over the last three decades, it is easy to identify the parties and politicians who have managed to defy the incumbency disadvantage. M.G. Ramachandran in Tamil Nadu did so in 1980 and then again in 1984, on both occasions tapping a rich vein of public sympathy to confound early predictions. In Bihar, Laloo Prasad Yadav managed twice over in the 1990s (although with his spouse as political proxy in the second instance) to engineer the perfect caste coalition and thwart the effort by excluded older elites to topple him. Digvijay Singh in Madhya Pradesh in 1998 and N. Chandrababu Naidu in Andhra Pradesh in 1999 managed to cloak themselves in the aura of the doer who would transform long stagnant social realities with their dynamic visions of development.
For the rest, the iron-clad rule of revolving door politics has generally applied - a party gaining office would normally be content to serve out a five-year term in the knowledge that this would only be the prelude to an equally long stint in the Opposition. Even a party or coalition that has established a fair track-record in reforms could be upended by unforeseen contingencies. A case in point is the Left Democratic Front (LDF) in Kerala. The LDF had introduced a path-breaking system of local self-government during its tenure between 1987 and 1991. Emboldened to seek a fresh mandate a year ahead of schedule by an exceptionally good performance in the District Council elections in early-1991, the LDF was soon inundated in the sympathy wave that followed the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi. Then followed the mandatory five-year cooling off period on the Opposition benches, depriving the coalition of the opportunity to consolidate on the reforms.
It should, in some senses, be an edifying experience for a party to go through the process of learning that is set in motion by a drubbing at the hustings every few years. But paradoxically this phenomenon has had a quite perverse effect in certain parts of India. Parties are beginning to tilt towards the belief that their only credentials for exercising authority lie in the ineptitude and manifest corruption of their opponents. Irrespective of their own performance and record, they can still retain political relevance if they manage to stay behind their opponents in the race to the depths of political corruption.
This is the context in which the national and global significance of the record of the Left Front in West Bengal is to be placed. Each of its six successive wins has been premised upon a positive record of accomplishments, rather than on the negative images evoked by the Opposition. And when the term "reform" itself has been subverted by a decade of miscued policy interventions that today seem clearly to be at the end of their tether, the experience of West Bengal under the Left represents a lesson in how reforms can bring political dividends if the priorities are right.
"Growthmanship" is not reform - it is futile to target a rate of aggregate economic growth in the belief that this will at some undetermined time in the future, benefit the poor. Rather, the poor need to be part of the initial programming of the reforms process. Unless they are brought in as protagonists at the very start, the ultimate role in which they are cast - that of passive beneficiaries of reforms - will remain unfulfilled.
WITH this broad generalisation in place, it is possible to go to the circumstances in which the Left Front first came to power in West Bengal. In 1977, West Bengal was just emerging from the most fearsome political repression ever witnessed in the country. It was an ironic reprise of the old colonial principle that Bengal thinks today what the country thinks tomorrow. In 1972, three years before the declaration of the Emergency, Siddhartha Shankar Ray, scion of a famous Bengali nationalist family, had taken the easy route to confront the challenge that popular mass politics posed to the elitist style that was in vogue then. He engineered the most scandalously rigged election in independent India and then embarked upon a bloodbath that has had few parallels since. The rest of the country soon caught up with West Bengal in the suppression of democratic rights, but nowhere else was the extent of actual human suffering quite as grave.
West Bengal was the focal point of all the contradictory impulses of the growth paradigm that Jawaharlal Nehru put in place soon after Independence. Nehru had a commitment to expand the public sector and redress the inequalities of asset distribution, but little political will to tackle the legatees of the Permanent Settlement in Bengal. Zamindari abolition was accomplished against a degree of opposition from the Right-wing of the Congress, but this remained a symbolic transfer of power from the top tier of the social hierarchy to the next. For the majority of the rural workers in Bengal, it meant little substantive benefit.
If agrarian reform was conspicuously absent, investment in agriculture - especially in the eastern region - was an area of neglect. Kolkata's captains of industry, with a history of profiteering and asset stripping behind them, were settling down to watch over the twilight of the city's engineering and jute industries. At the same time, the investments being made in the eastern region as part of the Nehruvian heavy industrialisation strategy were exerting a subtle magnetic attraction on the limited agricultural surpluses available. When successive monsoon failures hit the country in the mid-1960s, coinciding with a desperate fiscal crisis of the Central government, mass discontent boiled over. Unable to cope with the rising tide of popular anger, which found its natural expression through the Left forces, the Congress in West Bengal split and one faction formed a tenuous coalition with the Left, just managing to contain a situation that threatened to explode in violent insurrection.
Indira Gandhi's five-year-long repression in West Bengal only created the conditions for the unqualified ascendancy of the Left. And with the forces of social reaction in retreat, a phase of genuine agrarian reform followed. Noted economist Prabhat Patnaik has identified various elements in a broadly conceived strategy to pull the agricultural sector in West Bengal out of its prolonged stagnation. The most important of course, was land reform - the registration of unrecorded tenants and the distribution of ceiling surplus land. The agency of reform was not the bureaucracy, notoriously fickle in its commitments, but popular democratic institutions. This created a constituency for forward looking reform that has since been able to fight off successfully all attempts to turn the clock back to a less egalitarian pattern of asset distribution.
Investments in irrigation helped to consolidate the new system of assets ownership, making the small-holding farm a productive and viable unit. And with the introduction of a new package of technological inputs, the stage was set for an increase in agricultural productivity that genuinely benefited the smallholder and the agricultural worker and has hence proved more sustainable.
To be sure, there has in recent times been a degree of concern expressed about the fading stimulus of agricultural growth in West Bengal. The slow growth of rural infrastructure is now increasingly proving to be an impediment.
But the determinants of this bottleneck go beyond the confines of West Bengal to the larger national policy environment within which the State ploughs its lonely furrow of reform. Today, with agriculture in virtually the entire country plunging rapidly into an acute crisis, the West Bengal experience of institutional reform, rather than 'growthmanship', offers a definite national policy alternative. And if political mobilisation at the national level is able to create the conditions for such reform, then the lately encountered impediments to West Bengal's growth too could rapidly vanish. That ultimately is the attractive prospect that the Left Front experience in West Bengal holds out before the country and indeed the world.
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