The Indian Elections: a Game Changer?

http://www.counterpunch.org/prashad05192009.html

By VIJAY PRASHAD

The Indian general election of 2009 is finally over. 445 million voters entered 828,000 polling booths to elect 543 candidates to the lower house of the parliament, the Lok Sabha. An immense state apparatus went into play to ensure that the voters’ will was not subverted by theft (2.1 million security guards were joined by 74,729 videographers to observe the polls). The entire process took just over a month. On Saturday, May 16, the Election Commission released news of the outcome. This is the first election in decades where there was no foreseeable victor; neither was there one singular issue. Four major coalitions vied for position, and the issues on the table appeared to be far more local than national. The result has belied this expectation. The Indian National Congress won decisively, over 200 seats, and for the first time since the 1960s, is able to form a government in Delhi without any major allies. This is a remarkable feat, given that the Congress ran an election promising more of the same, a certain tonic for defeat in anti-incumbency democratic politics. It projected the current Prime Minister Manmohan Singh as its leader, even as it had the various scions of the Nehru family as the central icons of the party and of its campaigning (Sonia Gandhi and her son Rahul Gandhi both won their seats this election). Little suggested that the Congress would do better than it did in 2004 (with 145 seats).

The Congress’ victory came at the expense of various regional parties, and the Left. Its gains were taken directly from the Left (in West Bengal and Kerala), and from two other regions where it had previously been shut-out (Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh). The Left suffered, in many ways, from the perils of governance in neo-liberal times: able to bring justice to the countryside, the Left faced a growing unemployment problem that it could not solve through a feasible alternative. Attempts to break the intractable bind of jobless industrial growth failed, not only because the Left had to operate within the confines of bourgeois law, but also because of the privations of governance in regions without the treasury of oil. The Left’s allies in places such as Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh had an overly expedient relationship to anti-capitalism; the voters saw right through them. The Left had engineered a Third Front, which, at one time, projected as its prime ministerial candidate the leader of the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP), Mayawati. The BSP was originally the party of the most oppressed, Dalit, castes, but it has since crafted itself as a wily player, making alliances with Brahmins to fend off the dominant, rural castes who are not at either end of the hypothetical caste totem pole. Mayawati’s party maintained its 2004 position, making no gains.

The party of political Hinduism (the Bharatiya Janata Party, BJP) won 138 seats in 2004, but this time could only pull off 117. Confined to a few states, the BJP suffered from the gradual demise of its irascible politics: when one of its candidates, Varun Gandhi (another great-grandson of Jawaharlal Nehru, as it turns out), made anti-Muslim statements, it dented the BJP’s claim to being an inclusive party. Its leader, L. K. Advani, wanted desperately to be the next Prime Minister, but his close association with the politics of animus failed him. Concern for their economic well-being trumped any anxiety among the voters about national security, so that the BJP had little to run on. Both the Congress and the BJP have close ties to big money, and to economic “reform” (which is essentially the process to dismantle the public sector), but the Congress unlike the BJP also has some measure of commitment to social welfare. The siren of national security was so weak that the BJP was unable to make capital out of the Mumbai terror attacks of last year. The BJP’s alliance partners have also failed it, afraid for good reason that Hindu supremacy’s engine might be slowly winding down. Advani has resigned as leader of his party. In the wings stands Narendra Modi, the leader from Gujarat, who is known for his efficiency and his brutality, a combination that chills. The BJP is not down and out, only wounded. Its social base has not abandoned it, even as the party has left them down electorally.

If the BJP lost parts of its coalition in the run-up to the election, the Congress too lost several of its partners. Three of them went on to form the Fourth Front (these are the main parties that emerged out of the Socialist tradition, but they are now essentially parties of the Other Backward Castes who dominate the political culture along the Gangetic plain of northern India). This election was not kind to them. One of their leaders, Ram Vilas Pawan, holds a record in the Guinness Book for the largest margin of victory in a democratic election; but that was in 1977. He lost his seat this year. The Congress went alone in the politically fertile belt along the Ganges, and it emerged more victorious than even it anticipated. It won 22 of the 80 seats in Uttar Pradesh, a much better showing than its 9 in 2004, and the Samajwadi Party, which will certainly support the Congress government, won an equal number. Regional parties remained strong, although most of them held power in their states based on the reasonably good governance of their parties in the state governments (so that Nitish Kumar’s Janata Dal-United and Naveen Patnaik’s Biju Janata Dal both won in Bihar and Orissa respectively). They have limited national ambition.

Contributions of the Left.

Fawning supplicants hastily said that the turn-around in the Congress came because of the energy expended by the descendants of the Nehru family. “All credit goes to Rahul Gandhi for single handedly reviving the Congress in Uttar Pradesh,” said Jyotiraditya Scindia, the scion of an ex-royal family who is in the Congress high command. This is not a scientific judgment. More is gained by looking backward. The Congress went into what seemed like terminal decline from the 1970s to the mid-1990s. The emergence of regional parties with a commitment to political devolution put paid to the idea that such a vast region as India must have only one highly centralized party; local issues lost out in the centrifugal Congress. Apart from this institutional thrust against the Congress, the main reason for its decline was ideological. Till the 1970s, the Congress’ claim to legitimacy rested on the immense prestige of its anti-colonial role, and upon this foundation grew the two pillars of its policy, secularism and socialism. The socialism began to fray after the two oil shocks, and as India’s midnight’s children, those of the elite born after 1947, felt compelled to liberate themselves from India’s poor. This is what they meant by “liberalization,” and one of its main architects was the current Prime Minister, Manmohan Singh. A brief foray into populism in the early 1970s was abandoned as the Congress tried to govern without democracy (through an Emergency regime in 1975-77) and then through the politics of identity rather than the politics of well-being (in the 1980s). But as the Congress walked the identity road, it was outflanked from the Right by the BJP. The Congress limped on, but always a pale shadow.

In 2004, the Congress was able to return to power at the head of a vast coalition that was united by its disgust at six years of BJP rule. It is at this juncture that the Left forced the Congress to slightly shift its disregard for social democracy, and to enact several measures to benefit the impoverished rural workers, in particular. The Congress needed the Left, whose outside support not only gave stability to the government, but it also provided the Congress with the policy positions to reach populations abandoned by New Delhi. The National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA) was one such instrument, brought into force in 2005 to give adults who live in rural areas hundred days of employment a year to do public works at the minimum wage. Despite sneers from the Congress’ own economists (many of whom cut their teeth in Washington with the World Bank and IMF), the Congress political brass agreed with the Left that this project should be a priority. The NREGA provided a floor beneath families devastated by rural unemployment. Mihir Shah of the Central Employment Guarantee Council says that although “India’s countryside continues to be characterized by a sluggish agrarian economy, marred by malnourished children and anaemic women, as also suicide by farmers in distress, there is no question that NREGA has put money into the hands of the poorest of the poor on a scale that is unprecedented in the history of independent India.” The NREGA burnished the Congress’ image.

In July 2008, when the Left broke its tie with the Congress, the Finance Minister P. Chidambaram hastily told the business press that the Left’s departure will speed up the process of the “economic reforms.” Chidambaram, one of those least enthused by the NREGA and other social welfare provisions, was keen to move on the GDP. “What do they want us to do,” he had earlier asked of the Left. “Do they only want to distribute poverty in this country? Those who say the market growth is irrelevant and those who say the growth only helps the rich are the worst enemies of the poor.” The Left blocked the Banking Regulation Bill that would have given Indian banks over to their counterparts in London and New York, Tokyo and Hong Kong. The Left also protected both the insurance and the pension sector from control by the wiles of international finance capital. India has been buffered from the current financial crisis largely because the border guards of finance were not withdrawn. Had they left the financial borders unguarded, the crisis would have been even deeper (about 600,000 workers lost their jobs in these past few months, crop prices have dampened the hopes of an agricultural recovery, and agrarian suicides continue – but things could have been worse). The Congress benefitted from the Left’s vigilance.

Little distinguishes the Congress from the BJP on matters of “economic reform.” But the Congress has a softer spot, making it more amenable to the kind of social welfare schemes that capital can swallow. Additionally, the Congress is programmatically opposed to communalism, the politics of hatred that is central to political Hinduism. The Congress has a historical link to secularism, and it long recognized that for it to recover its political ground it must once more be seen as the party of Muslims and oppressed castes. Hence, early in the tenure of his government, Manmohan Singh appointed the Sachar Commission to investigate barriers that hold back Indian Muslims from full equality. The Commission’s frankness earned it plaudits from all sections, but especially from Indian Muslims, who had faced over two decades of ascendancy by the very nastiest face of political Hinduism. Rather than riots the Congress promised degrees and capital. Soberness marked the Congress-led government’s approach to things that mattered directly to Indian Muslims – its response to the Mumbai attacks was not jingoism, which would certainly have led to attacks on Indian Muslims. The seriousness of purpose to seek a diplomatic solution prevented the outbreak of a pogrom, something that had become commonplace when the BJP held the reins of power. Indian Muslims and other minorities took shelter in the Congress.

These gestures from the Congress government have much to do with the Left’s role in New Delhi. The probity of the Left gave it more influence than its parliamentary presence should have allowed. But it was this commitment to honesty and its program that also moved the Left to break its tie with the Congress in 2004. The issue here was the Congress’ foreign policy, a part of governance that is often least important during an election, unless the issue is one of war. Since the 1990s, the Congress has been eager to forge a political alliance with the United States (and Israel), a logical step if India was to become one more platform for the Washington Consensus. Small steps brought the ruling elites of Washington and New Delhi closer together, and by 9/11, the links had become very close. The Indian Left and wizened nationalists within the Congress threw themselves in the middle, preventing the complete fusion of Indian foreign policy with Washington’s needs. It was this alliance that refused Bush’s request for Indian troops to Iraq in 2003. But the Left could not win all the battles, having failed to prevent India’s agreement on the US policy to isolate Iran. As part of a quid pro quo, the US government validated India’s nuclear program and India voted with the US against Iran at the International Atomic Energy Agency. It was on the issue of the nuclear deal that the Left withdrew its support to the Congress government in 2008. The issue remains important, but it is not one that is immediately related to more pressing questions of hunger and homelessness.

The Confederation of Indian Industry hailed the new election result and said that the “reforms” must be “fast tracked.” The Congress’ spokesperson, Jairam Ramesh, explained to the New York Times that this kind of speed could now be the order of the day because “the Left will not have a stranglehold. There will be better cohesion on economic policy. Right now, the priority is to restore high economic growth.” Those in the Congress who lean Left are weakened by the Left’s loss; Mani Shankar Aiyar, who is a Congressman in the Fabian Socialist tradition, lost his seat, which means that that singular Nehruvian voice is lost to the Congress’ parliamentary delegation. It will be filled with those who are enthused with high-tech and stock exchanges, and care only for rural policy when it impacts their own vote banks. If the Congress does follow the advice of Ramesh, as all indicators assume it will, then it will shoot itself in the foot. The mandate it received is not for more “reform,” but for policies such as the NGERA and the Sachar Commission, policies that stem from its original social democratic ideology. But it no longer has the Left as conscience.

Defeat has come to the Left. In its three bastions, the Left held on only to Tripura. In Kerala and West Bengal the verdict was split, but that is not enough for the Communists. In West Bengal, in particular, the Left has over the past few decades swept the parliamentary elections. This was largely a function of its impressive work in the construction of rural democracy, and in the fragmentation of the camp of reaction. This time, the latter united, as the Congress joined hands with its long-time adversary, the Trinamool Congress and various extreme left cults. They united in opposition to the Left Front’s controversial industrialization policy, and in particular to the struggle in Singur (where a Tata car factory was to be built) and in Nandigram (where a ferocious battle broke out over land utilization). The Left was unable to defend both the broad policy and the interpretation of the events in Singur-Nandigram. In Kerala, the Left was undone by factionalism, and once more disagreements over development policy. The largest Communist Party, the CPIM, recognized that this election is a “major setback” for the movement, and that the party must now conduct a “serious examination of the reasons” for its poor performance.

Vijay Prashad is the George and Martha Kellner Chair of South Asian History and Director of International Studies at Trinity College, Hartford, CT His new book is The Darker Nations: A People's History of the Third World, New York: The New Press, 2007. He can be reached at: vijay.prashad@trincoll.edu

The Indian Elections: a Game Changer?

http://www.counterpunch.org/prashad05192009.html

By VIJAY PRASHAD

The Indian general election of 2009 is finally over. 445 million voters entered 828,000 polling booths to elect 543 candidates to the lower house of the parliament, the Lok Sabha. An immense state apparatus went into play to ensure that the voters’ will was not subverted by theft (2.1 million security guards were joined by 74,729 videographers to observe the polls). The entire process took just over a month. On Saturday, May 16, the Election Commission released news of the outcome. This is the first election in decades where there was no foreseeable victor; neither was there one singular issue. Four major coalitions vied for position, and the issues on the table appeared to be far more local than national. The result has belied this expectation. The Indian National Congress won decisively, over 200 seats, and for the first time since the 1960s, is able to form a government in Delhi without any major allies. This is a remarkable feat, given that the Congress ran an election promising more of the same, a certain tonic for defeat in anti-incumbency democratic politics. It projected the current Prime Minister Manmohan Singh as its leader, even as it had the various scions of the Nehru family as the central icons of the party and of its campaigning (Sonia Gandhi and her son Rahul Gandhi both won their seats this election). Little suggested that the Congress would do better than it did in 2004 (with 145 seats).

The Congress’ victory came at the expense of various regional parties, and the Left. Its gains were taken directly from the Left (in West Bengal and Kerala), and from two other regions where it had previously been shut-out (Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh). The Left suffered, in many ways, from the perils of governance in neo-liberal times: able to bring justice to the countryside, the Left faced a growing unemployment problem that it could not solve through a feasible alternative. Attempts to break the intractable bind of jobless industrial growth failed, not only because the Left had to operate within the confines of bourgeois law, but also because of the privations of governance in regions without the treasury of oil. The Left’s allies in places such as Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh had an overly expedient relationship to anti-capitalism; the voters saw right through them. The Left had engineered a Third Front, which, at one time, projected as its prime ministerial candidate the leader of the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP), Mayawati. The BSP was originally the party of the most oppressed, Dalit, castes, but it has since crafted itself as a wily player, making alliances with Brahmins to fend off the dominant, rural castes who are not at either end of the hypothetical caste totem pole. Mayawati’s party maintained its 2004 position, making no gains.

The party of political Hinduism (the Bharatiya Janata Party, BJP) won 138 seats in 2004, but this time could only pull off 117. Confined to a few states, the BJP suffered from the gradual demise of its irascible politics: when one of its candidates, Varun Gandhi (another great-grandson of Jawaharlal Nehru, as it turns out), made anti-Muslim statements, it dented the BJP’s claim to being an inclusive party. Its leader, L. K. Advani, wanted desperately to be the next Prime Minister, but his close association with the politics of animus failed him. Concern for their economic well-being trumped any anxiety among the voters about national security, so that the BJP had little to run on. Both the Congress and the BJP have close ties to big money, and to economic “reform” (which is essentially the process to dismantle the public sector), but the Congress unlike the BJP also has some measure of commitment to social welfare. The siren of national security was so weak that the BJP was unable to make capital out of the Mumbai terror attacks of last year. The BJP’s alliance partners have also failed it, afraid for good reason that Hindu supremacy’s engine might be slowly winding down. Advani has resigned as leader of his party. In the wings stands Narendra Modi, the leader from Gujarat, who is known for his efficiency and his brutality, a combination that chills. The BJP is not down and out, only wounded. Its social base has not abandoned it, even as the party has left them down electorally.

If the BJP lost parts of its coalition in the run-up to the election, the Congress too lost several of its partners. Three of them went on to form the Fourth Front (these are the main parties that emerged out of the Socialist tradition, but they are now essentially parties of the Other Backward Castes who dominate the political culture along the Gangetic plain of northern India). This election was not kind to them. One of their leaders, Ram Vilas Pawan, holds a record in the Guinness Book for the largest margin of victory in a democratic election; but that was in 1977. He lost his seat this year. The Congress went alone in the politically fertile belt along the Ganges, and it emerged more victorious than even it anticipated. It won 22 of the 80 seats in Uttar Pradesh, a much better showing than its 9 in 2004, and the Samajwadi Party, which will certainly support the Congress government, won an equal number. Regional parties remained strong, although most of them held power in their states based on the reasonably good governance of their parties in the state governments (so that Nitish Kumar’s Janata Dal-United and Naveen Patnaik’s Biju Janata Dal both won in Bihar and Orissa respectively). They have limited national ambition.

Contributions of the Left.

Fawning supplicants hastily said that the turn-around in the Congress came because of the energy expended by the descendants of the Nehru family. “All credit goes to Rahul Gandhi for single handedly reviving the Congress in Uttar Pradesh,” said Jyotiraditya Scindia, the scion of an ex-royal family who is in the Congress high command. This is not a scientific judgment. More is gained by looking backward. The Congress went into what seemed like terminal decline from the 1970s to the mid-1990s. The emergence of regional parties with a commitment to political devolution put paid to the idea that such a vast region as India must have only one highly centralized party; local issues lost out in the centrifugal Congress. Apart from this institutional thrust against the Congress, the main reason for its decline was ideological. Till the 1970s, the Congress’ claim to legitimacy rested on the immense prestige of its anti-colonial role, and upon this foundation grew the two pillars of its policy, secularism and socialism. The socialism began to fray after the two oil shocks, and as India’s midnight’s children, those of the elite born after 1947, felt compelled to liberate themselves from India’s poor. This is what they meant by “liberalization,” and one of its main architects was the current Prime Minister, Manmohan Singh. A brief foray into populism in the early 1970s was abandoned as the Congress tried to govern without democracy (through an Emergency regime in 1975-77) and then through the politics of identity rather than the politics of well-being (in the 1980s). But as the Congress walked the identity road, it was outflanked from the Right by the BJP. The Congress limped on, but always a pale shadow.

In 2004, the Congress was able to return to power at the head of a vast coalition that was united by its disgust at six years of BJP rule. It is at this juncture that the Left forced the Congress to slightly shift its disregard for social democracy, and to enact several measures to benefit the impoverished rural workers, in particular. The Congress needed the Left, whose outside support not only gave stability to the government, but it also provided the Congress with the policy positions to reach populations abandoned by New Delhi. The National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA) was one such instrument, brought into force in 2005 to give adults who live in rural areas hundred days of employment a year to do public works at the minimum wage. Despite sneers from the Congress’ own economists (many of whom cut their teeth in Washington with the World Bank and IMF), the Congress political brass agreed with the Left that this project should be a priority. The NREGA provided a floor beneath families devastated by rural unemployment. Mihir Shah of the Central Employment Guarantee Council says that although “India’s countryside continues to be characterized by a sluggish agrarian economy, marred by malnourished children and anaemic women, as also suicide by farmers in distress, there is no question that NREGA has put money into the hands of the poorest of the poor on a scale that is unprecedented in the history of independent India.” The NREGA burnished the Congress’ image.

In July 2008, when the Left broke its tie with the Congress, the Finance Minister P. Chidambaram hastily told the business press that the Left’s departure will speed up the process of the “economic reforms.” Chidambaram, one of those least enthused by the NREGA and other social welfare provisions, was keen to move on the GDP. “What do they want us to do,” he had earlier asked of the Left. “Do they only want to distribute poverty in this country? Those who say the market growth is irrelevant and those who say the growth only helps the rich are the worst enemies of the poor.” The Left blocked the Banking Regulation Bill that would have given Indian banks over to their counterparts in London and New York, Tokyo and Hong Kong. The Left also protected both the insurance and the pension sector from control by the wiles of international finance capital. India has been buffered from the current financial crisis largely because the border guards of finance were not withdrawn. Had they left the financial borders unguarded, the crisis would have been even deeper (about 600,000 workers lost their jobs in these past few months, crop prices have dampened the hopes of an agricultural recovery, and agrarian suicides continue – but things could have been worse). The Congress benefitted from the Left’s vigilance.

Little distinguishes the Congress from the BJP on matters of “economic reform.” But the Congress has a softer spot, making it more amenable to the kind of social welfare schemes that capital can swallow. Additionally, the Congress is programmatically opposed to communalism, the politics of hatred that is central to political Hinduism. The Congress has a historical link to secularism, and it long recognized that for it to recover its political ground it must once more be seen as the party of Muslims and oppressed castes. Hence, early in the tenure of his government, Manmohan Singh appointed the Sachar Commission to investigate barriers that hold back Indian Muslims from full equality. The Commission’s frankness earned it plaudits from all sections, but especially from Indian Muslims, who had faced over two decades of ascendancy by the very nastiest face of political Hinduism. Rather than riots the Congress promised degrees and capital. Soberness marked the Congress-led government’s approach to things that mattered directly to Indian Muslims – its response to the Mumbai attacks was not jingoism, which would certainly have led to attacks on Indian Muslims. The seriousness of purpose to seek a diplomatic solution prevented the outbreak of a pogrom, something that had become commonplace when the BJP held the reins of power. Indian Muslims and other minorities took shelter in the Congress.

These gestures from the Congress government have much to do with the Left’s role in New Delhi. The probity of the Left gave it more influence than its parliamentary presence should have allowed. But it was this commitment to honesty and its program that also moved the Left to break its tie with the Congress in 2004. The issue here was the Congress’ foreign policy, a part of governance that is often least important during an election, unless the issue is one of war. Since the 1990s, the Congress has been eager to forge a political alliance with the United States (and Israel), a logical step if India was to become one more platform for the Washington Consensus. Small steps brought the ruling elites of Washington and New Delhi closer together, and by 9/11, the links had become very close. The Indian Left and wizened nationalists within the Congress threw themselves in the middle, preventing the complete fusion of Indian foreign policy with Washington’s needs. It was this alliance that refused Bush’s request for Indian troops to Iraq in 2003. But the Left could not win all the battles, having failed to prevent India’s agreement on the US policy to isolate Iran. As part of a quid pro quo, the US government validated India’s nuclear program and India voted with the US against Iran at the International Atomic Energy Agency. It was on the issue of the nuclear deal that the Left withdrew its support to the Congress government in 2008. The issue remains important, but it is not one that is immediately related to more pressing questions of hunger and homelessness.

The Confederation of Indian Industry hailed the new election result and said that the “reforms” must be “fast tracked.” The Congress’ spokesperson, Jairam Ramesh, explained to the New York Times that this kind of speed could now be the order of the day because “the Left will not have a stranglehold. There will be better cohesion on economic policy. Right now, the priority is to restore high economic growth.” Those in the Congress who lean Left are weakened by the Left’s loss; Mani Shankar Aiyar, who is a Congressman in the Fabian Socialist tradition, lost his seat, which means that that singular Nehruvian voice is lost to the Congress’ parliamentary delegation. It will be filled with those who are enthused with high-tech and stock exchanges, and care only for rural policy when it impacts their own vote banks. If the Congress does follow the advice of Ramesh, as all indicators assume it will, then it will shoot itself in the foot. The mandate it received is not for more “reform,” but for policies such as the NGERA and the Sachar Commission, policies that stem from its original social democratic ideology. But it no longer has the Left as conscience.

Defeat has come to the Left. In its three bastions, the Left held on only to Tripura. In Kerala and West Bengal the verdict was split, but that is not enough for the Communists. In West Bengal, in particular, the Left has over the past few decades swept the parliamentary elections. This was largely a function of its impressive work in the construction of rural democracy, and in the fragmentation of the camp of reaction. This time, the latter united, as the Congress joined hands with its long-time adversary, the Trinamool Congress and various extreme left cults. They united in opposition to the Left Front’s controversial industrialization policy, and in particular to the struggle in Singur (where a Tata car factory was to be built) and in Nandigram (where a ferocious battle broke out over land utilization). The Left was unable to defend both the broad policy and the interpretation of the events in Singur-Nandigram. In Kerala, the Left was undone by factionalism, and once more disagreements over development policy. The largest Communist Party, the CPIM, recognized that this election is a “major setback” for the movement, and that the party must now conduct a “serious examination of the reasons” for its poor performance.

Vijay Prashad is the George and Martha Kellner Chair of South Asian History and Director of International Studies at Trinity College, Hartford, CT His new book is The Darker Nations: A People's History of the Third World, New York: The New Press, 2007. He can be reached at: vijay.prashad@trincoll.edu

Communism in Bengal: The Political Economy of a Crisis

http://www.counterpunch.org/prashad05232007.html
May 23, 2007

By SUDHANVA DESHPANDE
and VIJAY PRASHAD

Isn't our life a tunnel
between two clarities?

Pablo Neruda, Libros de las preguntas, 1974.

In August 2006, Mamata Banerjee traveled to Singur, home to around 20,000 people in the state of West Bengal. Banerjee, who was once an activist in the Congress Party, floated her own front in 1997 (the Trinamul Congress Party -- TMC), formed an alliance with the far right BJP two years later, and has since floundered to gain a footing in the state. Meanwhile, the Left had recently consolidated its political hold on the West Bengal, having ruled the state government since 1977 in a united front. The Left Front has won every election since 1977 with a two-thirds majority in the Legislative Assembly. In the last election, earlier in 2006, the Left Front increased its tally to three-fourths of the Assembly (the TMC lost half its sitting members). Nothing that Banerjee could do seemed to dislodge the robust alliance built by the Left. Her best chance was in the 2001 election, which was preceded by months of violence in Midnapur district, particularly along the Pingla-Garbeta-Keshpur belt. Banerjee claimed this was violence unleashed by the Communist Party of India (Marxist) [CPM], the largest component of the Left Front. She hoped to get a sympathetic central government (led by the BJP) to dismiss the state government on the eve of the elections. In fact, TMC cadres had begun the violence, in a brutal attempt to reverse the land reforms initiated by the Left in the 1970s.

Banerjee came to Singur, just north of West Bengal's capital Kolkata, to squelch the government's attempt to reinvigorate industrialization in the state. Descending from their three jeeps, TMC party members and Banerjee were joined by a handful of locals as she proceeded to plant rice on a small plot of land. Such political theatre was designed to lay bare her protest: that the government was in the process of acquiring land from the farmers on behalf of an Indian car manufacturing firm, the Tatas. The kisans of Bengal, she told the assembled media, would "shed blood." This was a harbinger of what was to come, given the recent history of Midnapur.

By December 2006, the TMC, joined by reformed Maoists and anarcho-syndicalists, offered leadership to the minority of disgruntled farmers who refused to give consent for land acquisition (farmers who owned 952 acres of the 997 acres needed had signed consent letters by then). The Krishi Jami Raksha Samiti (KJRS), led by the TMC, began to harass those who signed consent letters (by damaging houses, for instance), and they went on a rampage against those who had come to fence the acquired land. In this vise, the state government sent in the police, who fired tear gas at demonstrators and arrested several dozen people. The government has since begun an investigation of the excessive police action (the police alleges that the KJRS threw "country bombs" at them).

Singur was the dress rehearsal for the next phase.

Singur spilled over across the Hooghly River, into East Midnapur district, to the area of Nandigram. Nandigram is an economically weak region, but it is within sight of major industrial growth, exemplified by the Haldia Petrochemical refinery and by a Mitsubishi chemical factory. The government was eager to develop Nandigram, using the area as the site of a mega chemical hub. The estimate is that this hub would employ about 100,000 people. This part of the project remained dormant, at a proposal stage. The Chief Minister of West Bengal, Buddhadev Bhattacharya, made a public statement to the effect that there would be no land acquisition without the widest political consultation. However, a document circulated by the Haldia Development Authority sowed the seeds of doubt. Bhattacharya dismissed the document.

Banerjee's TMC, for the first time in years, saw the making of a political campaign against the Left Front government. Her party now pushed from Singur to Nandigram. When activist Medha Patkar came to visit Singur (a trip denied by the state government), she went to Nandigram, where the struggle, at that point, was muted. It came to a boil after Singur, as the TMC and its allies tried to build on the momentum achieved at Singur. In early January 2007, in two incidents, the police were assaulted, police jeeps were set on fire, and the state personnel was forced to withdraw from the area. CPM offices were destroyed, four thousand CPM supporters were removed from the region and roads into Nandigram were dug-up. In February, Chief Minister Bhattacharya held a public meeting near Nandigram, where he reiterated his commitment that no land would be used for the chemical hub and that the area would not be a Special Economic Zone (SEZ) if the people there opposed it. The violence against the CPM supporters continued, and Nandigram remained isolated. On March 14, 2007, the state government sent in the police to reclaim the area. In an armed action, the police killed eight people (six others were killed in the melee). This was the most damaging incident in the Left Front's thirty years of government.

Thirty years ago, in 1977, the two major Communist Parties joined with other socialist allies to take power over West Bengal's state government. With a great deal of promise, the Left Front alliance inherited control over a state government. The bourgeois-nationalist Congress Party failed to conduct elementary land reforms, and it had presided over the attrition of the state's industrial base (to be fair, one of the main industries was jute, which had entered a terminal decline after World War 2). The Left went to work with a modest mandate, keeping the land question at the forefront. In 1971, Communist leader P. Sundarayya wrote, "It is only by developing a powerful mass movement culminating in land seizure that we will ultimately get 'the land to the tiller,'" which is exactly what the Left did. The gains were substantial: today, 78% of agricultural land in West Bengal is in the hands of small and middle farmers, and agricultural productivity is higher there than in any other Indian state. Land reform, given the allowances for it in the Indian Constitution, was not a radical demand, but it was a radical step toward the structural transformation of the countryside. Land reforms were followed by a movement through which landless tenant farmers registered their rights to the land (Operation Bargha), a periodic campaign led by agricultural workers through their trade union to ensure a universal wage rate, and finally, the revival of village-level institutions (panchayats) for local self-government. The Left Front government implemented what is already legally allowed by the Constitution; it did not go beyond the right to property enshrined in the Constitution. As a government of a state within the federal republic of India, the Left has done what can be done in the countryside: anything else requires a revision of the Constitution, and that can only come with wider political strength.

The Left Front's first Chief Minister, Jyoti Basu was cautious as his government took office in 1977, telling the press, "We must be content to make whatever small improvements we can in the lives of the poor people, to make life more liveable." Two decades later, poverty levels in Bengal declined significantly (according to the Planning Commission).

But, by the mid-1990s, new contradictions emerged in the Bengali countryside. Neo-liberal agricultural polices on the global stage decreased the prices for agricultural goods, at the same time as neo-liberal economic polices of the Indian government has worn out the ability of the state to intervene on behalf of small and middle farmers who face an across the board crisis. The rate of poverty eradication began to slow down as agricultural production itself declined (it was 5.4% in the early 1980s and only 2.99% a decade later). In 1993, a committee set up the West Bengal government reported that agricultural stagnation was inevitable, as the land reform agenda had been exhausted. Distress in the countryside provided an opportunity for those rich farmers (many of them absentee landlords) who had lost their land in the reforms. They, along with the rural neo-rich, form a bloc in the countryside who are ready to join any counter-revolutionary, even counter-liberal, dynamic. The TMC had fronted for these forces in Midnapur in 2000-01, and the TMC's campaigns in Singur and Nandigram have afforded them a chance to strike back against the Left Front government.

In state after state in India, which had embraced neo-liberalism with missionary zeal, the price is being paid by farmers, particularly small farmers. In some places, like the Vidharba region of Maharasthra (as journalist P. Sainath continues to document), farmers' suicides have assumed near epidemic proportions. These farmers are the casualties of the global offensive of neo-liberalism on petty production in the agrarian sector. It is, therefore, no coincidence that in country after country in Latin America, the Left in some form or another has made a resurgence through the struggles of the small farmers' discontent and aspirations. In countries where the Left is virtually absent, that political space has been filled by other forces ­ in Iran, for instance, one factor behind Mahmud Ahmadinejad's electoral victory was his championing of the cause of the small peasantry. Given this global context, it seems remarkable that West Bengal has been able to ward off the political symptoms of the agrarian crisis. At some point though, global trends were bound to catch up. In addition, new problems, with their root in the land reforms, have cropped up: a report that the West Bengal state government had commissioned on the eve of the last election pointed to the fragmentation of land among the successor of the original beneficiaries of the land reforms.

Aware of the need to stem the economic distress of the working-class and the peasantry, and the political problems this would entail, the Left Front moved an industrial agenda from the 1970s itself. Of its seven goals (in its 1978 "Industrial Policy for West Bengal"), the CPM, the largest partner in the Left Front, called for a "reversal of the trend toward industrial stagnation" by constraining monopoly capital, encouraging small-scale industry, promoting worker self-management and an expansion of the state sector. Corporate industrialization was to be minimized in favor of industrial cooperatives and the public sector. The demise of the Jute industry (manufacturing output fell from 15% in 1979-80 to 7% in 1997-98) was a hallmark of the cataclysmic decline of Bengal's industrial base. Include in this a deeply hostile role played by the Congress-led Central Government (industrial licenses allowed by New Delhi declined in this period, as did financial resources for industrial development), and you can understand how registered factory production in West Bengal declined from about 10% in 1977 to 6% in 1990 (in 1947, West Bengal accounted for 30% of all industrial production). By the late 1980s, the industrial working class, it seemed, had begun to shift its allegiance from the Left to the Congress (in 1987, the Congress won 41% of the vote, whereas the CPM only 39%). There was no serious electoral challenge because the Congress could not confront the entire alliance, but there was the question of disaffection among an industrial working class faced with chronic unemployment or under-employment.

In 1992, the Central Government ended the freight equalization policy on steel that hampered the ability of the state to attract industrial capital. This reversal made the state attractive to investment, which started to flow in slowly. In 1994, the Left Front produced a new industrial policy document, which grew out of this problem of industrial decline, working-class unemployment and a general inability to create jobs for a rural population whose opportunities had been greatly improved by the land reforms and by the tenant registrations. The 1994 document argued, "The State Government welcomes foreign technology and investments, as may be appropriate, or mutually advantageous. It recognizes the importance and key role of the private sector in providing accelerated growth. While continuing to advocate a change in some important aspects of this New Economic Policy [of the Central Government], we must take the fullest advantage of the withdrawal of the freight equalization policy on steel and the delicensing in respect of many industries." The new industrial policy no longer puts industrialization by cooperatives or by the public sector at centerstage (although it continues to push for the revival of "sick" public sector units, to rehabilitate commodity production, such as tea and jute, that remains in decline, as well as to push for the small and cottage industry). Neo-liberal pressures from the central government and from trends in the world impinge on the document, which now accommodates corporate industrialization.

But how does a government take "fullest advantage" of a global situation where the short-term interests of finance capital utterly eclipse the longer-term commitments of industrial capital? The spatial and temporal barriers that held industrial capital to its obligations no longer applies, and now states feel obliged, as economist Prabhat Patnaik puts it, to pay a "social bribe" to corporations for their investments. Because these bribes (tax concessions and other giveaways) impact on the finances of state governments, they adversely impact the working class and the poor. Within the Left Front there has not been the kind of robust discussion on this theme that there should have been. One of the beneficial outcomes of Nandigram has been that there is now a discussion of the problems of corporate industrialization, and whether other, alternative strategies are possible.

The principle debate has to be around the question of whether corporate industrialization, and the SEZ strategy in particular, generates employment. An 8% growth rate in India since 1991 has created no absolute increase in manufacturing jobs. As Patnaik recently pointed out, corporate industry "not only generates little additional employment; but in addition it uses its monopoly position to carry out primitive accumulation of capital (or more generally, what I would call 'accumulation through encroachment'): by demanding concessions from the state exchequer; by imposing 'conditionalities' on the state government to the detriment of the people, including dispossession from their land and displacement from their habitat; and by engaging in land speculation." The Left parties have been very critical of the way the SEZ policy has been framed. Across India, SEZs have become a prime policy for real estate speculation. Because of this distortion, the share of SEZs in exports was only 5% in 2004-05 (in the same year, only 1% of factory employment and 0.32% in factory investment came through SEZs). Of the new SEZs in the pipeline, 61% are in the IT sector, which is hardly a promising way to strengthen the manufacturing sector. The Left Front, on the other hand, is not given to either eviction for real estate speculation or for IT boondoggles. It wants to use the policy not for speculation on land, but for industrial development (more Shenzhen than Shanghai). Furthermore, to leave the State outside the process of land acquisition will allow land speculators to bilk the peasants and farmers of their land in the service of corporate industry. The question of the SEZ is important to discuss, but it is not the principle problem: the question of employment generation by corporate industrialization.

Instead of corporate industrialization, Patnaik argues for industrialization by cooperatives or the public sector, "where the peasants themselves could collectively own industry by organizing themselves into cooperatives, then these costs to the people could be minimized or even avoided." The problem for these alternatives thus far has been lack of access to finance. It is true that the state governments cannot rely upon their savings, but neither do private industrialists. Both turn to banks and to "institutional lenders" for finance, but it should be pointed out that these commercial and "aid" lenders, and even the Indian central bank, are averse to finance any project that does not reek of neo-liberalism. Projects must have a private side to them (public-private partnerships are acceptable). This situation increases the confidence of the bourgeoisie, who have fashioned, as political scientist Jorgen Dige Pedersen wrote, "an employer's militancy," where the bourgeoisie feels emboldened on the world stage to act as if its bottom line is far more important than anything else. This patriotism of the bottom line is quite different from the enforced national patriotism of the import-substitution era. But this does not mean that public sector units cannot be financed. The Haldia plant is a Central Government project; and the Indian Oil Company, a public sector unit, is the anchor investor in the proposed chemical hub. In other words, sufficient leverage from the Left and from its allies might be able to produce a "people's militancy," to wrest finance from the public exchequer toward the people's good.

The crises at Singur and at Nandigram do not only derive from the agitations of the neo-rural rich and their main political party, the TMC (as well as some of their allies of the Left). A singular failure in both cases has been a clumsy implementation that led to a political crisis, which was, in both cases, attempted to be solved by recourse to police action. All components of the Left Front are critical of the implementation, even if some are more vocal than others. Even the Chief Minister, whose cabinet set the tempo for the implementation, has been forthright about the lack of a political campaign to explain the problems to the people and seek their views on both land acquisition and the rehabilitation. Only after the fracas, did the Left Front explain that the success of the land reform hampers the attempt to find land for industrialization (less than 1% of agricultural land lies fallow in the state, whereas the figure for the rest of India is 17.6%). The Land Reform Minister Abdur Rezzak Molla once said of the problem of land acquisition, "We are taking away from the farmers by the left hand what we once gave them with the right hand." The tussle at Singur was a red herring: the compensation package offered to the agricultural workers and to the land owners is widely accepted as generous, and most have accepted it. The government has set up training facilities to move some of the workforce from agricultural work to industrial work, although there are reasonable questions about how many people will find employment and at what level.

The shabby implementation at Singur and the problem of corporate industrialization at Nandigram are both significant matters that require discussion and deliberation. But the capitalist media and the tablogoids concentrated on the mal-implementation and the industrialization strategy and took this as a sign of the total failure of the Left Front. When the cadre of the Left acted, they were being "social fascist," with even some making the connection between the communal fascism of Gujarat (thousands killed in the pogrom of 2002) with the events of 2006-07 in Bengal. Stories were blown out of context, and allegations flew around (sexual assaults, murders) that have since been shown to be false. The most sensational was the murder of a young woman, Tapasi Malik, who had been a leader in the Singur struggle against the land acquisition. The blogs and the capitalist media blamed this death on the CPM. The Central Bureau of Investigation is now of the view that she was killed by her father and brother. Whatever the outcome, this is a criminal matter that was cavalierly taken as evidence of the decadence of the Left. Equally remarkable was the story of the "burnt remains of a child," purportedly killed by the CPM. It turned out that the remains were of a burnt synthetic pipe.

Furthermore, the capitalist media and the tablogoids ignored the murders of Left activists, and of the dispossession of the thousands of CPM supporters from the Nandigram area. Reading between the lies of these types of periodicals is a full-time job. The in toto rejection of the Party Left, particularly by the non-Party Left, forgets the crucial role the Left Front and the CPM plays in West Bengal and across the nation in the fight against Hindutva fascism; it also underestimates the central role played by the Left Front and the CPM in the fight against neo-liberal laws, and in defense of the interests of the working-class and the peasantry. Centrally, it omits the structural limitations face by the Left Front, who have to make the Indian road as they dream it.

When the police open fire in the name of a Left-wing government, it should always give us pause. There is no question that it is a symptom of a political problem, which requires a political solution. But, it is in this juncture that cooler heads need to prevail. One expects nothing more from the TMC, who not only egged on the situation, but has also, unsuccessfully attempted to collect political capital on it. Nor can one expect much from the Naxalites, the unreconstructed Maoists, who have largely lost control of their political strategy in favor of what was once called the "propaganda of the deed." Acts of violence against their major political enemy, the Left Front, is their raison d'etre. One does, however, expect more from the reformed Maoists, the anarcho-syndicalists and the non-Party Left. They, after all, could play a good, critical role in West Bengal, pushing from the Left, criticizing and learning. Instead, they have joined with the Trojan Horse of the far right, by an elementary error: to care only for short-term tactics and be blind to long-term strategy. If the TMC had succeeded in breaking the back of the Left, where would this leave the non-Left Front Left? What is their revolutionary strategy in that case?

West Bengal's Left Front has some space to maneuver on behalf of the people, but insufficient power to transform the institutions of the state and civil society. When Left regimes came to power in Venezuela, Bolivia and Ecuador, each started a process of revising the Constitution to enable the people's movements to move a radical agenda. They were also helped along by the oil and gas profits generated by Venezuela and by Bolivia. In other words, that they won state power and that they had some investment capital gave them the ability to forge a post-neoliberal agenda. West Bengal's Left Front is not in that league, although it is being judged on that basis.

But the Left Front must be judged, and it must face as much materialist critique as possible. Creative solutions to seemingly intractable problems are necessary. These can only come when the totality of the Left offers the best ideas to break the Gordian Knot of underdevelopment and development.

Sudhanva Deshpande is an actor and director with Jana Natya Manch. He is the Editor of Leftword Books (New Delhi).

Vijay Prashad is the George and Martha Kellner Chair of South Asian History and Director of International Studies at Trinity College, Hartford, CT His new book is The Darker Nations: A People's History of the Third World, New York: The New Press, 2007. He can be reached at: vijay.prashad@trincoll.edu