Change in Bengal's political landscape

The month long general election has just concluded in India. The Congress-led United Progressive Alliance (UPA) has won a decisive victory, defying all exit polls and opinion polls. The UPA will not have to depend on every whim of external partners. The last UPA government depended on external support of the left front.
Today, I will discuss specifically the election results in the state of West Bengal.
West Bengal earned the dubious distinction of hosting the longest serving elected Communist rule in the world. The Left Front comprising of the Communist Party of India (CPI), Communist Party of India (Marxist) (CPIM), Revolutionary Socialist Party (RSP) and Forward Block (FB) came to power in West Bengal in 1977 election. Since then the front has won every state election. It also won majority seats in the state in every parliamentary election since 1977. The CPI (M) is the predominant party in this alliance.
As a result, Indians outside Bengal as well as people outside India assume that Bengalis must be having a communist gene. In reality, in spite of their success, about half the Bengalis are opposed to communist rule. But until the election in April-May 2009, they could not dent the communist bastion. In the last Vidhan Sabha (state assembly) election in 2006, the opposition got only 35 out of a total of 294 seats. The primary reason was that opposition vote got divided. The two major opposition parties in Bengal are the Congress and the Trinamool Congress, a splinter group of Congress. Trinamool is a Bengali/Sanskrit word that means grassroots. Trinamool Congress founded and headed by Ms Mamata Banerjee is the dominant opposition. Until now, the two opposition parties usually ran for election separately. In a multi-way contest, the anti-left vote got divided and the left candidate usually won with less than 50% vote.
When they came together and fought the 2001 election jointly, there were plenty of ego clashes and the lower level workers of the two parties did not see eye to eye. As a result, the left front kept winning. Trinamool tried to form alliance with another national party, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) which means Indian People’s Party. But that did not help because BJP has few supporters in Bengal.
Finally, prior to 2009 elections, Trinamool and Congress overcame their massive egos and realized that the only way to defeat the left is to form unified alliance against them. In the meanwhile, the left front’s popularity also went down a little because of its attempts to forcibly acquire farmland for industry, following the tradition of communist China.
Although the opposition was trounced in 2006 assembly election, they lost most seats due to division of anti-left vote between Trinamool and Congress. If you added up their votes, they could win in many seats. Each parliamentary seat is composed of 7 adjacent assembly seats. When I analyzed the results in 294 assembly seats and computed the total opposition vote in the corresponding parliamentary seats, I found to my amazement that the opposition wins in 13 out of 42 Lok Sabha seats outright. In another 6 seats, they come very close to winning.
The 2009 election results followed the same path. The Congress, Trinamool alliance won all those 19 seats with a handsome margin. Since this time around the alliance was formed quite early, all senior leaders of the two parties promised full cooperation and the rank and file got time to adjust, it was a successful alliance. The alliance also energized a small percentage of anti-left voters who never went to polling booths before because they knew that their candidate would have no chance of winning. This time they voted.
The opinion polls and exit polls gave the alliance between 14 and 19 seats out of 42. But the alliance did spectacularly. They not only got the 19 where they were ahead or very close in 2006 but grabbed another 7 seats where the combined anti-left vote was much less than left vote in 2006. These 7 seats were won due to the prevailing anti-left sentiment that started as a mild storm but soon became a tsunami.
Hindsight is always 20/20. But let us look at few reasons of the destruction of the left in Bengal. The state government attempted to bring the Tata Nano project to Bengal. The establishment of this small car factory was a noble cause but the farm landowners were not willing to give up their fertile land for the auto project. The government could have asked Tata to sweeten the deal by raising land price. But instead, its cadres started terrorizing the villagers. This had a tremendous effect against the left front all over rural Bengal. Tata had to withdraw the project and moved it to Gujarat.
Some claim that the loss of Nano project caused resentment among urban, middle class Bengalis because they had seen the potential for many skilled jobs in that plant and in ancillary industries. In addition, a project like this usually attracts other unrelated companies to start operation in that location. Singur, where Tata Nano plant was proposed, could have been a prosperous metropolis 20 years from now.
The left front thought that the Tata Nano might have produced some support for them in the urban middle class who are otherwise opposed to left. It may have been true to some extent. But it was short lived.
The left front provided support from outside to the Congress government at the central (federal) level in New Delhi. But when the Congress almost completed negotiations with the USA for a nuclear deal that would essentially make India a nuclear power that does not have to sign the NPT, the left front led by its general secretary Prakash Karat opposed the deal tooth and nail. Although the West Bengal state government was only mildly opposed to the nuclear treaty, they could not raise their voice against Karat. As a result, the left front withdrew support from the Congress-led government in New Delhi, hoping that it will fall and new elections will be called. However, it did not happen as another small party, the Samajbadi Party(SP) provided support to the ruling coalition. The no confidence vote against the government was defeated in the Lok Sabha and the government completed its full term before calling the election in 2009 as scheduled.
But this back stabbing by the left front at the center in order to destabilize the central government, made it extremely unpopular among urban middle class Bengalis who might have supported the left on the Tata Nano issue.
The left front government tried to establish a chemical industrial complex in Nandigram in southern Bengal. But it faced huge opposition and protest from the residents of Nandigram . Determined to stop the protest, police fired and killed 14 protesters. This caused a massive backlash not only in Nandigram but across Bengal.
The Lok Sabha election was held on three days in Bengal. In the last phase on May 13, 11 Lok Sabha seats in and around Kolkata, a section of each of which was part of metropolitan Kolkata, were contested. The anti-left alliance won all 11 of them.
Final result
Left Front : 15 seats ( CPI(M):9, CPI:2, RSP:2, FB:2)
Anti Left alliance : 25 seats (Trinamool Congress: 19, Congress:6)
SUCI (supported by Trinamool) : 1
BJP : 1
The Congress and Trinamool realize that they have to stay together to win in Bengal. Since Trinamool Congress was a splinter group of Congress, they share the same ideology. They are now preparing to defeat the Left Front in the next assembly election in 2011. Unless there is infighting between Trinamool and Congress on petty issues, there is no chance for the left in 2011.