As the left fades from Bengal's landscape, BJP makes a fervent pitch

In West Bengal, the Left is in a dead heat with the Congress for the wooden spoon; Maoism in the tribal heartland has been entombed; and in Kerala, the Left fights double incumbency

How can you read the writings on the wall in West Bengal, in the midst of elections, without stepping out of Kolkata? You come with me, nearly 600 km north to the Siliguri corridor, the narrow 60-km strip joining the Bengali mainland to its Himalayan and Dooars districts. More precisely here, we begin with the walls of Naxalbari.

 

If anybody kept track of these things anymore, we’d now be observing the 59th anniversary of the armed Maoist uprising that began here, this precise week in 1967. That’s why the first writings on the wall we read are in village Bengaijote, a part of the Naxalbari cluster where the Maoist insurgency saw its first spark. Serendipity, or reporter’s luck, I came here in that anniversary week and found two old comrades busy giving a fresh coat of paint and a vigorous “jhaadu-pochha” (scrub) to the storied memorial to that lost revolution, where busts of Marx, Lenin, Engels (spelt Angles, never mind), Stalin, Mao, Charu Mazumdar and Saroj Dutta stand. I’ve deliberately excluded one for now.

 

The first five were the grand deities the revolution prayed to. The last two were its local founder and his successor, respectively. And then the name I excluded mischievously, but here we are. This, standing shoulder-to-shoulder with Mao, is Marshal Lin Piao (Biao), the boss of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA), often seen as the second most powerful figure in the Communist Party of China. Until, one day (September 13, 1971), he was gone.

 

He crashed with his family over Mongolia in what history knows as the Lin Biao incident. The official Chinese explanation was that he was fleeing after a failed coup, or the so-called “Project 571”.

 

As with much of that Communist history, doubts and arguments persist, but it’s believed he was escaping to the Soviet Union, then estranged from China due to the Pakistan-brokered China-US thaw. Nevertheless, Lin was condemned as a traitor, charged with planning a coup along with Mao’s wife Jiang Qing. Both were consigned to the Communist Party of China’s hall of shame as “counter revolutionaries”. But not in Naxalbari. Here, Bengaijote is probably the only spot in the world, where you’ll still find Mao and Lin next to each other. And the “history” doesn’t bother Punya Singh Rajbongshi, a Scheduled Caste comrade sprucing up the memorial for the anniversaries. Naxalbari uprising’s 59th and 156th of Lenin’s birth (22 April).

 

How can you have Lin Biao with Mao, I ask.

 

“Because Lin Biao and Chairman Mao, our Chairman, were great comrades,” Rajbongshi says.

 

But didn’t Lin betray Mao who had him killed? I persist. “No, that’s propaganda. It’s that Liu Shaoqi who conspired against Lin,” Rajbongshi was firm. I didn’t remind him that Liu had died almost two years earlier. Why argue with the faithful.

 

On the memorial wall, meanwhile, another old comrade, in a significantly higher “spiritual” state, is sticking pre-painted wallpaper that says, translated from Bangla: “There’s no liberation through votes. Liberation is only through revolution on the path of Naxalbari.” This, days before Naxalbari voted with 92 per cent turnout. Vote is the only revolution people believe in now.

 

If Naxalbari is where the revolution rose, it’s also where it lies buried. In 2021, the seat went to the Bharatiya Janata Party, its candidate Anandamay Burman winning by nearly 71,000 votes, netting 58 per cent of the vote. About an hour’s drive off the highway, we catch him doing a door-to-door campaign in Matigara (the constituency is now called Matigara-Naxalbari). The soft-spoken schoolteacher and lifetime Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh karyakarta says the revolution brought people only misery.

 

In this election, the Left is in a dead heat with the Congress for the wooden spoon. Maoism in the tribal heartland has been entombed. Far in the South, in Kerala, the Left fights double incumbency. And unless it pulls off an incredible surprise on May 4, we’d see the conclusive marginalisation of the Left in our independent history.

 

The end of armed Communism was a matter of time. The marginalisation of the mainstream Left is self-inflicted. They were taken down by just one sentiment from their peak of 53 seats in 2004: Anti-Americanism. They pulled out of the United Progressive Alliance and tried to pull it down, even joined hands with the BJP, over the nuclear deal. They’ve only rolled downhill since, the Pinarayi Vijayan exception apart.

 

In so many decades of disagreeing and arguing with the Left, I’ve always found them civilised, open-minded and good-humoured. But unchanging. In 1988, I was intrigued that the Communists in Beijing and Moscow were changing but not in Calcutta. That question took me to Calcutta. My abiding memory is sitting with state secretary Saroj Mukherjee under portraits of Lenin, Stalin, Marx, the usual suspects.

 

Deng and Gorbachev have changed their Communism. Why aren’t Indian Communists reforming, I asked. “Because my Communism,” he said, looking up at the portraits as if for inspiration, “is purer than that of Deng and Gorbachev.” You can find that article in the India Today archives.

 

Almost two decades later, one of his successors, Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee, tried to change too. I had two long WalkTheTalk conversations with him and asked him, inevitably, how his invitation to private and foreign capital squared with his ideology.

 

“My ideology is my belief,” he said, “but I’m not running a revolutionary government. I have to work within my Constitution.” Now that was change but not the kind the ideological base was ready for.

 

The mass campaign against his planned industrial townships, Singur and Nandigram, was led not by his political opposition, but ideological comrades far to his Left, many of them from the intellectual clique. For them, this was a betrayal. They killed his dream, burned his party and Mamata Banerjee rose to bury it. The BJP is building its new home over that grave. Even in that most unlikely event of Pinarayi Vijayan salvaging Kerala, this election cycle will mark a most dramatic demise of a formidable political force. And if you did manage to build a mausoleum or a memorial for India’s Left, the epitaph could read something like: Because I let doctrine become my dogma, and ideology my obstacle. That too will be a writing on the wall, even if on an imaginary one.

 

Postscript: Naxalbari is now mostly forgotten, but Siliguri is top of the mind. The BJP has made its vulnerability a key electoral plank, linking it to “demographic change” and dovetailing neatly into its polarisation pitch.

 

The BJP’s point is made somewhat more understatedly by former foreign secretary and now Rajya Sabha MP Harsh Vardhan Shringla. “The sensitivity of the region makes any further demographic changes a problem.” Infiltration, he says, continues because too much of the border is still not fenced in sensitive areas. That would refer mostly to North Dinajpur where the corridor begins narrowing. West Bengal’s 2216.17 km border with Bangladesh is mostly fenced, but 569 km remains open. Some is riverine but 456.224 km can be fenced. It remains open because the state government, he says, hasn’t released the land.

 

This vulnerability is Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s campaign pitch and senior security officials here also worry. “Bangladesh or Nepal won’t invade us. And if the Chinese come down the Himalayas they’ll be decimated,” a top commander says. But then, “We saw the farmers hold the capital under siege, even the Shaheen Bagh protests.” Anti-CAA activist Sharjeel Imam’s speech where he called blocking the Siliguri Neck and cutting off Assam the “duty of us Muslims” especially because “Siliguri mein Muslim aksariyat hai” (Siliguri has Muslim majority) has left a scar.

 

It still doesn’t justify his long incarceration because you cannot jail young people indefinitely for stupidity and bringing disgrace on their IIT education. But, it has fuelled the BJP’s  polarisation proposition in West Bengal. 

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