On Politics in West Bengal

West Bengal is witnessing Assembly elections in a novel perspective. The CPI-M-Congress alliance is the main contender of the TMC in the present elections. Rather than making a critique of their past deeds, the CPI-M has left no stone unturned in forging an alliance with the Congress for electoral gains. Other than ousting the Mamata Banerjee-led government, the CPI-M has not offered any substantial argument in support of the alliance. The most blatant thing they did was to give the pre-alliance call of making padayatra from Singur to Salboni in support of industrialisation in West Bengal. Even a man in the street knows the state violence associated with the indus-trialisation drive of the Left Front Government in the two above-mentioned regions. The agenda of industrialisation promised by the Left testifies that they still support the neo-liberal paradigm of industrialisation, which played a big role in the demise of the more than the three-decade-long rule of the Left Front Government in West Bengal.

The proponents of the Left-Congress alliance cite criminalisation of the public sphere and politicisation of the police as two major pillars of the paradigm of governance pursued by the TMC Government. To speak the truth, both the Congress and the CPI-M were the architects of this paradigm of governance in their respective years of rule in West Bengal.