A Distant Election

The front page of the May 14, 2011 issue of anandabazar patrika that you see above announces the outcome of the recent elections in the Indian state of West Bengal. (Although I wasn't born there, I spent the first two decades of my life in Kolkata, the capital city of West Bengal, and continue to consider it my hometown.) In this election, the 34-year rule of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) -- and its considerably smaller coalition partners, including the Communist Party of India, from which the CPI(M) split in 1964 -- came to an ignominious end. Consequently, this election could, in the fullness of time, come to be regarded as a milestone in the history of West Bengal. (The election didn't go unnoticed in the U.S. press: see reports in The New York Times and in The Washington Post.)

Of the 294 seats in the West Bengal legislature, the CPI(M) won a mere 40 seats. By contrast, the Trinamul Congress -- the big winner -- won 184 seats.

In other words, dear reader, this was a blowout. This was like the hydrogen gas explosion that blew the roof off the Fukushima nuclear power plant. No, this was like the explosion that sank BP's Deepwater Horizon oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico. No no, what am I saying! This was like the Mount St. Helens eruption of 1980. No, silly me, that wasn't it either. This was like the Krakatoa eruption of 1883!

The communists came to power in West Bengal way back in 1977, when I was a teenager, and they have been in power ever since. I never understood how the CPI(M) kept winning election after election for more than three decades. Granted, they began well. They implemented important land reforms that distributed valuable land to destitute and landless agricultural workers. But that was an easy one-off achievement. If you have the electoral numbers to push your program through it doesn't take much creativity to grab land from Peter and give it to Paul. Land reform was the low-hanging fruit. After that fruit got plucked, things got tougher. Once you've done your Peter-to-Paul redistribution, for your next act you'll have to get a lot more creative. And if your creative idea for economic reform requires short-term pain for long-term gain, some clever corraling of political support will be needed. The communists turned out to be quite incapable of any of this. They slowly but surely ran the economy of West Bangal into the ground, while the rest of India raced ahead.

Towards the end they seemed to have seen the light. They began a desperate effort to lure private enterprise into West Bengal. But, barring some successes in the information technology sector, it was too little, too late.

Another factor behind the communists' long tenure in power in West Bengal was the general cluelessness of the opposition parties. These parties could not convince the electorate that they had good ideas or that the ideas that the communists had were bad ones. They did not have the muscle power to fight the communist cadres in the streets. They did not even have the guile to steal the communists clothes and convince the Bengali voter that they (the opposition parties) had the things that the Bengali people liked about the communists.

All that changed with the arrival of Ms. Mamata Banerjee -- that's her in the picture above -- and Trinamul Congress, the party that she almost single-handedly founded. Mamata is a highly imperfect political leader and it is completely unclear what she will do for West Bengal. But the people of West Bengal had grown sick and tired of the CPI(M) after 34 years of sub-par economic performance and constant political turmoil. And, I suspect that there is something about Mamata's gumption, her never-say-die spirit (that was so clearly in evidence in all her epic fights with the communists), and her emotional and excessively volatile demeanor that may have appealed to something deep in the psyche of the Bengali electorate. My late father, for example, was a big fan.

By the way, West Bengal -- along with two other Indian states, Kerala and Tripura -- can claim the very rare (and dubious?) distinction of having democratically elected communist governments. San Marino, an independent republic that is a really, really tiny landlocked enclave within Italy, is, as far as I know, the only example outside India. According to the Wikipedia entry on San Marino, "San Marino had the world's first democratically elected communist government, which held office between 1945 and 1957 and again between 2006 and 2008". However, another Wikipedia entry -- this one on E.M.S. Namboodiripad, a legendary Indian communist leader -- says this: "In 1957, EMS led the Communists to victory in the first election for the [Kerala] state government, making him the first communist leader anywhere to head a popularly elected government". Go figure!