OPED | Monday, November 2, 2009 | Email | Print | 
No time for real issues
Shikha Mukerjee
CPM, Trinamool busy abusing each other
If instead of minding their rival’s business political parties in West Bengal minded their own, there would be less deliberately crafted chaos and greater accountability. The people of West Bengal would not be held to ransom by competing political parties if each side attached some priority to minding their own business and fighting for votes.
Nothing illustrates this better than the handling of the train hijack at Banstala close to Jhargram in the Maoist-infested forests of Jangal Mahal in West Midnapore. There was so much that was said that by the end of the incident, the Union Railway Ministry failed to name the organisation that claimed credit for the successful hijack, the Peoples Committee Against Police Atrocities. Since Union Home Minister P Chidambaram and Union Home Secretary GK Pillai had also charged the Maoists with hijacking the train and the Maoists themselves had taken credit, not naming them was a bizarre lapse.
Since the political rivals — the Communist Party of India (Marxist) and the Trinamool Congress — are happier engaged in competitive verbal fireworks and consequently suffer from an attention deficit syndrome, neither side is pinned down and held to account. Sometimes, as happened with the hijack drama, it seems that the CPI(M)’s tactics are designed to divert attention and so rescue the Trinamool Congress, rather than push its rival harder up against the wall. In other words, the CPI(M) seems unprepared to go in for the kill as it were and prefers to perform complicated muletas rather than stick the knife in.
Just as the Trinamool Congress is prepared to divert attention from the CPI(M)’s frequently dismal governance by raising the pitch of its accusations to a level where there is only noise and no substance. If either side had studied the classic Death in the Afternoon they would have known that a goaded bull allowed to survive to fight another day is wilier and dangerous or too wounded to go back into the bullring.
If exhausting the competition is what the political class in West Bengal imagine is tactics then there should be no case for complaining about flawed delivery of governance, rent seeking behaviour and indifference to the quality of governance when it does get delivered. Since none of the parliamentary political parties is willing to effectively hold the other to account, it does create the conditions for lawless politics and the politics of annihilation to take over.
If the Union Railway Ministry is asked why it failed to name the perpetrators of the hijack it ducks answering. If the Trinamool Congress is asked why the Railways failed to name the perpetrators it accuses the CPI(M) of conspiracy. The Trinamool Congress is not embarrassed that its leader Mamata Banerjee was described as a “friend” in the scrawled messages that decorated the hijacked Bhubaneswar-New Delhi Rajdhani. The CPI(M) is not fazed that its supporters obstructed another Rajdhani train two days later and that it does not have the political courage to ban the Maoists, call its Left Front partners to book for parleying in secret with the Maoists, namely Kishenji alias Koteswar Rao.
Politics in West Bengal has become a crude version of what was once upon a time a sophisticated rivalry between contradictory ideological positions and practices. According to Ms Banerjee, she is more truly Left or Marxist because she is pro-poor; her slogan “Maa, mati, manush” being the only evidence till now that she is indeed pro-poor. The CPI(M), according to her, are for big business and anti-people, willing to displace propertied and poor sic farmers, skim the cream off all Government schemes and use it to build ostentatious residences.
If the CPI(M), even before its loudly proclaimed rectification, that is housecleaning exercise, had denied that it was contaminated, by opportunists who routinely abused political as well as administrative power then, it would have had greater political significance. By repeating what the CPI(M) has always acknowledged Ms Banerjee has in effect helped her rivals defend their misdeeds. By waging war against Chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee for being pro-capitalist, Ms Banerjee has successfully driven out investors and restored the CPI(M) to its original position, at least in its rhetoric.
Such complicity suggests that the Trinamool Congress as much as the CPI(M) are not concerned about improving the quality of life through better governance and responsible politics for the people of West Bengal. Since the two sides, aided and abetted by the Congress are busier minding the other sides business, change, momentum, dynamism, are words evacuated, because politics has rendered them so.
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