The party’s Bengal project began when a young Mamata may have been deciding whether to be a painter or a politician. A Nano-sized summary of how the CPM managed the fallout of the first major policy, the now mythical land redistribution, can be thus: Marxists were responsible for a fifth of all land redistributed in India; a huge project considering Bengal occupies less than a twentieth of India’s land area. An astounding 40 per cent-plus of Bengal’s rural population got either no-eviction rights (barga) or titles to redistributed land (patta).

The political management of this big social change was done via sharply increasing the representation of the beneficiaries in the panchayat system. It is not for nothing that the CPM takes panchayat elections in Bengal dead seriously and that dead seriousness often produces dead political opponents.

But, and this is where the CPM often has been a victim of bad analysis in the “bourgeois” press, the party was clever enough to realise politics alone won’t cut it. Economics was essential. Beginning in the late ’70s and up to the middle ’90s, agriculture in Bengal grew impressively, with the high-yield boro rice leading the pack and posting double-digit annual growth rates. This was a reddish green revolution — the output growth happened in small plots and with labour intensive techniques. This suited the CPM because land reform had reduced average plot sizes and labour intensive production kept a lot of people employed.

From here on, it is easy to repeat the conventional story. The Bengal CPM didn’t need industry because villages had become anytime vote machines and it was not until intelligent, realistic, nice Buddhababu came along that the CPM understood the need for industrial capital. Like any conventional story, bits of truth in this obscure the more fundamental truth. Yes, a variation of class warfare against “big capital” was presided over by the party. Which is why between the early ‘80s and the late ’90s, Bengal, along with UP and Bihar, saw negative growth in industrial employment in the organised sector. But this deindustrialisation was a big change as well and, as is seldom appreciated, it had to be managed. The CPM did it by encouraging unorganised, non-rural economic activities.

A fine analysis by Abhirup Sarkar (EPW, January 28, 2006) estimates that the share of unregistered manufacture in total manufacturing in Bengal jumped from 30 per cent in the ’80s to a staggering 60 per cent in the ’90s. Obviously, informal employment went up sharply as well. Sarkar estimates, by taking marginal workers (who work less than 183 days a year) as the yardstick, that informal employment grew by more than 15 per cent annually in the ’90s.

These were people working as small traders, street traders, cabbies, shopkeepers and all their assistants and, as Sarkar points out, all of them face huge job insecurity and frequently have to operate outside formal commercial laws and rules. This huge army of informally employed will respond gratefully to a protector. Enter the CPM. Informal employment increase isn’t confined to Bengal. But only in Bengal is there a political set-up ruthless enough to design a wide-ranging social contract and then maximise its benefits.

Therefore, the party had two big political economic paradigms, urban and rural. But one of the CPM’s paradigms, as paradigms often do, shifted. Beginning in the early-middle ’90s, Bengal started experiencing what always happens with agrarian transformation, of whatever kind: growth petering out. Slowing farm output made the CPM’s reddish green strategy look particularly inadequate — when stagnating production meets labour intensive production techniques and small-scale operations, small producers and labour are always big victims. The economic bit of the village political economy wasn’t working well because rural income, job creation and consumption started taking a hit.

This was another change, a hugely critical one, the CPM had to manage. Formal industrial employment was the party’s answer. A lot of rubbish has been said and written about how the CPM planned this wrong from the very start. More than 60 per cent of Bengal’s land is used for cultivation. Even massive industrialisation — let’s say a 100 projects the size of Nano’s — will occupy less than 1 per cent of agricultural land (Sarkar estimates this in another analysis; EPW, April 21, 2007). So the “huge loss of farm land” argument is a load of manure.

The use of land acquisition laws to acquire the Singur land discomfited even economic liberals. But negotiating with thousands of owners of very small plots is an understandable turn-off for any capitalist. Ideally, a government should help small landowners form a sellers’ group and referee the process of price discovery. That way the land acquisition law’s bias for underpricing can be corrected. Against this theory is the fact however that a substantial majority of landowners sold their land in Singur.

Therefore Singur wasn’t badly managed by the CPM from the start. So it’s Mamata — she’s the explanation. No, the explanation is that in deciding to encourage formal industrial capital, the CPM perforce opened the windows of a closed political economic world. Here was an outsider whose prosperity didn’t depend on the Bengal model, who earns his bread by paying attention to laws and rules, who demands protection, isn’t grateful for it.

Such an agent being deployed in the transformation of Bengal means that the CPM’s capacity to manage is severely reduced. If Ratan Tata could be told by the CPM to hang around, have a cup of tea, talk football and culture, while it sorts out Mamata, the experienced CPM-watcher would have bet on the party managing Singur, despite Nandigram. But Ratan Tata can’t be told to hang around. He has options.

But the CPM, given its way of managing Bengal, doesn’t. It is used to being the monopolist in negotiations. It is used to institutions, like panchayats, that will bend to its will. It is used to ignoring or bending laws and rules and used to dealing with agents who like that sort of thing. None of that helps when formal industrial capital gets upset.

That’s why the Bengal governor enjoys the CPM’s backing when he writes to Ratan Tata. The party knows it can’t manage alone on Singur. It also knows that the Bengal model is exhausted. And that if it keeps its invitation to formal industrial capital open, its days as sole manager are over and, by extension, so are its days of all-encompassing politics. Therefore, the most interesting question in Bengal is not whether Mamata will change. It is whether the CPM can change.

saubhik.chakrabarti@expressindia.com