WEST BENGAL’S latest contribution to Left-wing political praxis — a mainstream Left government agreeing to get blackmailed by an extreme Left violent movement — has rightly raised questions about governability. Needless to add here that it is unlikely Maoist leaders are quaking in their sandals after Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee’s rediscovery of the state’s basic duties.

But we have to look beyond Bhattacharjee. He is the man in charge at a time Bengal’s prime political experiment is going horribly wrong. A large section of Bengal’s political/ intellectual/ cultural elite gloried in the exceptionalism that the experiment was supposed to have engendered. Bengal was different. Yes it was. But just how difficultly different, from the point of view of sane political economy, is becoming apparent only now. This, as it were, is the proper historical materialist context in which to understand the surrender of people who put up Stalin’s photograph to people who put up Mao’s.

The political experiment was that the CPM in Bengal could construct a viable progressive model that would both take away the attractions of radical violent communism and be an exception to mainstream Indian politics.

The CPM tried to answer radical, violent communists, whose original leadership was in the CPM, through land reform. It sought to create a progressive exception to mainstream Indian politics by creating a political base on the back of labour intensive/ small plot cultivation and funneling the political support through the reinvigorated panchayat system. Both parts of the experiment appeared to be politically successful initially. But both suffered from a fatal political flaw: the assumption that cold-blooded hypocrisy will never be called to account. What is the big deal about hypocrisy in politics, it is legitimate to ask. The big deal is the CPM’s kind of hypocrisy. Here’s what makes it special.

... contd.