The law should eventually be restored in Lalgarh. But the question it poses for Bengal is trickier. Your columnist would love to be wrong on this but Bengal is probably looking at a grim political future. There are three reasons for this. The (CPM) machine is not what it used to be. Maoists are not what they used to be. Mamata Banerjee may remain what she used to be.

It will be useful to quickly recount the last big clash between the CPM and Maoists in Bengal. It came right after the CPM’s first taste of power in Bengal, in 1967, as a partner in the United Front coalition. Maoists then were ex-CPM types who left the party accusing it of insufficient radicalism. The establishment of an unviable peasant “soviet” in north Bengal’s Naxalbari and the politics of murder (“annihilation of class enemies”) were the then Maoists’ signal contributions to political praxis.

The CPM vs Maoists battle then was rooted in the question of land redistribution. The CPM had the advantage of making a fresh start. In the two periods of UF rule totalling 19 months and in the first 15 years of Left Front’s rule beginning in 1977, 40 per cent of Bengal’s population received land titles.

The CPM also presided over almost a quarter century of agrarian growth, a boro rice-led jump in farm output that happened because of labour intensive cultivation in small plots. With panchayat representation giving socially-empowered middle peasantry political space and farm growth providing economic space, the CPM could ignore basic rural infrastructure as well as welfare provisioning to the very poor. It didn’t cost them too many votes.

... contd.