For the West Bengal government, representation is defined in party terms. When Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee, speaking as CM from Writers’ Building, justified the bloody actions of CPM cadres, said that they were only “paying them back in their own coin”, he may not have immediately recalled how another chief minister had explained away the widespread murder and mayhem that followed Godhra in a startingly similar fashion. Clearly, chief ministers who are less certain of power, more dependent on cultivating the oppositional space, more fearful of being swept out of their chairs, would not employ the language of Us versus The Other in this fashion. It is the impunity that comes from assured and uninterrupted power that prompts such a stance.

An extensive patronage network and cadre base built up over the years, is the third commonality to note. If the Sangh Parivar provided the muscle and support base for the BJP in Gujarat, and ensured sufficient numbers of hewers of wood and throwers of gas cylinders to create mayhem in Gujarat in 2002, the CPM has over 30 years of power in Bengal created a formidable cadre that has become increasingly lumpenised, criminalised, armed and parasitical on the state. They have come to exercise absolute control over every aspect of people’s lives at the grassroots in West Bengal today.

Finally, there is the fourth similiarity: a clear disdain for institutions and institutional correctives. The Modi government fed the National Human Rights Commission a tissue of falsehoods when it came inquiring into the Gujarat pogrom. The ‘official version’ did not even have a mention of the role played by the VHP and Bajrang Dal. The state government also attacked the Election Commissioner and the man who headed it, when it sought to update post-pogrom electoral rolls and raised diversionary arguments before a Supreme Court concerned about the Gujarat events. Today, the CPM is displaying a similar hypersensitivity to the adverse comment being made on its conduct of the Nandigram events, whether it was from the governor, the Calcutta High Court or, indeed, the NHRC.

... contd.