CPI (Management)

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.

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.

... contd.