Paranoiac party

The bad news has been steadily filtering in for the ruling Left Front in Bengal and if the past week is an indication, the comrades may have decided to shoot the messenger. Over the past few months, the reigning Left Front has suffered many a political setback. First it was the resounding defeat in the crucial Panskura by-poll, and then its failure to retain control of the prestigious Calcutta corporation. These have been among the many unmistakable signals in recent times that the people of Bengal are tiring of the regime that has ruled the state for over two decades. Confronted with the spectre of a slipping fief, and stalked by a fast advancing contender, the CPM-led government is now reacting in the manner that insecure and paranoid regimes have been known to do in similarly unenviable predicaments. Of late, CPM goons, led by the party leaders, have been targeting journalists. The attack on mediapersons interviewing disgruntled staff of the Information and Cultural Affairs Department by state governmentemployees and irate CPM activists in the premises of the Writer8217;s Building, the assault by another band of rampaging party activists on a correspondent of this paper attempting to enter a village close to Chamkaitala where Mamata Banerjee had called a meeting, and the latest incident of violence against a television reporter covering the Uttarpara municipal polls in the Hooghly district of West Bengal are part of the same pattern. The CPM, it seems, is jittery that it may not come back to power in West Bengal in next year8217;s assembly polls.

Actually, the tone and tenor of the unfolding politics in West Bengal evokes a compelling sense of deja vu. The allegations by the party apparatchik of quot;conspiracy by the mediaquot; to quot;malign the image of the CPM-led Left Front government in Bengalquot; bear a familiar resonance. They bring back memories of the 1960s when the CPM routinely invoked the spectre of an anti-Left conspiracy to keep its flock together and opposition at bay. At that time, the enemy was the US, more specifically the ubiquitous CIA. Today8217;s anti-media, anti-Mamata, and anti-Centre rhetoric is basically an incarnation, therefore, of an older syndrome. But even as it has added newer demons to its list, the doughty Marxist party cannot be accused of forsaking its old bugbear. The recent public tirade by the comrades against the US Consul General in Calcutta for sending consulate officials to violence-hit Nanoor has loudly proclaimed that the US still remains high on the list of its intimate enemies.

As the CPM leadership rails against conspiracies, national and international, to dislodge the Left Front government, and as its cadres lock horns now with the media and then with workers of arch rival Trinamool Congress on the field, it is time someone within the party stood up and pointed out that it won8217;t work. The party is completely missing the point. Not all of its conspiracy theories can restore the CPM to its former preeminence. The only way in which it can win back its lost constituency is by addressing itself anew to the concerns of the electorate.