Red flag fading

In pursuance of this policy, on Thursday he exhorted Left Front workers to adopt a “blood for blood” approach in their violent tussles in Midnapore, mostly with Trinamool Congress supporters. “Retaliate with all your might whenever and wherever you are attacked,” he boomed to thunderous applause from the mammoth gathering in Calcutta. Surely, the West Bengal chief minister did not mean to give official sanction to workers to take the law into their own hands and go about beheading opponents. Surely, he does not mean to be so emphatic in his castigation of the police force, whose performance reflects on the candidature of his heir apparent, state home minister Buddhadev Bhattacharyya. Surely, all Jyoti Basu is hoping to convey to his wide, attentive audience across the country is that he has given them one more reason to rid him of the burdens of the chief ministerial office and one less reason to extend once again his periodically announced dates for intended retirement.

Seriously, Basu’s latest tirade is more than a sad and depressing turn in his record innings as chief minister of West Bengal and his long years as the uncontested leader of the Communist movement in India. It is symptomatic of the crisis within the once formidable Left Front. That great coalition lost its economic raison d’etre long ago when its economic prescriptions were rendered altogether out of sync with the changing times; and its political confusion has become increasingly evident in the post-United Front years. And now the Left Front is struggling to prevent division in its ranks, with men-with-a-mass-base like Subhas Chakraborty threatening to walk off with a big chunk of the CPI(M). Add to this perceptible signs of public dissatisfaction, the seemingly imminent split in the Congress, the challenge posed by Mamata Banerjee’s Mahajot… and the Left Front’s West Bengal bastion appears impregnable no longer.