After the vote

As West Bengal votes in its sixth and last phase today,it is time to look at the agenda for the next government in Kolkata. There has never been any doubt about the momentousness of this election. Comparisons are made to the 1977 wave which swept away the Emergency-tainted Congress in most parts of the country and which brought the Left to power in Bengal. Who,in that beginning,had seen what has of late been variously foretold as the end of the Left Front government,stretched out over 34 long years? We will not know before Friday,May 13,whether Mamata Banerjee will indeed ride triumphantly into Writers Building or Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee hold on,amazed and confused. Ever since his well-intentioned but badly managed programme to fast-track industrialisation came unstuck in Singur and Nandigram so soon after his 2006 mandate,Bhattacharjees government has governed Bengal practically as a lameduck. The task after May 13 will be as much to bring direction and momentum to the administration as to retrieve a working civility between government and opposition.

These polls have made a narrative of managerial triumph. The Election Commission,so far,has ensured Bengals first violence-free elections in decades. The ECs triumph,however,is the lesson and task left behind for the next government. As recently as the 2009 Lok Sabha polls,it had been painful to recount and analyse election-day stories from the state,given the heartless brutality of cadre battles and innocents killed in crossfire. After years of such blood-drenched human stories,this time,a dam seemed to burst causing 82.2 per cent turnout even in the penultimate phase in some of the more troubled areas.

The task of the new executive and the opposition will be to rebuild Bengals shredded body politic,reconstructing its political culture,which has been utterly shorn of civility in the last few years. Both the CPM and Trinamool must comprehend the responsibilities of mainstream parties in a democratic framework. Past examples of neither the Trinamool,which had boycotted this government and resorted to the default option of non-cooperation,nor those of the Left in its street agitating bus-and-tram-burning days,will do ever again. That was the spiral that took Bengal up in smoke. The fires must be doused and full attention given to socio-economic reconstruction of a near-bankrupt state. It is an unenviable job,and whoever comes to power would do well to first read Bertolt Brechts poem Parade of the Old New that shows how the old and the new are intertwined inseparably. The new must beware the ghosts of its own old.