The long quest

Rarely,surely,could so much have changed in five years. In May 2006,the Left Front,under Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee,was returned to power in West Bengal,with a sweeping majority: 235 of 294 Assembly seats,a gain of 60 or so. The opposition Trinamool had been reduced by half,to 30. It was difficult to see the Lefts decades-old stranglehold over Writers Building coming to an end any time soon. The reversal of Bengals deindustrialisation,it was assumed,would pick up,given the investor-friendly vibes that Bhattacharjee sent out; the opposition was in disarray,its driven leaders populism convincingly rejected for the third time in as many tries.

Yet such is our politics that nothing should be taken for granted,not even the politics of Bengal,predictable though that has been for 30 years now. Barely a year after returning to power,the Left Front government made its crucial mistake in Nandigram,and since then it has suffered one body-blow after another,leaving it with little political capital,and a leader who looks more and more as if he longs for a poetry-filled retirement. The states governance has suffered,with a government that behaves like it is merely filling up time till it is ousted; and the heavy-handed politics of intimidation and thuggery has spread its tentacles across parties. So loud is the clamouring for change that Bhattacharjee spends public meetings attacking the very idea,an odd descent for a party of supposed revolutionaries.

There are no predictable results in Indias politics,but if there were,then this would be the most predictable of them all. This year will likely close as the first since 1977 without a communist in the chief ministers office in Kolkata. The question is whether Mamata Bannerjee,if she fulfils her long quest for that office,will be able to

deliver what she has promised and,unsurprisingly for someone in opposition for so long that power would seem like a dream to her,she has promised so much to so many that following through on any of it will be problematic. Yet,after 30 years of increasingly strangling one-party rule,it is probable that Bengals population will think of any change as for the better.