Opinion Timing the apology

Bhattacharjee has been out on the street,unlike in the past,to send a message that his government means business,but will he be able to convince the electorate this time? He turns up in his constituency,Jadavpur,numerous times; in the last assembly elections in 2006 he had held only a handful of meetings there. He talks to the people,accepts coconut water from them,apologises for the Left’s “lapses” and seeks their blessings. Matching Mamata Banerjee’s gruelling padayatras — when not on election duty,the Trinamool chief is said to clock up a decent mileage on the treadmill everyday — the chief minister has also set himself a punishing schedule in his constituency,which goes to the polls on April 27.

In fact,he held a press conference in March to explain the Left’s gameplan,soon after Banerjee released a refreshing Trinamool manifesto. Usually,he doesn’t hold press conferences and even at events he chairs,he hardly ever answers questions posed to him. In fact,just last June,after the Left’s Kolkata civic poll defeat,he refused to take any questions on the polls,storming out of the state secretariat in a huff. Prior to that in June 2009,after the cyclonic storm Aila which severely affected South 24 Parganas and the Sunderbans,the chief minister lost his cool at least twice.

Now,however,Bhattacharjee appears more amiable in his interactions,with all his barbs targeted at Banerjee. In January,he addressed Singur farmers for the first time since the Tatas left in 2008. Even at the peak of the Singur agitation,with Banerjee camping right outside the project site,Bhattacharjee stayed away. In the initial days of the Singur agitation,he had refused to take the Trinamool seriously,saying they had too few seats to matter. In 2006,Bhattacharjee could perhaps afford to be complacent. The Trinamool Congress had barely 30-odd seats in the 294-seat assembly,but the 2008 panchayat polls and the 2009 general elections changed all that.

The electoral decline of the Left started with the 2008 panchayat polls which came on the back of the Singur and Nandigram agitations. It not only fared badly in the Lok Sabha elections,but also lost the Kolkata municipal polls and nine out of ten bypolls held last year. For Bhattacharjee,this election is crucial because in the parliamentary elections the CPM’s lead in the Jadavpur assembly segment was merely 19,000. This,when Bhattacharjee had won the 2006 elections,defeating the

Trinamool’s Dipak Ghosh,a retired IAS officer,by over 50,000 votes. In the civic polls too,the CPM lagged behind the Trinamool in six of 10 wards.

An intellectual — he is poet Sukanta’s nephew and likes his Kafka and Pamuk — Bhattacharjee is not known to suffer fools,and his Left Front partners complain that he is not particularly communicative. Indeed,he failed to carry along even the LF in his industrialisation drive,though that was the right thing to do. At a Brigade Ground rally this February,which the Trinamool dubbed the Left’s “farewell speech”,Bhattacharjee steered clear of controversial issues,and focused on women,Muslims,teachers and students. “We want factories,but not at the cost of agitation,” he told the rally. This was a far cry from his 2006 slogan — krishi amader bhitti,shilpo amader bhobisyot (our base is agriculture,industry our future). In the manifesto too,the CPM has admitted “lapses” in its rectification drive,and at various public meetings Bhattacharjee has apologised on behalf of “haughty” party leaders.

Bengal isn’t used to its leaders apologising for anything — lack of infrastructure,poor healthcare,growing unemployment,forced land acquisition. But now that one of them is doing so,could it be a case of too little too late?

The writer is a senior editor,‘The Financial Express’