CPM Is Trapped In Its Alliance With Congress In Bengal

There is a Tagore song that aptly describes the unpleasant state that the CPI(M) finds itself in regard to its ‘jote’(alliance) with the Congress in Bengal. The song--Ei Monihar Amai-- roughly translated, says: “this jewelled necklace doesn’t suit me, It hurts me when I wear it, It jangles and mocks me when I try to tear it off…”

The jote did the CPI (M) no good and a lot of bad in the recently held Assembly polls. It won only 26 seats, down from 40 seats in 2011, while its vote share fell to 23 percent from 30.08 percent. The Congress, however, marginally improved its performance over 2011 by winning 44 seats (42 in 2011) and garnering a vote share of 12.3 percent (up from 9.09 percent in 2011).

After dreaming of defeating the Trinamool, the crushing loss of the alliance, particularly the CPI (M), triggered a lot of disquiet among the Marxists. The CPI (M)-led Left Front lost its position as the principal opposition party to the Congress, leading many within the Front to believe that it was the Congress which gained from the alliance while the CPI (M) lost out.

But breaking the alliance is not an option for the CPI (M) since that would lay it bare to criticism that the electoral tie-up was an opportunistic one. There is also a commitment. Senior CPI (M) leaders like the party state secretary Surya Kanta Mishra, a potential chief minister candidate, had stated during the poll campaign that the alliance with the Congress would continue even after the elections.

Hence, it would be a terrible loss of face for the CPI(M) state leadership if it breaks the alliance as demand by the party cadre. The two-day state committee meeting of the party, which concluded in Kolkata on Sunday, wisely decided to continue with the alliance.

The CPI(M) central committee’s three-day meeting in New Delhi from 18 June will take a call on the continuation of alliance till the 2019 Lok Sabha polls.

Given the factors which drove the party state committee to decide on continuing its tie with the Congress, it is quite likely that the party’s central leadership will ultimately give its nod.

Many within the CPI(M) state committee have been vehemently opposed to the electoral alliance with the Congress from the very beginning.

“The jote was not a principled one and people refused to accept it. Many of us have been speaking out against the jote. It went against the political-tactical line adopted at our party’s 21st Congress at Vishakapatnam in April last year where it was decided that we would have no truck with the Congress. Some of our leaders raised false hopes that if we join hands with the Congress, we would win a majority of the seats in the Assembly. Our party cadres are totally demoralised now. If we have to regain lost ground in Bengal, we have to fight independently,” said a state committee member.

The alliance came into being based on the naive arithmetic that the combined vote share of the CPI(M) and the Congress in the 2011 polls has been more than that of the Trinamool and, hence, in the 2016 elections, if the two parties join hands, they can defeat the Trinamool. In 2011, the combined vote share of the two parties was 39.17percent while that of the Trinamool was 38.93percent. That such arithmetic was fundamentally flawed was lost on the CPI(M) and Congress leaders.

In 2011, the Trinamool and the Congress were electoral allies and ranged against the CPI(M)-led Left Front. In seats where the Congress contested in 2011, Trinamool supporters voted for the Congress. That couldn’t have happened this time.

“We have fought the Congress for decades. How could our supporters vote for a party that has always been portrayed by us as a reactionary, bourgeois and neo-liberal party? The alliance was unprincipled,” said a state committee member hailing from Murshidabad who was also a senior minister in successive Left Front governments.

That the two allies did not even bother to chart out a common electoral agenda and a common minimum programme, or even a joint manifesto, was not lost on the people of Bengal.

“We came together with a one-point agenda: to defeat Mamata Banerjee and stave off attacks against us by the Trinamool. How did we expect the people of Bengal to accept this one-point agenda? We did not offer any solid alternatives to the electorate. What did we promise them? A ‘Mamata-mukht’ Bengal. We did not even bother to tell the people what sort of government we would offer along with the Congress if we win, what policies that alliance government will follow and the programmes it will implement. People are not fools,” said an angry former minister of the Front.

A close analysis of the 2016 Assembly election results shows that while Left voters did vote for the Congress, albeit in small numbers, most of the Congress voters did not vote for the CPI (M) in seats where that party contested as an ally of the Congress. Not only that, Congress voters in those seats shifted their allegiance to the BJP.

And the BJP won three seats. It was in second position in nearly a hundred seats, and had 10.7 percent vote share. This was primarily at the cost of the CPI (M) and its Left partners like CPI (which saw its seats falling from 2 in 2011 to 1 in 2016), the Forward Bloc (from 11 in 2011 to nil in 2016) and the Revolutionary Socialist Party (RSP) (from 7 in 2011 to 3 in 2016).

Senior CPI (M) leaders realise this, but there is no way they can break their alliance with the Congress. Doing so would expose them to be the opportunists that they are. And continuing with the alliance is also becoming uncomfortable. It is, truly, a Catch 22 situation for the CPI (M) in Bengal today.