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T V R Shenoy

Why is the CPI-M desperate to pull down Vajpayee?

The historian of the future who plots the growth of the BJP will find it an easy task -- all he needs do is follow the route of India's great rivers!

In the South, the first trickles were seen in Karnataka before achieving full flow in Tamil Nadu along with its allies -- the path of the mighty Cauvery. In Central India, the major river is the Narmada, so the BJP began in Madhya Pradesh before streaming westward into Gujarat. And, of course, in the North the party has followed the Ganga -- beginning in Uttar Pradesh, then racing through Bihar. What is next?

West Bengal, of course, where the Communist masters of Writers's building in Calcutta have become lazy and arrogant over the past 20 years. They took it for granted that the voters would never fail them (aided where necessary by discreet rigging).

On the face of it, the results of the recent polls shouldn't disturb the Left Front. The Communists won 33 of the 42 seats in Bengal in 1996, and their tally is intact. Yet the Left Front is desperately worried.

The reason is the astounding success of the Trinamul Congress-BJP experiment. The Communists had calculated that Mamata Bannerjee's revolt would split the Congress votes. There was even talk of winning every seat. It came as a major shock when the Communists found they hadn't improved at all.

The seven seats won by the Trinamul Congress and the BJP's lone seat don't sound like much. But they indicate the Communist grip is faltering. Perhaps the most significant result was the BJP victory in Dumdum. Three of Jyoti Basu's ministers were elected from assembly seats falling in this Lok Sabha constituency. And the BJP won all the seven segments.

It gets worse. The new alliance polled over one third of all the votes in West Bengal. If you add their joint tally to the votes won by the Congress the total goes up to 48 per cent, slightly more than the Left Front share.

Bannerjee proved capable of taking over the old Congress voteshare wholesale. Given that there were only 55 days between the formation of the Trinamul Congress and the general election, the new alliance necessarily concentrated on Calcutta. What happens when they widen their focus on rural Bengal?

According to one estimate, the Trinamul Congress-BJP alliance already has the potential to win 100 assembly seats. That is well short of a majority in a House of 294. But the next assembly election is scheduled for 2001. Much can happen in three years.

Bannerjee is threatening to pull every skeleton from the CPI-M's cupboards -- from the public ledger account scam to misuse of funds in the Jawahar Rozgar Yojna. And with a BJP government in Delhi the investigating agencies won't be shackled any longer.

That isn't all that worries the CPI-M. The Big Brother of the Left Front wonders if Banerjee's successful revolt has inspired the RSP and the Front Bloc. The junior members of the Left Front were treated like widows in an eighteenth century family.

In other words, they were basically unpaid servants, trotted out only at poll-time. Decisions were effectively taken by the CPI-M alone. But with the Congress reduced to 'the CPI-M's B-team' (Bannerjee's telling phrase), the RSP and the Forward Bloc had nowhere to go. Now they do…

All this explains why the CPI-M is so desperate to pull down the Vajpayee ministry, even at the cost of installing Sonia Gandhi as prime minister. After all, the Congress and the CPI-M reached a cozy little arrangement long back (which, of course, is what led Bannerjee to rebellion).

Actually, the Left Front has cracked even without the RSP and the Forward Bloc making a move. The CPI-M's Kerala unit shudders at aligning with the Congress.

The difference between the CPI-M and Congress fronts in Kerala is incredibly narrow -- about 300,000 votes spread over 20 Lok Sabha constituencies. (The BJP polled a total of 1.1 million). So CPI-M MPs from Kerala are trying to sabotage efforts to install the Congress in Delhi. They are clearly scared of being seen as the 'B team of the Congress'!

Will the comrades from Kerala accept the Calcutta thesis? Well, only if the BJP suddenly leaps into prominence in Kerala too, an unlikely development if my theory of the BJP's riparian progress is correct. Unfortunately for Kerala, there are no major river systems linking it to the rest of the country!

T V R Shenoy