The LF’s vote share has shrunk to between 5 and 7 per cent, with the seat tally dropping to 2 in the 2014 Lok Sabha polls, and further plummeting to zero in the 2019 and 2024 general elections and the 2021 Assembly contest.
Notwithstanding the Left Front’s seven years of fruitless struggle to bag Lok Sabha or Assembly seats from its one-time red citadel, West Bengal, coalition spearhead CPI-M feels the party has been rejuvenated, and the upcoming Vidhan Sabha elections could kickstart a Left resurgence.
“For a resurgent Bengal, a rejuvenated Left is necessary. We are working through the playbook,” Communist Party of India-Marxist state Secretary Mohammad Salim told UNI in an interview.
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In the din and bustle of the fiercely fought election this time, hardly any political pundit or psephologist has put his (or her) bet on the Left Front, which occupied West Bengal’s seat of power for a record 34-year stretch till being voted out in 2011 by a Trinamool Congress-led tsunami.
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Since then, the combine has been on a free fall, as it ceded the principal opposition space to the BJP.
The LF’s vote share has shrunk to between 5 and 7 per cent, with the seat tally dropping to 2 in the 2014 Lok Sabha polls, and further plummeting to zero in the 2019 and 2024 general elections and the 2021 Assembly contest.
It fared comparatively better in the 2016 Assembly election, when the LF-Congress combine finished runner-up to the TMC by picking up 77 seats (Congress 44, LF 32, plus one independent supported by the alliance).
The LF secured 19.5 per cent of the popular mandate. While not hazarding any guess on the number of seats, the LF could win in the two-phase Bengal polls later this month, the 68-year-old articulate Marxist leader exuded confidence of a turnaround in the Left’s fortune, basing his optimism on several factors, he said, “which have given hope”.
The first and foremost, said Salim, was the combine achieving of a broader Left unity.
“Now it is a resurgent Left, more united. Even left parties and groups, which have not been constituents of the Left Front traditionally, have combined,” said Salim, sitting in his small chamber at Muzaffar Ahmed Bhavan, the state CPI-M headquarters.
To buttress his point, he mentioned the Communist Party of India (Marxist Leninist) Liberation, which is taking part in the state Assembly election as an associate of the Left Front for the first time after the split in the Communist movement in the 1960s.
Salim, a member of the party’s top policy making body – the Politbureau – also highlighted the Left’s “success” in playing a pivotal role in the widespread protests against the gruesome rape-murder of a young post-graduate trainee doctor in the state-run R G Kar Hospital here in 2024, besides frequently taking up day-to-day bread and butter issues and organising the working classes and the unemployed youth.
“Since the last Panchayat election in 2023, Bengal has witnessed an unprecedented kind of violence and loot. The Left movement has gained momentum in this period.
“The BJP was nowhere seen taking up any issues related to the people of Bengal, whose agriculture, industry, commerce, business, health, education, and civic amenities are in deplorable condition,” he said.
Asked whether his assessment of the political situation was realistic given the bipolar politics, where the TMC and the BJP have emerged as the main contestants, Salim referred to the national scenario decades back.
“Even in this country in the 1990s, a two-party system was sought to be established. But now it has fallen flat. How come in Bengal this can continue any longer!” Responding to a query on the perceived religious polarisation in the state, he said: “While the BJP and TMC are relying on theatrical appearances, hate campaigns, divisive politics, and befooling people with temple-mosque kind of politics, we are making people aware of these tricks repeatedly played on them by the two parties.”
He complained that religious festivals were also being used to further engineer communal violence or reinforce the divisive politics. “But people of Bengal are not going to buy it again. They have started resisting,” Salim added.
Time and again during the interview, Salim harped on the Left’s pet theme of a BJP-Trinamool nexus.
He referred to the RSS in the past, describing Trinamool chief Mamata Banerjee as “Ma Durga”, and the repeated “migration and remigration” of leaders between the BJP and the Trinamool.
“We have also seen during the RG Kar protests, as also all other such incidents, when, even though millions of people cried for justice, justice was not delivered because of the collusion between the TMC and the BJP, and the role played by the agencies run by Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government. Now people can see through how both these apparatus work at the behest of Nagpur (RSS headquarters).”
Besides roping in the CPI (ML) Liberation, the LF has also entered into seat adjustments with the Indian Secular Front, but efforts to cobble up an alliance with the Congress came a cropper.
Calling it “unfortunate”, Salim blamed the All India Congress Committee and the party’s state leadership. “People of Bengal and even the supporters of Congress and its lower-level activists wanted to ally with us to take both the BJP and the TMC head-on.
But it is the AICC or PCC leadership, which did not respond to the cry raised by the Congress supporters and activists from below.” But he claimed that in many areas of the state, the lower-level Congress leaders and activists, supporters and voters, would “stick to the path of anti-BJP and anti-TMC politics.”
“They will choose their own path to ensure the defeat of the TMC and the BJP in their respective constituencies. A people’s alliance is being formed,” he added.
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