India's Communist party faces defeat in its West Bengal heartland
The opposition Trinamool Congress smells blood as corruption and the rise of violent Maoism take their toll on the CPIM
Communist supporters in some areas of Kolkata still remain loyal. Photograph: Deshakalyan Chowdhury/AFP
The walls are covered with freshly painted graffiti: hammers and sickles in a range of bright colours. The security precautions are in place: no candidates' bodyguards are allowed in polling booths and 17,000 policemen are deployed on the traffic-choked, steaming, potholed streets. The adult population of Calcutta, now known as Kolkata, is going to the polls.
So, too, are the inhabitants of 80 other towns and cities across India's dilapidated eastern state of West Bengal. Today's municipal elections are unlike any for decades: the Communists, who have held West Bengal's main towns almost without a break since the 1970s, are facing disaster. Kolkata, the capital of the state and the only major Indian metropolis currently held by the party, may be lost. This time defeat is likely to be definitive and could signal the beginning of the end for the Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPIM), which is among the biggest and oldest communist parties in the world.
Opposition politicians in the city of 15 million are confident of victory. "No doubt, no sweat, we will win in Calcutta by a thumping majority," claimed Partha Chatterjee, a leader of the All India Trinamool ("grassroots") Congress party (TMC), the main opposition locally. "We have support from the poor, the students, the middle class. People are oppressed, repressed. They have had enough. They want change."
Chatterjee's claim is not merely bombastic. Earlier this year, the Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm said that the collapse of the Communists in West Bengal was one of the developments that had surprised him most in recent years. The comment made front page headlines locally and forced hasty rebuttals from the CPIM national leadership in Delhi.
"There is a sense of desperation setting in," said Ashis Biswas, Kolkata-based author of a forthcoming history of West Bengal's left. "They know they are going to lose but want to go down fighting. But time is running out."
Four factors help explain the fate of the communists: the corruption and incompetence embedded over their long and mainly unchallenged rule; a largely unreconstructed ideological language that puts off wealthier and more aspirational younger Indian voters; the economic decline of West Bengal relative to other, more dynamic, states; and the rise of a genuine opposition led by the maverick populist Mamata Banerjee, the leader and founder of the TMC and current national railways minister, who has cleverly exploited the weakness of the CPIM to position herself for power.
"West Bengal had become a one-party state almost by default," said Biswas. "Now that monopoly is being challenged seriously for the first time. Banerjee knows exactly which buttons to press and where she can hurt the communists." It is in small towns such as Arambagh in Hooghly district – a 50-mile, three-hour drive on potholed roads choked by trucks, buses, cattle and carts from the city – that the left is hurting most. Once the bedrock of Communist support, inhabitants of such towns have grown disillusioned by years of broken promises of development and controversial and often brutal bids to bring in large-scale industrial investment.
Around Arambagh, the CPIM lost two local seats in last year's national parliamentary election and only just held on to a third. At the CPIM office in the town, Khandakar Jahangir, secretary of the CPIM's district general committee, said that if the election went badly it would be the fault of "bourgeois capitalist newspapers" who had spread damaging rumours aimed at undermining "class enemies".
"Our party is in a good state," he told the Observer. "The opposition is creating a reign of terror. Foreign funds from America are being spent to undermine us."
Across town, at the Arambagh branch of the TMC headquarters, workers claimed that the CPIM had launched a campaign of vote-rigging and intimidation. Swapan Nandy, the head of the local party, said the CPIM had got used to being the only party in Arambagh and so had reacted badly to the new challenge posed by the opposition. "Most of our voters are landless agricultural labourers. We are a rightwing party but we support the poor. The CPIM don't like that," Nandy, a railway worker, explained.
Nationally, the CPIM still dominates the governments of the southern state of Kerala, known for its high levels of development and literacy, the small north-east state of Tripura, and Kolkata. It also has a small but, in a world of interminably complex coalition politics, powerful, group of parliamentarians in Delhi. But West Bengal is by far its most significant power base and to lose its capital would be a serious blow, auguring ill for the full state elections scheduled for next year. Disunity in the opposition ranks brings hope, however, and some long-held fiefdoms remain loyal. In one neighbourhood of the vast Calcutta working-class district of Jadavpur, the CPIM can still do little wrong.
"I have never thought about changing my allegiance," said 34-year-old Seeka Mundal, who was born a year before the CPIM led an alliance of leftwing parties to definitively take power in West Bengal. "The roads are better now. We have proper houses. There is water and electricity. Our family are staunch Communist supporters."
Rajaha Mahato, who lives in the newly built tenement beside the water pump where Mundal filled brimming buckets of washing, agreed. So did Sanjit Dutt on his way to open the neighbourhood teashop. "We always have been CPIM voters and always will be," he said.
Nonetheless, analysts see anarchic times ahead. "For more than 30 years, the party has been the state and when, after decades, monolithic power collapses, there is always a period of violence and chaos," said Sumit Chowdhury, a film-maker and social activist.
One factor in the confused maelstrom of local politics is the resurgence of radical Maoist-led violence in West Bengal. On Friday, a train was derailed by extremist rebels just 100 miles from Kolkata, killing more than 80 people. Communist leaders immediately condemned the attack but are painfully aware that, though the CPIM claims a membership approaching one million, Maoist revolutionary ideology is increasingly attracting followers in Indian universities and among the intelligentsia.
In the gloomy Alimuddin Street headquarters of West Bengal's Communists, Biman Bose, the secretary of the local party and a member of its national politbureau, said the struggle would go on.
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