Wednesday, June 03, 2009

Mandate 2009: Part 3: The Bengal Voter – Caught between a Rock and a very hard place

The current elections threw up a very interesting dilemma for the Bengal voter. Used to as they were, to docilely voting for the ruling Left combine (chup chap lale chaap), since:

a) any other option simply did not exist and,

b) (more importantly) the Left had turned rigging into a both a science and an art with a fine tuned machinery that worked flawlessly to either vote for you or inflate the voter rolls like nobody’s business.

This time around voters in Bengal truly stood at the end of the precipice. No matter which way they voted they had inadvertently booked a one-way ticket downwards. On one hand they had to make sense of the maverick Mamata Banerjee, (Maverick M from hereon) who single-handedly heaved the mighty TATA group from the Bay of Bengal to the Arabian Sea and to my mind pushed the lately awaken industrial drive in Bengal literally to the seas and on the other put up with the arrogance and sheer apathy of the ruling combine, who are so lost in their self-woven cocoon of invincibility that they are hurtling down to be modern day Neros; to burnt down along with Rome.

The rural populace had their own arithmetic to figure out. The Left, which had ridden to power based on this rice and potato growing mass, giving land to the landless etc while shutting down all the industries was suddenly faced with very vocal and strong dissent when they went to buy land for the industrial drive carrying fat purses in tow. The wheel had turned a full circle. Why should the poor and marginal farmer, who had for years being fed on the rhetoric that capitalism and industry were the biggest evil to mankind, suddenly wake-up one fine morning to find you exposing the goodness of industry and be ready to sell his sweat-soaked land to the devil? Maverick ‘M’ maybe mad for all he cared but to her undying credit she did not promote the capitalistic devil to be the newly arisen Leftist God.

The urban voters were in real quandary. With the intellectuals and their mass of followers having already decided to throw in their lot with Maverick ‘M’, the average citizen knew very well that voting for Maverick ‘M’ would push the industrialisation drive down the tube, whereas not voting for the Left (thereby ensuring their defeat) would mean that a badly mauled Left would be on their back foot and would shelve all work on the industrialisation process.

Voters in Bengal sorely missed the ‘No Vote’ button. Had their been one, I dare say the results would have been very difficult what with our high voting percentage (80%) and love of participating in any political process.

We await to see if any fight is left in the Left tiger or the dramatic transformation of Maverick ‘M’ into a development and performance driven leader of the masses. Both these guys have two years to deliver the goods and the portents don’t seem good for the Left as of now.