On 7 January, the first Sunday of the new year, the Democratic Youth Federation of India (DYFI), the youth wing of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) or the CPI(M), held a massive "Insaaf" rally in the Brigade Parade ground of Kolkata, the ground which witnessed many historic political events of the state post-independence. This rally by DYFI in the ground — considered the largest venue in the state — was held after 16 years.
Last time, when it held the rally in 2008, the CPM was the ruling party of the state but the ground scenario has changed after 16 years. Currently, the Left party is reduced to zero in the state, its erstwhile stronghold. Despite this, the DYFI rally turned out to be a successful one and through this rally, the CPM sounded the poll bugle for the Lok Sabha polls.
Beleaguered Left Gets a New Face in the Form of Minakshi Mukherjee
The ruling Trinamool Congress and the main Opposition, the Bharatiya Janata Party, dismissed the Brigade rally of DYFI as “politically insignificant”. Both parties cited the recent history of the Left being able to hold successful Brigade rallies but failing to transfer this success into electoral success. Obviously, this is a valid criticism but having said this, it can’t be denied that this rally was different.
Since the ouster of the CPM-led Left Front from power in the 2011 state assembly elections, the Left has been unable to bring a face acceptable to the masses. After the defeat, the former chief minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee — still popular among the masses and currently bedridden — started withdrawing from public politics as a result of his fragile health. If the Left failed to challenge chief minister and TMC supremo Mamata Banerjee, one of the major reasons was that it didn’t have a credible face to challenge her, although it had unsuccessfully tried to project former state minister and leader of the Opposition Surja Kanta Mishra, who also held the position of the state secretary of the state’s CPM unit.
At a time when the leader of the Opposition and TMC-turned-BJP leader Suvendu Adhikari is trying to become the main challenger against Mamata-led TMC, the Left, after a decade, has found a leader in the form of a young woman, Minakshi Mukherjee, who is 39 years old and currently is the state DYFI secretary.
She was the main face of the DYFI rally, which was the culmination of a 50-day-long Insaaf March led by the young Turks of the Left. This long march, which unfortunately didn’t get much attention from Bengal’s mainstream media, started from Cooch Behar of North Bengal and ended in Kolkata covering 22 districts by raising issues related to livelihood and striking a chord with the common people of the state.
Minakshi, who led the 2,900 km long yatra from the forefront, became the face of the cadres and supporters of the Left. Her popularity — as witnessed again through the rally — has given hope to the beleaguered Left, even prompting veteran CPM leader and the Left Front chairman Biman Bose to call her the “captain”. This is quite unusual in an ideology-centric party like CPM where individualism isn’t given much importance. However, in the changing times, it seems the CPM has softened its rigidity on individualism and is encouraging young leaders like Minakshi.
The Rally Tries to Address the Weak Links of the Left
Another two main reasons for the decline and decline of the Left in West Bengal — as well as in Tripura, another erstwhile stronghold — are the failure to attract young voters and women, who have emerged as crucial vote banks in the state as well as in the country. Most of the speakers of the Insaaf rally — like Minakshi, state DYFI president Dhrubajyoti Saha, DYFI state committee member Kalatan Dasgupta or Srijan Bhattacharjya and Pratikur Rehman of CPM’s student wing Students Federation of India — were young leaders while the old leaders like Biman Bose and Surjya Kanta Mishra were seated on the ground.
This clearly marks a generation change to send a message to the youth of the state that the party is ready to give space to them in the party leadership to address the challenges faced by the youth.
The Left, which although has been at the forefront of raising women's issues through All India Democratic Women’s Association (AIDWA), one of the largest women's organisations in the country, has, however, failed to give representation to women within the party — a reason why the party in the recent times has declined among women voters, a large section of whom are now supporters of Mamata Banerjee.
Through her government’s women-oriented schemes, Mamata, undoubtedly, has been able to get strong support from the women voters, who played a major role in her big success against Prime Minister Narendra Modi-led BJP in the last assembly polls. So, by projecting Minakshi as the “captain”, the Left party has played the right move as this puts her directly against Mamata in an attempt to get the women voters.
Another crucial change noticed in the rally — filled with red and white flags of DYFI — was the huge Indian national flag that flew beside the stage at the Brigade. The saffron party has often accused the Left of being anti-national. Finally, the Left is changing its strategies to properly address those criticisms and the DYFI’s Insaaf rally is an example of that.
Challenging Bipolarity Remains a Tough Job for the Left
However, the tough challenge that lies ahead for the Left is to recover its ground at a time when the state is polarised between TMC and BJP. While the TMC terms the Left the “friend of the BJP”, the saffron party accuses the Left of an “alliance” with the TMC at the centre. True that a large section of the Left voters shifted towards the BJP as was witnessed in the 2019 Lok Sabha polls and later in the last assembly polls, however, in recent times, there has been a reverse shift towards the Left as seen in the last year’s rural body polls.
But the problem is that this reverse shift is slow. The saffron party, despite factionalism and organisational weakness, is a force to reckon with and most of its voters are anti-TMC. The Left is yet to get a large section of these anti-TMC voters and particularly after the formation of the Indian National Developmental Inclusive Alliance (INDIA), where both TMC and CPM are constituents at the central level, things have become more difficult for the Left.
Many anti-TMC voters, including the Left voters, aren’t taking this development lightly. It was this concern that the young CPM leaders and Mohammad Salim, state CPM secretary, tried to address by attacking TMC, apart from targeting the BJP to reach out to the anti-BJP voters of the state too.
To break this bipolarity, the CPM-led Left has to provide itself as the alternative to the people. Though by projecting Minakshi Mukherjee and other youth leaders, the Left has clearly indicated that it is now committed to giving prominence to young faces. It has to continue to carry out its programmes, which should relate to the issues of the common public — whether of North Bengal or greater Kolkata region or Junglemahal — and avoid hurting religious sentiments of any community. The CPM, instead of banking on Congress, should concentrate on gaining its own strength and also listen to the views of its decades-old allies like the All India Forward Bloc, Revolutionary Socialist Party, and Communist Party of India.
(Sagarneel Sinha is a political commentator and tweets @SagarneelSinha. This is an opinion piece and the views expressed above are the author’s own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for them.)
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