The Communist Party of India-Marxist-led Left Front government in West Bengal completed 33 years in power on June 21. The celebration, which otherwise would have been held with much festivities, is being held in a sombre mood.
On the occasion, a rally is being held at Kolkata's Netaji Indoor Stadium where Chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee and the CPI-M state secretary Biman Bose will be the main speakers along with some leaders of Front partners.
With successive electoral setbacks in Panchayat, Lok Sabha and municipal polls in the past three years, Left leaders in Bengal have realised that there has been a steady and serious erosion in their traditional vote bank among the urban and rural poor.
A number of Left leaders have admitted in public that they would be out of power in the next assembly election. Some of the Left leaders have even suggested that since they had lost the moral authority to rule the state, the assembly election should be brought forward to seek a fresh mandate. While some, like Goutam Deb raised this issue within the party forum, former state finance minister Ashoke Mitra argued openly.
However, the Left Front leaders are not keen to consider this possibility and are instead still in favour of making a serious effort to regain the poor peoples' support before the election.
On Saturday, the CPI-M state secretariat held a day-long meeting with its ministers and tried to impress upon them the urgency for speeding up the implementation of pro-poor programmes. Stress was given on panchayat, health, primary education, public health engineering and similar departments which deal directly with public services.
The chief minister urged ministers to speed up the works assuring them quick disbursal of budgetary allocations. However, Abdur Rezzal Molla, minister of Land and Land Reforms came out disappointed. Molla told Business Standard that the leaders were under delusion that these measures would be enough to regain the lost political ground.
According to Molla, realising that the Left rule would be over in less than a year's time, a section of industry has become overactive in grabbing land.
Though officially these industry people are citing reasons for setting up new ventures, the real reason must be for speculative activities, Molla suspects. Yet, the chief minister and industry minister are pressing hard for immediate clearance of those land acquisition by the department of Land and Land Reforms, which Molla represents. For that, he has been asked to overlook the provision of the existing land reforms Act.
Already he has declined to clear a proposal for acquisition of 700 acre for a project pushed by Patton Co. Another proposal made by Orion has also been blocked by him.
"Knowing that the government is on its way out, the industry people are keen to gobble up as much land as possible. This is not going to help the state or its government. Already Mamata Banerjee has warned that once in power her party would go deep into the land scam. By allowing the acquisition of these lands, I would only stick my neck out. Why should I do that," asks Molla.
The CPI-M will hold its state committee meeting on June 26-27 to prepare its electoral strategy for the coming assembly election. The strategy will be given final shape in the next central committee meeting.
