Left Front is using SRK’s Jawan & AI in Bengal campaign. It still can’t beat TMC-BJP binary

08/05/2024

If there is one word to describe the Left Front’s electoral messaging in West Bengal for the 2024 Lok Sabha election, it is “Jawan”. Shah Rukh Khan would be surprised to find that the inverse of the famous dialogue from his 2023 blockbuster—Bete ko haath lagane se pehle baap se baat kar—has become a raging hit in Bengal. It underlines the Left Front’s political messaging.

The Communist Party of India (Marxist) candidate from the Jadavpur constituency, Srijan Bhattacharya, is repeating the dialogue in his campaign speeches to silence the critics enquiring about the ‘disappearance’ of the Left’s elder statesmen from the party’s rallies. Bhattacharya’s version (Baap ko haat lagane se pehle bete se baat karna parega, Talk to the son before laying a hand on the father) of the SRK dialogue has gone viral in its own right, bringing a smile to supporters’ faces.

Veteran actor Naseeruddin Shah’s blessings to his niece Saira Shah Halim, CPI(M)’s Kolkata Dakshin candidate, has also been duly noted by a city that prides itself on its cultural moorings. Equally notable is her youthful vigour and focus on core issues like education, jobs, sanitation, air index, water, and illegal construction.

The ‘Jawan’ (young) candidates fielded by the Left, such as Bhattacharya, Halim, Dipsita Dhar, and Sayan Banerjee, offer a welcome change from the Trinamool Congress-Bharatiya Janata Party binary that West Bengal seems to be trapped in since 2019. In the last Lok Sabha election, the BJP had won 18 out of 42 seats in the state with 40.25 per cent votes and the Left Front had won zero seats. And in the 2021 assembly election that followed, the TMC won 213 seats and the BJP won 77. The Left, which has ruled West Bengal for 34 years from 1977 to 2011, won zero seats.

The question is whether fresh faces and pop-culture references can reverse the Left’s fortunes.

Full Marx for AI

Between its disastrous election performances in 2019 and 2021, the Left showed West Bengal it was not a spent force, yet. The coalition unleashed its power of young supporters for the same society where it has become a political outsider.

Red Volunteers, teams of Left activists drawn mostly from the CPI(M) at the block and panchayat levels, helped families during the Covid lockdown from 25 March to 31 May 2020.

With oxygen cylinders and medicine, Red Volunteers reached people’s doorsteps even as pressure mounted on the TMC government over the lack of medical resources. The Red Volunteers repeated this when Cyclone Amphan devastated parts of West Bengal in May 2020. When they were extending a helping hand to families that had lost homes and livelihoods, the BJP was targeting the TMC government for allegedly siphoning off relief funds meant for victims.

What stood out during those trying times was the Red Volunteers’ smart use of social media, primarily Facebook, to spread their message and get people on board to help the distressed.

The Left’s use of social media is also making headlines in the ongoing Lok Sabha election. Technology enabled the bedridden former Chief Minister and CPI(M) leader Buddhadeb Bhattacharya to deliver an impassioned address to the electorate last Saturday. “Who is Narendra Modi? Who is Mamata Banerjee? Don’t give them a chance to ruin our country, our state,” an AI-generated Bhattacharya said.

The CPI(M) shared the 2:06-minute-long video on its social media account and said that the video was made with Bhattacharya’s consent.

The use of social media, AI, and pop-culture references by the likes of Srijan Bhattacharya helps dispel the notion that the Left is an idea whose time has long gone. The host of fresh faces in the poll fray, as well as the focus on basics like “roti, kapda, and makaan” (food, cloth, and housing), offer a new narrative to the electorate. However, it may be too early to forget the past.

Massacres and misdirection

Unless one is a diehard TMC supporter, they would accept that Buddhadeb Bhattacharya’s plans of bringing industry to West Bengal would have benefited the state. But the way land acquisition was done for the Salim Group in Nandigram in 2007 and the Tatas in Singur in 2008, through violence and coercion, sent a different message. It appeared that the Left was going against those very sharecroppers and small farmers for whom it had launched the land reform movement, Operation Barga, in 1978, just a year after coming to power.

The people of West Bengal were also reminded of the Left’s long and inglorious history of political killings—Marichjhapi massacre of Dalit refugees in 1979, the Bijon Setu massacre of saints in 1982, and the killings of 11 Muslim labourers in Birbhum in 2000.

Whenever the Left talks about the problem of joblessness and political violence under the Mamata Banerjee government, one is reminded of the misdirection the Left took in weaponising trade unions and legitimising political violence that drove industries out of the state.

There were other missteps along the way. How will the Left’s young brigade make West Bengal forget that the Jyoti Basu government had banned English for primary students in the 1980s and hamstrung an entire generation in the job market?

A 2011 article in The Telegraph noted how the Left Front government had justified the move, citing the Himanshu Bimal Majumdar Committee, which had reportedly said in 1975 that teaching two languages to children until Class 6 would be tortuous and unscientific. The paper noted that the Left leaders wanted to earn “brownie points” with higher enrolments in state-aided schools located in rural districts.

Duality and Bengali identity

It was a Bengali, Manabendra Nath Roy, popularly known as MN Roy, who had founded the Communist Party of India in 1920. The Left Front, an alliance among CPI, All India Forward Bloc, the Revolutionary Socialist Party, the Marxist Forward Bloc, the Revolutionary Communist Party of India, and the Biplobi Bangla Congress, only came to power in West Bengal in 1977, 30 years after India became independent.

The alliance ruled the state for over three decades. Despite the massacres, the Bengali mind gave it one chance after the next to course correct. It was typical of the state because, if you look at West Bengal’s political history, it takes a long time to accept and a long time to forget. It may be too early yet to forget how the Left ruined Bengal.

Even the fresh burst of Leftist energy visible among today’s new leaders of the party may not be enough to bring it back into reckoning in Bengal due to another quirk of the Bengali mind: its love for duality. From Ritwik Ghatak-Satyajit Ray, East Bengal-Mohun Bagan football rivalry, to Rabindranath Tagore-Kazi Nazrul, Bengalis have always had a thing for duality.

“I showed that the TMC-BJP binary can be broken,” Halim told The Economic Times on 3 May. She revived CPI(M)’s fortunes in the 2022 assembly bypoll by emerging as the runner-up in the Ballygunge seat. However, it is this very binary that is keeping Bengali voters glued to their TV sets. Mamata or Modi, Hindu or Muslim, outsider (bohiragoto) or insider are the dualities that seem to be determining how West Bengal is voting.

A Calcutta University professor, who did not wish to be named, said that the Communist Bengal would have balked to see thousands of Bengalis flock to witness the Ram Mandir-themed Durga Puja pandal in Kolkata last year. “But it is duality that lets the once-godless embrace Ram in such a manner,” he said. It will take more than Buddhadeb Bhattacharya’s AI video and young Left leaders to change that.

Deep Halder is an author and journalist. He tweets @deepscribble. Views are personal.

(Edited by Ratan Priya)