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Calcutta, June 3 : The aftermath of Cyclone Aila could have been Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee’s and the CPM’s moment for an attempted turnaround. Instead, it is proving to be as embarrassing as the Marxists’ stunning electoral defeat last month.
It is not new for politicians to face the wrath of the victims of natural or other disasters. It is not even rare for politicians to be manhandled by people living without food, shelter or drinking water. The cyclone’s ravages in 54 islands in the Sunderbans, inhabited by over 40 lakh people, are unprecedented. In times of hunger, anger becomes public action.
But one would not have expected the chief minister to show his anger. But he showed it — both at the media and quite unbelievably, at a victim whom he threatened to “throw out of the room” where he was meeting some of the affected people. It can only add to the public perception of him — and his party — being too arrogant to learn the right lessons from the poll debacle.
During his second visit to the affected areas on Tuesday, a CPM MLA faced much worse. Even Bhattacharjee was heckled on this visit. The road that was repaired hastily for the chief minister’s visit today added insult to injury for the affected people.
The people were angry with not just the administration’s rather casual response to the human suffering, but also with the long years of official indifference to their plight. Not that they had not felt this way before; there have been outbursts of anger against local CPM leaders or low-level government officials.
But such expressions of public anger at the chief minister have been uncommon in Bengal. The anger that Bhattacharjee faced in the Sunderbans is also very different in its political significance from the anger expressed by “intellectuals” against the police firing in Nandigram on the streets of Calcutta two years ago.
Such anger erupting in the Sunderbans and in the chief minister’s presence can only mean how it is extending beyond ideological or partisan confines. True, South 24-Parganas district, along with the rest of south Bengal, is now Mamata Banerjee’s extended area of influence.
The CPM’s drubbing in the recent Lok Sabha polls has obviously emboldened many more people to voice their anger against Bhattacharjee and his government. These public shows of disaffection could also be an indication of the erosion of Bhattacharjee’s own popularity as a leader among an expanding section of the people. No leader – neither he nor Mamata – is popular in equal measure among different sections of the people.
But the change in Bengal is noticeable and it seems to be confirmed by Bhattacharjee’s discomfiture on his visits – Bhattacharjee and the CPM are now less popular with the rural masses, though they still enjoy the support of the middle classes which had earlier been sceptical of them. It is much the same for Mamata – for all her electoral successes, large sections of the middle classes are still wary of her brand of politics.
But the anger at Bhattacharjee and the assault on the CPM MLA suggest another change. The people’s disgust with the incompetence of the administration is also out in the open. The lack of co-ordination of relief work and long delays in reaching relief material to the victims brought to focus yet again the inability of the administration to cope with a crisis.
More and more people are now convinced that the administration in Bengal has been a casualty of the CPM’s partisan approaches to it. The party’s only interest in administration has been to pack it with people of its own choice. Quality and competence were pushed out in the process.
Old-timers in the party contrast the response to the cyclone to that to the floods that devastated Bengal in 1978. It was only a year after the Left Front had come to power and also the year the first panchayat elections were held.
The party plunged into the flood-fighting and rescue and relief work as on a mission possible. Thirty-two years in power has sapped most of that energy and made the party dependent on the government. But the problem is it is a government which has its administration sabotaged by the party itself.