Kolkata’s biggest urban park, the Brigade Parade Ground, turned saffron on Christmas Eve. A hundred thousand people gathered there to chant the Bhagavad Gita in unison.
This Sunday, the Brigade is all set to turn red.
The Democratic Youth Federation of India (DYFI) has called for a rally on 7 January, which its members say will be historic, and will mark the resurgence of its mother party, the Communist Party of India (Marxist), in West Bengal. The CPI(M) ruled the state for 34 years till it was ousted by Trinamool Congress (TMC) supremo Mamata Banerjee in 2011.
Is the promise of a resurgence of the Left in West Bengal real or mere wishful thinking?
The Brigade rally
The TMC and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)—the Left’s rivals in West Bengal—say the DYFI and the CPI(M) are building desperate castles in the air. And that the state has said goodbye to the party for good. Shoring their argument is the assembly elections results of 2021 when the CPI(M) drew a blank. Just 15 years ago, the Left Front led by the CPI(M) had won a monstrous majority of 230 out of 294 seats.
West Bengal DYFI chief secretary, Minakshi Mukherjee, however, is confident of a slow but steady return of the red wave in West Bengal. The 39-year-old political science post-graduate from Bardhaman contested against Banerjee in Nandigram in 2021 as the CPI(M)’s giant slayer. Banerjee lost the election to BJP’s Suvendu Adhikari by 1,956 votes and Mukherjee only got 3 per cent of votes. She recently led a 50-day march from north to south West Bengal.
Titled ‘Insaaf Yatra’ (march for justice), the DYFI march began on 3 November at Cooch Behar and ended on 22 December in Kolkata, covering 22 districts and 2,200 km. Sunday’s Brigade rally is a culmination of the march to protest a ‘communal BJP’ and a ‘corrupt TMC’.
Being able to hold a rally at the Brigade Parade Ground is a big feather in anybody’s cap. India’s first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru held one for visiting Soviet Union leaders Nikita Khrushchev and Nikolai Bulganin in 1955. Legendary CPI(M) leaders Pramod Dasgupta, Hare Krishna Konar and Jyoti Basu took part in a historic meeting on these grounds in 1978, soon after the Left Front came to power in West Bengal for the first time. Former minister Indira Gandhi and Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, father of the Bangladesh nation, held a momentous rally at Brigade. Twenty years later, Banerjee held a mega rally here against the CPI-M, followed by many more till she became chief minister. Prime Minister Narendra Modi, too, has been to Brigade a couple of times.
Those in the know say it takes about 1.5 lakh people to fill the Brigade, from the fountain in front of Victoria Memorial to Outram Road, connecting Fort William to Park Street. But political parties claim the ground holds between 5 to 7 lakh people, even 10. To be able to have even 1.5 lakh people attend a meeting at the Brigade takes enormous organisation and management, and most importantly, the political commitment of supporters.
Is DYFI being too ambitious in holding its first major rally in nearly 15 years at the Brigade on Sunday?
The youth organisation’s last rally at the Brigade was held in 2008. Former Chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee, who was then a DYFI leader in his early political career, was the star speaker at that meeting. Today, the CPI(M) has been out of power for 12 years and its electoral fortunes have sunk. Averaging about 37 per cent votes in assembly polls in its three decades in office, the CPI(M) got just about 5 per cent in 2021. However, its panchayat polls performance in 2023 was marginally better than in 2018 and fanned hopes of a revival.
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Revival of the Left
Why would the TMC or the BJP bother about a party that has less than 5 per cent vote share?
Both may feign indifference to the CPI(M)’s fortunes but they are still watching Sunday’s Brigade rally. Any shift in the CPI(M)’s political stature will impact theirs.
In the 2021 polls, the BJP’s vote share was around 37 per cent against the TMC’s 48 per cent. What appears to have happened over the last decade is that the Left vote has shifted to the right, the BJP. Now, even if a fraction of the Left vote returns to its base, the CPI(M), it would be bad news for the BJP. Any gain for CPI(M) is the BJP’s direct loss. Of course, any loss for the BJP is good news for TMC, which wants the opposition vote to be fragmented rather than consolidated behind the BJP.
So, all eyes are on the turnout at the Brigade on Sunday. The DYFI and CPI(M) are hopeful. The ‘Insaaf Yatra’ has been imaginative, and engaging enough to visit villages along its 2,200 km route. Supporters who had given up on the Left’s revival may feel re-invigorated enough to attend the rally. Rampant allegations of corruption against the TMC and organisational disarray in the BJP, along with its alleged communal agenda, would help the DYFI cause.
A sidelight. Normally, at Brigade rallies, the stage is positioned in a way that speakers have the Victoria Memorial in the background. However, due to metro rail construction on Sunday, the stage will be built at the opposite end of the ground, and the speakers will face Victoria Memorial. This has never happened before. Decorators who have traditionally built stages and arranged microphones at Brigade Parade Ground are grappling with the change in geography. The Left is hoping that history may change, if not by 2024, then definitely West Bengal Assembly elections in 2026.
The author is a senior journalist based in Kolkata. She tweets @Monideepa62. Views are personal.
(Edited by Ratan Priya)
CPI(M) secured their place in the dustbins of history way too long ago. It is dead as a dodo.