Murshidabad/Kolkata: Sporting a white crisp kurta and a red scarf, Srijan Bhattacharya rides an e-rickshaw through the bustling campaign trail in West Bengal’s South 24 Parganas. He is confronted by an onlooker about the Communist Party of India (Marxist)’s failed dalliance with the relatively new Indian Secular Front (ISF) in the run up to the Lok Sabha election.
Holding the mic close, the CPI(M) candidate from Jadavpur belts a line of a Bollywood song featuring Salman Khan — ‘Chahe jo lekar aaye dil mei ishq mohabbat, sabko gale lagana apne culture ki hai aadat (Whosoever comes with love in their heart, we embrace them, as that is our culture).’
Cheers and whistles follow from his supporters at Bhangar, some 30 km from Kolkata, where ISF’s Naushad Siddiqui is the MLA.
In his own words, Bhattacharya calls it “using easy language to reach out to the masses” as part of the renewed strategy of the CPI(M), which held power in Bengal for 34 years but is struggling to come up for over a decade now.
Using Bollywood dialogues, promoting youth leaders to using AI and social media for reaching out to the masses and shifting the party’s political discourse from class to caste, the CPI(M) is making concerted efforts to rebuild itself in Bengal as it suffered setbacks one after another — right from losing power in 2011 to drawing a blank in the 2019 Lok Sabha and 2021 assembly elections.
“Quoting Hindi cinema dialogues was forbidden earlier, as it was not seen as the Left’s culture. But now that is changing. We are trying to speak in an easy language to connect with the people. We have only changed the form but the content is the same,” says Bhattacharya.
He is not the only young Turk fielded by the party. His comrades from the Students’ Federation of India, Pratikur Rahman and Dipsita Dhar, are contesting from Diamond Harbour and Serampore.
At the CPI(M) office in Murshidabad, the floor is littered with cigarette butts and half-smoked beedis as the party members discuss the election strategy — a road show, ‘jan sabhas’ in the chalked out villages, and door-to-door campaigns.
CPI(M) state secretary and politburo member Md Salim is contesting from Murshidabad where the Muslims, according to the 2011 Census, comprise 66.27 percent of the population. The party is hoping Salim will win against sitting Trinamool Congress (TMC) MP Abu Taher Khan, who is not keeping well.
“Instead of making people understand what Fascism is and how, democracy is being attacked by the TMC and the BJP. We are telling people that Khan is unwell and won’t be able to work for the people. They need a fit leader. We know that people won’t understand Fascism and democracy,” says a CPI(M) worker.
In Kolkata, CPI(M)’s Saira Shah Halim asserts that the Left Front carries the baggage of being pro-poor and not with the urban constituents.
“We want to dispel this notion and tell people that the Left is very pro-development, pro-youth, pro-jobs and pro-industry. We want jobs for our youth and don’t want them to go to other states,” says the party’s South Kolkata candidate.
In the 2022 Ballygunge assembly bypolls, Halim came second behind Trinamool Congress’s Babul Supriyo and relegated the BJP to the third position.
The convent educated Halim says that the old stereotypes that comrades should look poor and carry a ‘jhola’ are no longer relevant. “The red fortress of the Left has evolved. You don’t have to look a certain manner, quote Marx at the drop of hat, or talk in a certain manner. The party is promoting young comrades and providing space for individualism.”
The biggest challenge before the CPI(M) is getting back its voters who shifted allegiance especially after 2019.
In Murshidabad, CPI(M) state committee member Shatarup Ghosh says that the party needs to rebuild the social influence which will then be reflected in vote share. Ghosh recalls how the Red Volunteers assembled during the Covid to help the people translated into votes in panchayat elections. “But that is not enough.”
The portraits of Lenin, Marx, Engels, Castro, Stalin, and Ho Chi Minh jostle for space with that of local leaders Anil Biswas and Jyoti Basu on the walls of the party office.
When asked why there is no Ambedkar or Bhagat Singh, another member concedes: “This is the problem with the Left Front. They are lacking Indianness. We left the ground for the BJP and the RSS to appropriate our Indian revolutionaries.”
Political analyst Suman Bhattacharya says that the Left has been unable to cope up with the new political and economic realities. “The Left’s slogans are no longer valid, and everyone knows that revolution will never happen. Identity politics has taken the world by storm. People know that the labour-peasant class will never occupy the power position. Why should people vote for the Left?”
But, Ghosh feels that after being in power for 34 years, the Left Front took time to come out of its “comfort zone” and see itself as an “opposition”. “The habit of being in opposition was not there. The TMC ensured that the Left cadres were removed not only from panchayats, but every village. And the Left didn’t realise that it is losing social influence.”
This time, the CPI(M) member says, the party is plunging into the polls with its revitalised young cadres. “The work of Red Volunteers was appreciated across the spectrum, and that’s when people realised that it was the Left Front which was available for them.”
The CPI(M) first started to field fresh faces below the age of 40 in the 2021 state election and continued the trend in the civic and rural polls in 2022 and 2023, respectively. Of the 127 seats it contested in Kolkata, as many as 47 had candidates who were Red Volunteers.
“We have overhauled our party. We have young faces at all levels of the organisation. We fielded young faces during the assembly and panchayat polls and are doing the same in the Lok Sabha election. Media needs to stop creating perception based on the erstwhile understanding of the Left,” says Md Salim.
‘Ethical use of social media’
When the CPI(M) launched its AI anchor Samata in March, the sense of irony was not lost on many including those in the Left Front. And it is not just AI, a social media team comprising graphic designers and content creators work 24/7 to boost the party’s online engagement with the people. The groundwork was laid way back in 2019 when a Digital CPI(M) campaign was launched seeking volunteers for its social media team.
On the face of it, the CPI(M) calls it “ethical use of social media”. For a party that supported unions in protests against the introduction of computers in the 1970s, adoption of technology was never an easy call.
Halim calls the move a “blunder”. “Initially, there were talks that computers might overtake the jobs, but they had a change of heart, and with knowledge comes assimilation and the Left course corrected that in due process. If you see during Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee’s time as the CM, all the roads and flyovers and IT companies came in,” the niece of veteran actor Naseeruddin Shah adds.
The solidarity March.
Gratitude to comrade #BrindaKarat and comrade @aishe_ghosh for the support.#SairaShahHalim4KolkataSouth pic.twitter.com/ZmG1WhkzwU
— Saira Shah Halim সায়রা سائرہ (@sairashahhalim) April 28, 2024
Change hasn’t been easy either. “They were still stuck with the idea that the CPI(M) shouldn’t depend on technology and should focus on individual outreach. We established our social media pages in 2015, but we were not active because the party was still unsure,” rues a member of the social media team.
Abin Mitra, who oversees CPI(M) digital, says that after several training sessions, a clarity was reached that social media was an important tool for reaching out to the masses.
Currently, CPI(M) digital has 30 volunteers who work at its main office and has several teams across 23 districts with another 1 lakh volunteers. These volunteers are ideologically inclined to the party and are only given travel allowance, the party maintains.
Political analyst Rahul Mukherji says that fielding fresh faces, playing popular jingles and posting witty lines won’t amount to anything until the party changes its approach towards elections. “It’s like old wine in a new bottle. The failure of the Left to identify the real enemy for a particular election and weaving a narrative that caters to their core base might result in crowds, but it won’t translate into votes.”
And now with the Naushad Ali-led ISF contesting solo, the CPI(M)’s gambit of splitting the Muslim votes is in disarray. “The Left Front tried experimenting with the ISF in 2021, but failed. It also exposed a lack of credible faces among Bengali-speaking Muslims at the grassroot level. The alliance failed to identify and address the issues that mattered the most to the target group,” says Mukherji.
Md Salim refuses to go into that discussion. “Alliances change depending on the political realities of the day. The Congress made it clear that it is against the BJP and the TMC, that’s when seat adjustment took place. ISF decided not to be a part of this,” he asserts.
(Edited by Tony Rai)
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