New Delhi: In less than 24 hours, from Tala Park in Kolkata to Arcadia in California, people will start witnessing the beating retreat of the world’s longest-serving elected Left government. Eyes will be glued to television screens, online traffic will jump manifold.
On the eve of the most anticipated transition in three decades in a state that has learnt to live in the uneasy stability that the Left party offered, a strange excitement sweeps through the bylanes of Kolkata.
The writing on the wall is no indication, for they still have fading graffiti of the hammer and sickle calling on people to gather at the Shaheed Minar grounds and strengthen a party that has long since lost its connect with the state's weary population reeling under counterproductive policies of a regime that projects the party above individuals.
The Soviet Union collapsed and Eastern Europe embraced capitalism, but the Communist Party in West Bengal held on to power even after their thrashing in the 2008 Panchayat elections, the 2009 Lok Sabha elections and the 2010 municipal elections that they themselves acknowledged as a failure of the organization as a whole.
The world and its media in particular will look at it not just as an end of a government but as another death knell for the end of an idea. The dreams of a class-less society which had prompted the youth of Bengal to embrace the ideology for long will be shattered.
There will be mixed emotions – tears of both jubilation and dejection. For the dedicated septuagenarian worker who has, never in the last 34 years, failed to open the local CPI(M) party office at 9:00 am sharp and never made a penny on account of his politics, there will be a sense of bewilderment too.
The last time such a jolt came was in 1991 when people suddenly came to know that the Soviet Union had ceased to exist. Builders, promoters and contractors who had aligned themselves with the rulers to get lucrative contracts will start counting their losses.
Most of these creatures, of course, have already been working to redraw their equations with the leaders of the impending new order. The clusters of unions that ruled most of the state’s administration for 34 years – from transportation to education – are uneasy.
Party leaders are apprehensive that a Trinamool victory in the assembly election will lead to an exodus from the party file.
"If we lose this election, it will be the other way round. Instead of the party dictating terms to the cadres, many of them may stop paying levy in order to avoid renewing their membership. That could be worrisome," The Telegraph newspaper in Kolkata quoted a CPM state secretariat member as saying.
Those who believe in the 'India Superpower' theory, most of whom are living abroad and are products of the positivist school of thought, will rejoice. Toasts will be raised to mark the beginning of the end to the biggest institutional impediment to India's growth.
Policy mandarins sitting inside the AK Gopalan Bhavan in Delhi and the vaunted Alimuddin Street building in Kolkata will start giving statements, some of which will gracefully respect the will of the people; some will cite excuses. There will be voices of resolve to bounce back in 2016. But behind the closed doors, there will be introspection too. Life is a carnival but every carnival has its end.
Those who have triumphed will party hard. Words about bonhomie and understanding between the two partners of the winning alliance will find utterance every now and then. But the feeling that to party harder, they will have to work harder will be there on the incoming chief minister’s mind. She will also be aware that seasons turn, turn and turn. The burden of people’s expectations will also start weighing upon her shoulders.
But for a large section of a generation that grew up knowing no other way of life, the change does not come easy. The born-in-the-70s generation that embraced the Left ideologies is a disillusioned lot after witnessing the unraveling of lofty ideals, waiting for a change but equally wary of the newcomers who will take over the Writer’s Building in a few days time.
The young people, for whom West Bengal government and the CPI(M) were virtual synonyms, will breathe a sigh of relief but will brace themselves for an uncertain future. People have been long familiar with the Left Front rule and its ideology; they know what to expect and what is never to be expected. The new government is an unknown quantity, expectations are skyhigh and everybody is waiting for a miracle.
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