Another "Historic blunder"

NOW IS THE TIME
Whose party is it, anyway? Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee and his comrades in Bengal would do well to ask Prakash Karat this question. And it would be much more than a rhetorical question. Mr Karat, the general secretary of the Communist Party of India (Marxist), can thunder in New Delhi only on the strength of the party in Bengal and Kerala. Yet, the interest of Bengal’s economic development does not seem to be of much concern to Mr Karat and his band of old-fashioned ideologues, who are in the party’s central leadership. Mr Karat’s brinkmanship in New Delhi has, therefore, threatened to spoil the hopes that the chief minister has managed to raise for Bengal’s economy. The Left’s confrontation with the prime minister on the issue of the nuclear deal between India and the United States of America will hit Bengal and Mr Bhattacharjee as badly as it would destabilize Mr Manmohan Singh’s government. The new possibilities for Bengal’s economic modernization will be darkened by political rhetoric in the event of a mid-term poll. Worse, the investors, who had begun to see signs of change in the CPI(M)’s political culture, will be bitterly disappointed.

It is time Mr Bhattacharjee and his men in Bengal asked themselves if they could afford to sacrifice Bengal’s economic interests for partisan politics yet again. When he led the Left Front to its seventh successive electoral win last year, the chief minister did so with the promise of a new Bengal. His reformist agenda has been supported and supplemented by Mr Singh’s government in New Delhi. After several decades of the politics of confrontation, the Centre and the state government have worked in the spirit of mutual accommodation and understanding. Many of the new projects, such as the proposed chemical hub, the expansion and modernization of Calcutta airport and the construction of a deep-sea port in South 24 Parganas, were largely the result of this new cooperation. Even on controversial issues such as the one concerning the Tata group’s small car project in Singur and the land wars in Nandigram, the Congress and the United Progressive Alliance government at the Centre have been generally supportive of Mr Bhattacharjee.

Mr Karat has now not only dismantled this structure of cooperation but also struck a new note of hostility between the Congress and the CPI(M). It is no secret that some of the CPI(M) leaders in Bengal are upset with Mr Karat’s games. But it is not enough for them to keep their arguments to themselves. At another critical juncture in the CPI(M)’s experiments with power at the Centre, Jyoti Basu called his party’s decision a “historic blunder”. If the leaders in Bengal do not stop Mr Karat in his tracks now, they would do the state a historic injustice.

From The Telegraph.