Renewed possibilities…well, I must confess I’m sceptical about the possibility of renewal within the CPM, or at any rate its West Bengal branch, which seems to me rotten to the core. Where will the fresh blood you hope for come from? The internal structure of the West Bengal CPM has been hollowed our systematically, and there really seems to be nothing at all left there but a formidable machine geared to the preservation of control at all levels – bereft of ideas, principles, and imagination. I don’t know if there’s any form of political chemotherapy that will work: the malignancy is everywhere, from the tithe-collectors who extort compulsory and regular contributions to the party funds, to the SFI activists who routinely beat up opposition students in colleges, and try to impose dress codes on women students, to hospitals starved of funding and equipment and controlled by party patronage, and a public health system among the very worst in the world, to academic appointments monitored, doctored and controlled by the party elite and their hangers-on, to the cadres who beat up and intimidate potential Opposition voters prior to elections, to a local CITU that strangles any signs of real workers’ politics…the list is, quite literally, endless.

Losing power, and losing it comprehensively, in 2011, might help the CPM. Even there, though, I can’t see it happening without a very ugly process: Mamata may well unleash savage revenge for all these years of repression, and the cadres may then leave the CPM en masse, leaving in their wake nothing but a broken, terrorized shell of a party – in other words, something like what the CPM has reduced all dissenting voices to over the last two decades. This is not a pretty scenario – but it may well happen. And if it doesn’t happen, and the CPM manages miraculously to retain power, I don’t see any hopes whatsoever of any change other than the purely cosmetic. In West Bengal at least, the CPM’s power has to be comprehensively destroyed at all levels if it is to have even the faintest chance of positive renewal – and, of course, the more likely outcome of such destruction is political death. None of this is going to be nice – but all of it will simply be the result of processes initiated by the CPM itself.

I’m no Trinamul supporter, and I remain sceptical about the hopes many left-minded people seem to have of them – witness the way ex-Naxals and progressive activists have flocked to their ranks. Unlike the Communists of earlier generations, who led some of the most significant movements of their time, often with courage and commitment, the Trinamul IS an entirely opportunistic party, with no self-definition other than being anti-CPM. Mamata’s alliance with the movements in Nandigram and Singur were driven purely by this.

But we do need to take note of this (apparent) irony – the CPM is, unambiguously, the party of the Right in West Bengal, and whatever the TMC’s pathologies, it stands firmly to the left of the CPM – which is saying nothing much, because so would a lamp-post, in today’s West Bengal. I don’t hold much hope for the transformation of the TMC into a radical-democratic force, which is what the state needs so desperately at the moment – but positive energies are more likely to come from the TMC (or shall we say less unlikely) than from this ‘Left’. I’d rather see an independent party of the Left emerge in West Bengal, that can move beyond the TMC, but that’s just a dream. The point, however, is that the machinery of corruption and coercion within the West Bengal CPM is just too entrenched to admit of internal reform. The leadership of the West Bengal unit is, more than any other political force in the whole country (and I mean this quite literally) the agent of big business, and thoroughly and completely authoritarian. And the rot inside the party doesn’t end or even begin with the leadership – it’s in the rank and file. Devika’s posts about Kerala on this blog tell us of significant churning and rebellion at the grassroots level within the CPM there – it may lead nowhere but at least it’s happening. I doubt there are any equivalents in West Bengal. I doubt there’s anything left to salvage.

Saying all this gives me no pleasure – there were times when things were different, certainly, there were times when the CPM (and, much more, the earlier undivided CPI) stood for popular struggle and justice, and viewed in the long term, it’s difficult to see the hollowing out of the Left as anything other than tragedy. More immediately, of course, it’s pure, darkly comic farce. And in the short term, as your post makes clear, there’s also much to celebrate in Humpty Dumpty’s fall. Let me put it rhetorically, and against the sadness I myself occasionally feel: the complete erasure of the CPM with all its traditions, good as well as bad, is unequivocally a price worth paying for Lakshman Seth’s fall, to which the only legitimate reaction is joy, triumph, and an appreciation of the beauty of it all, which came through so well in your post.