Minakshi Mukherjee is terribly busy. The president of the Democratic Youth Federation of India (DYFI), the youth wing of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) or the CPI(M), is one among those organising a Long March — it took off on November 30 — from the industrial town of Chittaranjan on the Jharkhand-Bengal border to Calcutta. Mukherjee has been meeting people and discussing the nitty-gritty of the 12-day march that will cover 283 kilometres and will culminate in a public meeting in central Calcutta.
“People are coming forward spontaneously,” says Mukherjee. Anil Saha, 62, was a casual labourer at Hindustan Cables Limited; he lost his job when the public sector unit (PSU) downed its shutters some years ago. Shibram Bauri is a 50-year-old farm labourer. Both will be participating in the march. Thousands of people — factory workers, farmers and members of several mass organisations — are gearing up for the march led by Citu, the trade union arm of the CPI(M). It will travel through the industrial and coal belts of Asansol, Raniganj, Andal and Durgapur raising the primary slogan “Save Public Sector” against the Centre’s ongoing exercise of selling or closing down public sector units and, consequently, rendering lakhs of people jobless.
The march is also meant to be a protest against the BJP’s proposed implementation of the National Registry of Citizens or NRC across India. Subal Ghosh, another factory worker, who is worried about his non-existent legacy documents, will also join the march. “Mind you, many of the participants are neither our party members nor Left sympathisers; they are ordinary citizens pushed to the wall by the anti-people policies of the government,” says Mukherjee. “In our state, countless PSUs [reportedly 56] have been closed down by the Centre in the past few years. The state government too has shut down public units and merged some with others,” she adds.
Mukherjee’s earnestness notwithstanding, the irony is unmissable. After all, the three-decade-long Left rule in Bengal witnessed the near decimation of every possible industry across the state beginning with jute right down to machine tools.
Abhijit Ghosh is a state committee member of the Indian People’s Theatre Organisation (IPTA), a Leftist cultural organisation; he is also a CPI(M) cardholder. For 28 years, this cultural activist has been working in the industrial town of Burdwan. He believes the NRC issue has spread anxiety among a large section of people here. The area once known as the Glasgow of the East, because of the concentration of hundreds of industrial units, has been a melting pot for over a century. Says Ghosh, “Some of the Sikh workers trace their origins to Lahore from the time of undivided India. Then there are people who arrived from Tibet [following the Chinese occupation in 1950] and erstwhile Burma, post Independence.”
According to him, since most of these people don’t have any documents as they had to escape in haste, their progeny is now spending sleepless nights after the NRC scare. “Also, there are Adivasis from the adjoining Chhotanagpur plateau who never had any papers, though they are perhaps the oldest inhabitants of the subcontinent,” he points out; never mind the Left’s own disconnect with the state’s sizeable tribal population during the later years of its reign.
Ghosh and his comrades have been staging street plays such as Ajker Ihudi, or The Jews of Today, to raise awareness about the citizenship issue and go beyond the purported point of the Citizenship Amendment Bill (CAB). Many of the people he has interacted with also joined the march of November 30.
The Long March, reminiscent of the 6,000-mile trek of the Chinese Communists during their fight against nationalist forces in 1934-35, could well be regarded as the first major clarion call of the Left forces post the 2019 general elections. No less a bid to regain foothold in its longtime, though lost, bastion. Apart from the usual allies such as the CPI, the Forward Bloc and the RSP and the CPIML have also joined hands. In fact, the NRC issue has been a potent glue bringing together different shades of red. It must be remembered, however, that Left unity with all the Left parties in a fold has never happened because of ideological differences.
In 2018, the All India Kisan Sabha, the farmers’ front of the CPI(M), had organised a march in Maharashtra. Over 40,000 farmers and landless labourers had walked 200 kilometres from Nashik to Mumbai, demanding land rights, loan waivers, drought relief, a minimum support price for farm produce and compensation for crop failure due to unpredictable weather. The mammoth protest rally that ended in the gherao of the Vidhan Sabha, resulted in talks and promises by the then BJP state government. The promises remained largely unaddressed and the BJP lost a large number of seats in the farm belt and, recently, power in Maharashtra.
The Left parties have printed thousands of posters and lakhs of leaflets to spread the word about the Long March in Bengal. Young members have taken to social media to spread awareness. Mohammed Salim, a politburo member of the CPI(M), points out that despite chief minister Mamata Banerjee’s reassurance that there won’t be any NRC procedure in Bengal, there is mounting anxiety.
Common people are queuing up to get their names in voter lists verified, assiduously taking prints of forms for digital ration cards. “The panic tells you that people have lost faith in both the state and central governments,” says Salim. The veteran leader draws attention to how Left workers have been trying to help the poor and the illiterate fill forms and update their voter cards or ration cards. “Our support is encouraging people to seek solace in Left politics and the Left ideology,” says Salim.
Many of the rural offices of the Left parties that had been shut for the past 5-6 years reopened some months ago. During Durga Puja and Kali Puja, party bookstalls selling “progressive literature” in Calcutta as well as the districts witnessed handsome footfall, did brisk business. “Especially the booklets demystifying NRC and exposing the underlying motives of CAB in Parliament,” says Salim. Most of these stalls also doubled up as facilitation centres for a voter verification drive.
That is not all. Veteran CPI leader and writer Kapil Krishna Thakur has held workshops and spoken at meetings in border districts such as Nadia, North and South 24-Parganas, where the fear of NRC is the greatest. He has also met many members of the Matua Mahasangha — a sect of backward caste Hindus who migrated to West Bengal after 1947 — who are in a quandary over citizenship. Thakur tells The Telegraph, “Because a large number of Hindus, many of them Matuas, were not included in NRC in Assam, they are scared.” He also talks about how people have been coming to him to clear their doubts about the requisite documents.
Poet and social activist Swapan Bhowmick of Majdia in Nadia says, “Left rallies are attracting people again.” This means something, given that Nadia is one of those districts that witnessed a prominent saffron surge in recent years. “It seems some of the disillusioned cadres, especially from the backward classes, are back in the Left fold,” he adds.
And then there is campus politics. The SFI, which is the CPI(M)’s students’ wing, swept the elections at Presidency University last month. Says Mukherjee of the DYFI, “If free and fair elections are held, our candidates will win many more seats. For the past two-and-a-half years, students’ elections were stopped in all government-run institutes by the state government.” Apart from the SFI, the AISA, which is the student wing of the CPIML, is also witnessing a multiplication of cadre strength across colleges in Bengal.
Partha Ghosh, state secretary of the CPIML says, “The long tradition of rational and scientific thinking in Bengal doesn’t fit with the divisive agenda and politics based on religion unleashed by the BJP in the state. No wonder the young and educated have started rejecting the narrow fascist agenda.”
Manik Fakir, a writer and founder-secretary of Manabikata Mancha, a fringe Leftist forum, has been fighting the nationalists’ agenda in his own way. Apart from campaigns in villages against NRC, he has lodged a couple of PILs against CAB and NRC in the Calcutta High Court. “For Leftists, this is the biggest opportunity to stand beside the weak and the oppressed,” says Fakir. “They must make people aware that citizenship is their constitutional right and no one can grab it,” he adds.
Ghosh of the CPIML, however, has his fair share of worries. He says, “This will only work if the CPI(M) doesn’t behave like a big brother and walks in unison with other partners. People haven’t forgotten the high-handedness of certain Left leaders in rural Bengal. Also, they must stop hobnobbing with the Congress, a party that doesn’t have the experience of a people’s movement and is a feudalistic group that works top down.”
In the meantime, Red resurgence or no, on December 11, the Long March will reach Calcutta and congregate with several other rallies from the districts. Thereon, the road to recovery the Communists are striving to get onto will be long.
Snapchat: Mohammed Salim
‘Rising unemployment, divisive politics attract youth to the Left’
Q The Left, especially the CPI(M), has taken up the NRC issue.
Yes, NRC is one of the key issues affecting the common people, especially the poor and the daily wage labourers. The BJP and RSS have spread fear to divert attention from the economic disaster that is their making. People have been made to believe that voter verification and issuing of digital ration cards are steps towards implementation of NRC. They are running from pillar to post. We are beside them. We hold camps to reach out to those in villages, blocks and districts. We tell them how to organise the documents. We are telling people how the poor faced harassment in the name of NRC in Assam. Though they promised to protect the Hindus, there were 12 lakh Hindus in the final list.
Q But the chief minister said there won’t be any NRC in West Bengal.
She did, but she sought people’s co-operation for NPR (National Population Register), which is nothing but a stepping stone to NRC. The state government has also decided to build two detention camps for foreign nationals. It was Mamata Banerjee who had once alleged in Parliament that we had ushered in crores of infiltrators to inflate our votebank. She was part of the NDA then. These contradictions haven’t gone down well with the people. The TMC and the BJP are feeding off each other with a similar communal agenda.
Q NRC booklets issued by your party apparently sold in lakhs...
Right. During the Durga Puja, the stalls selling Marxist literature attracted many. NRC booklets exposing the real agenda behind the procedure were sold out. Books on rationality and fascist Germany also sold in thousands. The response encouraged us to open stalls during Kali Puja too.
Q Were there any young comrades in the stalls?
In some of the stalls, there were youngsters singing revolutionary songs as they wielded guitars. Our young cadres are very active on social media, where, among other things, they counter misinformation spread by elements of the Sangh parivar.
Q So does this mean that you are attracting the youth?
Rising unemployment, religious fanaticism, the government’s divisive agenda are attracting them to the Left. Results of college elections reflect renewed interest.
