I saw a hoarding the other day which read "I am change, I am coming!" It obviously referred to the recent tilt in political faithfulness in this state towards a party which is the new face of the masses, the downtrodden, the poor and anyone who is not actively linked to the ruling front. I picked up a few conversations with some of my friends who are known to have well defined political orientations and in every discussion, without fail, the industry versus agri debate came up.
The Singur saga - Most of us inevitably bring in the Tata motors case to compare good and bad. I would like to look at it this way: What happened at Singur is an open book to me, and it is no way a case to be discussed to derive who had the better will. Left front wanted to gain back people's confidence quickly.They did not have the skills to do a proper negotiation with the Tatas, else there are other good places also which are well connected to the port etc. e.g. the -parts of Purulia which barren and are close to the Asansol-Durgapur industrial belt, well connected by road and rail. So are large parts of West Midanapur and some parts of Birbhum. Whatever may it be, the fact remains that they did not do so and the number of unhappy faces started mounting. The CPM mis-managed the situation more as they tried forcing their decision, and they did so in the zest of gaining back popularity - never ever for people's good. Paradoxically, Mamata simply tried to use people's emotions to win over popularity, irrespective of what the consequences may be. If she had the political will at that time to make life better for people, she would definitely have worked more on getting much better compensation for the land-losers, which she did not. She created a situation which forced the Tatas to think differently.
If today someone says Mamata Banerjee has great brains, she surely does have, but so do many other people. She definitely has the political brain to pull in masses and a very strong attitude to fight, may it be in her own "agricultural" way. However, she has never shown her mettle as a tricky politician with a sack-full of strategy behind he decisions till 2008. So how are they happening now? How are her recent decision feel like real management decisions? A little bit of chronology check will expose that all such smart decisions started being taken only after she became the Railway Minister. They are happening because she has new found faith in the bureaucrats she works with. Strategic inputs are theirs, and they just have her endorsement to be called as a decision. She is adding her fighter core and her mass puller instincts to package these decisions and voila! they all seem to work!
This is good, and this is possibly the best way it could have happened.
The first few governments of this ruling party had strong strategists within and they also were using the bureaucracy for some of their decisions. Nobody can deny the fact that the party cadre regime laid out by the ruling front (primarily CPM) was one of the most thought out, organized, silent and successful things any political party could ever do anywhere in the world to gain popularity on one side and in the same vein, control mutinies. They could do so because they had read good brains with them at that time (Pramod Dasgupta, Sailen Dasgupta, A Sen to name a few) - within the party and also withing the bureaucracy that was so close to them then. They also built the muscle with partial help from the events in neighboring Bangladesh in the seventies. However, as time passed, they failed to improve and improvise, which finally resulted in this "bring the change" feeling among the masses. Anil Biswas was the last strategist in the team, and with his passing away, they lost their strategy factory. With Subhash Chakraborty's demise, they lost their muscle too. Ego grew large on them and they started taking decisions on their own without realizing that they are probably better off by leaning on to external brains.
For a party that has ruled the state for 30 plus years, anti-incumbency is surely something that should have taken huge proportions much earlier. There are n number of reasoning and anti-reasoning to debate on why it did not happen earlier, but now that it has come out big finally, it will bring in the C H A N G E.
Change is good for the changed as well - - the have lost ground to conquer and this time they can't afford to be arrogant, so they can only resort to some real development stuff. Having said this, let us not forget that the ruling party is exposed for 30+ yrs, the new party is apparently not. They have a lot of things to prove, and in this way, they would do a few things which are eventually good for the state. Change has a shock factor - it helps people realize not everything is good, and helps in rectifying faster. I agree that there are some faces in the ruling side who have already realized that they need to improve, but firstly, they are a minority within their own party, and secondly, their urge to change is not such strong that it can push them to overcome their fondness for the easy going benefits that their "own people" enjoyed all these years. The shock is going to do more good than bad.
Overall, I do not buy this idea that x is less worse than y so x should come in. Most of the people would look forward to change just because they love it - most of the supporters of such change really do not support change for a specific cause - they want change because they love change - it is mostly mass hysteria. Someone way saying "If Mamata as a lady could drive away the Tatas, the credit should go to her because she did not have the government money to fund this and yet she could achieve this!" - Credit? If we have started forgetting the difference between famous and infamous, if we cant differentiate between feats and eventualities, we are surely hysteric, we have lost control over what we are saying because we are madly in love with change.
However, I am open for a change as well - that brings back the urge in people to do something out of the ordinary. Bringing in Mamata is not going to make things better. However the change will surely do so. Change is good. Change may not always be inevitable in the verbatim sense of the word, but if it doesn't happen the natural way through improvisations, it surely will some day inevitably happen all in one go.
Bring it on, I am game!
