Allimuddin Street scripts CPI(M) election debacle thesis blaming old enemies, but ignores its party led-government performance deficiency.
A document circulated only among party members to explain the doom and workout strategies to overcome, the think-tanks within the CPI(M) said that "imperialists" (apparently a reference to US and Washington-propelled economic reforms) who inspired the media had stretched up disinformation campaign too far to smite down the Left in Bengal.’’
The document which reads like a series of broadsides against the people who voted against the Left and who have allegedly have corroborated in the downfall, ignored a huge anti-incumbency factor due to deficit at the performance level of the government for years at the end.
For example, the state coffers which got emptied owing to financial mismanagement and which led to the Left Front government facing difficulties in paying legitimate dues to lakhs of teachers and government staff, an assured Left vote-bank for decades, found no mention in the document, as titled Party Chitty no 3 (Party’s Letter no 3)!
Instead, the Left big brother’s logic was stale and depended heavily on old blame-game, identifying `old enemies,’ -- media, corporate sector conspiracy -- and a "total anti-Left gang up and its total mobilisation’’ as the reason for their defeat.
Of course, it admitted blunders handling popular anti-Left peasant mobilisation in Singur and Nandigram, as it admitted party workers and leaders developing a fatal disconnect with poor and middle-class intellectuals who could "influence people’s opinion,’’ but lack of economic development which at the end sullied the Left image in West Bengal, found no mention in the document.
If this was the summing up of defeat in urban and rural areas, they found a politically a killing link between the Maoists, Opposition, Trinamool Congress and Congress which also spread out a very systematic "disinformation campaign" and "anarchy" - which bore out evil fruits’’ - against the Left in vast rural belt.
Here the party letter ignored the accumulating disaffection among rural people for party’s letting loose armed party cardres in Stalinist fashion, on common people who dissented!
