Popping up on the walls in West Bengal’s rural areas is a curious new symbol – a hammer on a hand. This symbol has been created by party workers of the Congress and CPI(M) who seem to have concluded – even if their party leaders haven’t (at least officially) – that they will be able to take on the powerful ruling Trinamool Congress in the upcoming Assembly elections only if they join hands.
The symbol is a call for joint mobilisation not only against the Trinamool Congress, but also against the common subsidiary enemy of the Congress and CPI(M) – the Bharatiya Janata Party.
This informal arrangement by grassroots workers of one-time fierce political foes is entirely unprecedented in West Bengal’s intensely competitive politics. That this symbol has been left untouched so far suggests the tacit approval of leaders from both parties.
United they stand
The “hammer and hand” symbol has popped up in Rampurhat in Birbhum district in South Bengal. This is where the Trinamool Congress, the BJP, the Congress and the CPI(M) have previously fought pitched battles to control turf. The district is home to Trinamool Congress leader Anubrata Mandal, who famously threatened to blow up a police station. It is here where ruling party workers have terrorised villages, lynched Opposition workers and brutalised women while the police has been inactive or blatantly partisan.
As West Bengal gears up for the elections to be held later this year (the dates haven’t been announced yet), and Trinamool Congress workers attempt to deliver a second term to chief minister Mamata Banerjee, violence is a real threat. The Election Commission has already made clear its apprehensions of pre-poll violence. The fears are not unfounded. Just last week, two Trinamool workers making crude bombs were killed in an explosion at a party leader’s house in Khairashol in Birbhum district. In January, two Trinamool workers were killed in a similar blast at another party leader’s house, again in Birbhum.
Mamata’s show of strength
Though Chief Minister Mamata Bannerjee has challenged the Congress and CPI(M) to make their “unholy” alliance official, it is evident she is rattled. “I heard that CPM and Congress are trying to forge an alliance. I want this alliance to be made official,” Mamata said in the Assembly on Friday. "The people will give you a befitting reply."
Small processions of the Trinamool Congress were seen threading their way through residential areas across Kolkata on Sunday. The slogans chanted indicated a nervousness over the Congress-CPI(M) alliance. But the processions were also a show of strength designed to intimidate voters who may be considering crossing the line – its participants were not ordinary people but hand-picked strongmen to convey the message that the Trinamool Congress will win.
The “hammer in the hand” idea seems to have acquired a life of its own, propelling joint action that was unthinkable as early as last December. For instance, while trade unions affiliated to the CPI(M) and Congress have previously worked together on major issues – they have marched to Parliament together, and shut down banks – their student bodies have never combined forces before. But last week, the Students Federation of India and the National Students Union of India – affiliated to the CPI(M) and Congress respectively – acted in a rare show of solidarity to protest against police action against members of the SFI at Burdwan University.
Question of survival
The Congress and the CPI(M) have demonstrated their intention to consolidate their strengths against the Trinamool Congress in Raidighi in South 24 Parganas too – they organised a joint rally against the Trinamool Congress and BJP last week.
The beginnings of this informal political cooperation was first evident last year during municipal elections in the North Bengal town of Siliguri where CPI(M) and Congress workers worked in tandem to help the Left Front wrest control from the Trinamool Congress. An invisible coordination has also been formed at the grassroots in elections to bodies like school and madrassa boards.
Whichever way the Congress and the CPI(M)-led Left Front resolve their top-level differences on policy and the practical problems of dividing West Bengal’s 294 constituencies between themselves, this unprecedented informal arrangement at the grassroots is the result of political compulsion, and is likely to continue in 2019, when the general elections are due. Now, as much as in 2019, it’s a question of survival for both parties.
With party workers having shown the way forward, leaders have to get on with formalising the alliance. A Congress leader wryly confessed that even if the high command in Delhi could not finally work out a deal with the CPI(M), party workers in West Bengal have prepared their own alternative contingency plans. They know their lives depend on it.
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