The 34 years of Left Front led Government in West Bengal during 1977-2011 refers to the consequently winning of the Communist Party of India (Marxist)-led Left Front in the West Bengal Legislative Assembly elections and democratically forming Government for seven terms starting from 1977 to 2011 (34 years) in the Indian state of West Bengal. This period (1977-2011) is the longest serving of any democratically elected communists-led Government in the world.[1][2] The "34 years of Left Front rule in West Bengal" is a well used poltical term coined by politicians in the West Bengal politics as well as politics of India.
It was started from 1977, when Left Front, led by Communist Party of India (Marxist) won 1977 Assembly elections in Indian state of West Bengal with 2/3rd majority suppressing Janata Dal and Indian National Congress. Left Front of West Bengal included Communist Party of India (Marxist), All India Forward Bloc, Revolutionary Socialist Party, Marxist Forward Bloc, Revolutionary Communist Party of India and the Biplabi Bangla Congress, while Communist Party of India, Socialist party joined in later years.[3] Jyoti Basu was sworn in as Chief Minister of West Bengal after being elected from Satgachhia constituency. The Left Front ruled the state for seven consecutive terms 1977–2011, five with Jyoti Basu as Chief Minister and two under Buddhadev Bhattacharya. The rule ended in 2011, when All India Trinamool Congress historically defeated Left Front in 2011 Assembly elections.
Left Front and the politics of West Bengal
Left Front
The Left Front (Bengali: বাম ফ্রন্ট; baam front) is an left-leaning alliance of left and communist political parties in of West Bengal. It was formed in January 1977, which subsequently won 1977 West Bengal Legislative Assembly election in June 1977 and formed Government in the state. The alliance won every election after that upto 2011 and formed Governments for consequent 7 times.
The Left Front includes:
- Communist Party of India (Marxist)
- Communist Party of India
- All India Forward Bloc
- Revolutionary Socialist Party
- Revolutionary Communist Party of India
- Marxist Forward Bloc
Elections
| Assembly elections | ||||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Year | Total seats | Winning Party/alliance | Opposition | Others | Remarks | Ref(s) | ||||||
| Party/alliance | Seats contested | Seats won | Vote share | Party/alliance | Seats contested | Seats | Vote share | |||||
| 1977 | 294 | Left Front
|
|
Total: 231
|
45.61% | JNP | 289 | 29 | 20.02% | The election marked the beginning of the 34-year Left Front rule in West Bengal. Jyoti Basu became chief minister and First Basu Ministry formed. Prafulla Chandra Sen became leader of opposition. | [4] | |
| 1982 | 294 | Left Front
|
|
Total: 231
|
52.78% | Indian National Congress (I) | 250 | 49 | 35.73 |
|
Jyoti Basu became chief minister and Second Basu Ministry formed. Siddhartha Shankar Ray became leader of opposition. | [5] |
| 1987 | 294 | Left Front
|
|
Total: 231
|
38.49 | Indian National Congress (I) | 250 | 49 | 35.73 |
|
Jyoti Basu remained chief minister and Third Basu Ministry formed. Siddhartha Shankar Ray remained leader of opposition. | [6] |
| 1991 | 294 | Left Front
|
|
Total: 244
|
48.57 | Indian National Congress (I) | 250 | 49 | 35.73 |
|
Jyoti Basu remained chief minister and Third Basu Ministry formed. Siddhartha Shankar Ray remained leader of opposition. | [7] |
| 1996 | Left Front | INC | ||||||||||
| 2001 | Left Front | INC | ||||||||||
| 2006 | Left Front | INC | ||||||||||
| 2011 | Left Front | INC | ||||||||||
| Parlamentary elections | ||||||||||||
| Year | Total seats | Party wise results | Remarks | Ref(s) | ||||||||
| Seats contested | Seats won | Vote share | ||||||||||
| Local body elections | ||||||||||||
| Year | Type | Bodies won (by parties/alliance) | Remarks | Ref(s) | ||||||||
Major opposition parties
- Janata Dal
- Indian National Congress
- All India Trinamool Congress
Political controversies
1979 Marichjhanpi Massacre
The massacre in Marichjhanpi, which took place under CPI(M) rule in Bengal between January 26 and May 16, 1979, relates to the eviction of refugees from the reserved island of Marichjhanpi, Sunderbans, who had fled from East Pakistan thereby leading to the death of a sizable population among them.[8]
Out of the 14,388 families who deserted [for West Bengal], 10,260 families returned to their previous places … and the remaining 4,128 families perished in transit, died of starvation, exhaustion, and many were killed in Kashipur, Kumirmari, and Marichjhapi by police firings (Biswas 1982, 19).[9][10]
After leading the Left Front government for consecutive five terms, Jyoti Basu retired from active politics and Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee was appointed as his successor. In 2000, the Left Front came back to the power with Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee again assuming the office of the Chief Minister.[8]
The state's economic recovery gathered momentum after economic reforms in India were introduced in the early 1990s by the central government, aided by election of a new reformist Chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee in 2000. About during 2007, armed activists, and Maoists have been organizing terrorist attacks in some parts of the state,[11][12] while clashes with the administration have taken place at several sensitive places on the issue of industrial land acquisition.[13][14]
Singur Tata Nano controversy
The Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee government wanted to set up a Tata Nano factory in Singur, Hooghly.Tata Motors started constructing a factory to manufacture a car, Tata Nano which was estimated to cost $2,500. The small cars were scheduled to roll out of the factory by 2008. Singur was chosen by the Tata Motors among six sites offered by the West Bengal state government. The project faced massive opposition from displaced farmers. The unwilling farmers were given political support by West Bengal's then-opposition leader Mamata Banerjee. Banerjee's "Save Farmland" movement was supported by civil rights and human rights groups, legal bodies, and social activists like Medha Patkar, Anuradha Talwar, Arundhati Roy and Magsaysay and Jnanpith Award-winning author Mahasweta Devi. Leftist activists also shared the platform with Banerjee's Trinamool Congress. The Tatas finally decided to move out of Singur on 3 October 2008. On 7 October 2008, the Tatas announced that they would be setting up the Tata Nano plant in Sanand in Gujarat after Ratan Tata received a call from the then Chief Minister of Gujarat, Narendra Modi.
Nandigram violence
The Nandigram violence was an incident in Nandigram, West Bengal where, under the orders of the Left Front government, more than 4,000 heavily armed police stormed the Nandigram area with the aim of stamping out protests against the West Bengal government's plans to expropriate 10,000 acres (40 km2) of land for a Special Economic Zone (SEZ) to be developed by the Indonesian-based Salim Group. The area of Nandigram had turned into an internal-security threat for the country.[15] The Trinamool Congress, collaborating with the Maoists, had isolated the entire area from the rest of the country, by cutting up all the roads and blocking them by tree trunks. Weapons were being collected and stored for an armed rebellion.[16] The villagers were brainwashed against the Government and the progressive scheme. However, the shootings, in recent developments have proved to be a conspiracy of the TMC and Maoists alike. Indeed the police had to resort to firing when the armed mob refused to disperse even after much persuasion and tear gassing and started attacking the police. The then Chief Minister, Buddhadeb Bhattacharya was awarded a clean-chit for non-involvement in the Nandigram violence by the CBI.[17] The police shot 13 villagers dead and one died from a very suspicious knife-attack, thus sparking controversies whether the police were, in the least, the ones to fire. At least 30 police officers were injured in the incident.
The SEZ controversy started when the government of West Bengal decided that the Salim Group of Indonesia[18][19][20] would set up a chemical hub under the SEZ policy at Nandigram, a rural area in the district of Purba Medinipur. The villagers took over the administration of the area and all the roads to the villages were cut off.
Land reforms and agriculture
Left Front is considered for the most successful land reforms in India. While land reform had not made much headway in most of India, West Bengal has achieved many notable land reforms compared to it in fields like redistributing agricultural land ownership, regulating sharecropping relationships, and distributing homestead plots.[21]
Operation Barga
In the first term of Left Front goverment, one of the main key priorities were land redistribution[22][23] and the most effective was Operation Barga. Introduced in 1978, it was a comprehensive and radical measure for land reforms which was further formalised through two legislation in 1979 and 1980.[24][25] The operation sough to actively identify and record bargardars (trans: sharecroppers) by present occupational status without any reliance on ancestral records, producing official documentation for enforcement of the rights of bargardars to crop share from landlords and priority rights to lands in cases of both voluntary sale of land and forced sale of ceiling surplus lands.[26][25] The effects
- ^ "Communists Lead Kolkata's Capitalist Makeover". Los Angeles Times. May 12, 2006.
- ^ Bose, Sumantra. "End of an era in Bengal". www.aljazeera.com.
- ^ N. Jose Chander (1 January 2004). Coalition Politics: The Indian Experience. Concept Publishing Company. pp. 105–111. ISBN 978-81-8069-092-1.
- ^ https://eci.gov.in/files/file/3188-west-bengal-1977/
- ^ https://eci.gov.in/files/file/3189-west-bengal-1982/
- ^ https://eci.gov.in/files/file/3189-west-bengal-1982/
- ^ https://eci.gov.in/files/file/3189-west-bengal-1982/
- ^ a b Bhattacharya, Snigdhendu (25 April 2011). "Ghost of Marichjhapi returns to haunt". The Hindustan Times. Archived from the original on 10 June 2015. Retrieved 5 August 2013.
- ^ Ross, Mallick. "The Morichjhanpi massacre: When tigers became citizens, refugees "tiger-food"" (PDF).
- ^ "Remembering Marichjhapi Massacre, 1979". insightyv.com. Archived from the original on 7 July 2009. Retrieved 16 May 2010.
- ^ Ghosh Roy, Paramasish (22 July 2005). "Maoist on Rise in West Bengal". VOA Bangla. Voice of America. Archived from the original on 12 December 2007. Retrieved 11 September 2006.
- ^ "Maoist Communist Centre (MCC)". Left-wing Extremist group. South Asia Terrorism Portal. Retrieved 2006-09-11.
- ^ "Several hurt in Singur clash". rediff News. Rediff.com India Limited. 28 January 2007. Retrieved 2007-03-15.
- ^ "Red-hand Buddha: 14 killed in Nandigram re-entry bid". The Telegraph. 15 March 2007. Archived from the original on December 4, 2012. Retrieved 2007-03-15.
- ^ "Terrorism and Rising Security Concerns in West Bengal | IPCS". www.ipcs.org. Retrieved 2021-11-25.
- ^ "2007-Nandigram violence: A state of failure". India Today. December 24, 2009. Retrieved 2021-11-25.
- ^ "CBI clean chit to Buddha govt on Nandigram firing". The Times of India. Retrieved 2021-11-25.
- ^ For more information on the Salim Group please see Sudono Salim
- ^ Asia Week
- ^ Far Easter Economic Review October 1998
- ^ Cite error: The named reference
land1was invoked but never defined (see the help page). - ^ People's Democracy. Thirty Years of Left Front Government in West Bengal Archived 1 April 2015 at the Wayback Machine
- ^ People's Democracy. West Bengal Left Front Govt: A Historic Anniversary
- ^ Chattopadhyay, Suhas (1979). "Operation Barga: A Comment". Economic and Political Weekly. 14 (49): 2022–2024. ISSN 0012-9976. JSTOR 4368206.
- ^ a b Banerjee, Abhijit V.; Gertler, Paul J.; Ghatak, Maitreesh (2002). "Empowerment and Efficiency: Tenancy Reform in West Bengal". Journal of Political Economy. 110 (2): 239–280. doi:10.1086/338744. ISSN 0022-3808. JSTOR 10.1086/338744. S2CID 35935397.
- ^ Pal, Sasanka Sekhar (1995). Impact of Tenancy Reforms on Production and Income Distribution: A Case Study of Operation Barga in West Bengal. National Centre for Agricultural Economics and Policy Research.