As panchayat elections are nearing in West Bengal — voting is on July 8 — three streams of political discourse are becoming more and more apparent across different platforms. The first stream often reiterates the inevitability of the Trinamool Congress retaining its majority despite several corruption and criminal charges against members of the leadership in recent times. This line of discourse primarily banks on the large-scale cash-transfer schemes and the ‘incorruptible’ public image of the Chief Minister.
The second discourse acknowledges the recent win recorded by the Left-Congress alliance in the recent by-election (it is another matter that the candidate has since joined Trinamool) and other local body elections while dismissing their chance at becoming a harbinger of change at the larger electoral level. This is partly due to the previous Assembly Election performances and more importantly a critique of the Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPIM) led Left Front being a party of ‘old-veterans’.
The third stream that is doing the rounds still hopes that the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) could be a game-changer and could stand up to the alleged violence and cut-money culture that Trinamool is often associated with. However, this stream of discourse is getting quieter because of the regular in-and-out migration of political leaders between the Trinamool and the BJP. Therefore, at this juncture, the BJP might be considered to be in an incapacitated condition within the political arena of West Bengal. In this article, we will focus on the changes that have occurred in the rural economy of West Bengal during the last decade, and how those changes have shaped the political formations for both the Trinamool and the Left. This might provide a deeper understanding of the first and second discourses that we have mentioned above, and take the discussion beyond the tiring binary rhetoric of ‘Trinamool’s cash transfer worked’ and ‘CPI(M) is old’.
