The Left and elections in West Bengal

By C.P.CHANDRASEKHAR &
JAYATI GHOSH

The Assembly elections in West Bengal have resulted in the defeat of the Left Front government after 34 years in power. This edition of MacroScan examines votes polled to see whether this actually reflects a big decline in popular support for the Left in the State.

BusinessLine, MacroScan, May 17, 2011

This is clearly an important moment in Indian politics. The dust has still not settled in the five States where elections to the State Assemblies were held, but their impact is already reverberating cross the country. Not just the elections in West Bengal, Tamil Nadu, Assam, Kerala and Puducherry, but even by-election results (as in Kadapa in Andhra Pradesh) may turn out to have national significance for the course of both politics and economic policies at Central and State levels.

The two States where Left Front governments were in power have captured the bulk of media attention.

And within that, the focus has been on West Bengal, not only because of the importance of Left politics in that state for the Left movement in the country as a whole, but because the Left Front government there had managed to win elections for a record seven consecutive elections.

Pyrrhic victory

In Kerala, where incumbent governments have been ejected by voters every five years for nearly four decades, the vote was extremely close and the incumbent Left Democratic Front very nearly made it back to power.

Indeed, the victory of the Opposition may well be seen as pyrrhic because of the likely instability of the future UDF coalition government.

Across the board, it is the Left's loss of State power in West Bengal which is being widely seen as the most devastating and full of portent for the future.

Interestingly, this view seems to be shared by both the opponents and proponents of organised Left parties in the country: that this huge loss shows that the people have decisively rejected the Left Front government, and that the major Left parties (such as the CPI (M) and the CPI will find it impossible to recover from this massive defeat.

In some quarters this is being celebrated; within the Left, there is a sense of desolation and anxiety; in other quarters, more dispassionate observers are concerned about the lack of the moderating power of the Left in preventing a national rightward lurch, particularly in economic policies. Mainstream media responses have contributed to this by talking about “the death of the Left” and similar stereotypical responses. But how much of this is actually justified by the voting patterns that have been revealed in the latest elections?

There is no question that the Left Front government has been handed a resounding defeat, with most Ministers losing their seats and the seat share of the parties involved in the coalition falling to one-third of the former strength in the Assembly.

Extraordinary show

Chart 1 shows the number of Assembly seats held or implicitly garnered by the Left Front in successive elections since its historic seventh victory in 2006. It is clear that there has been a very significant, even dramatic, decline.

But note that the number of seats gained in 2006 represented an extraordinary achievement: 80 per cent of Assembly seats (well over the two-thirds majority) claimed by a government that had already been in power in the State for three decades. This is an achievement unparalleled in independent India, and probably anywhere in the world. It is rare to find a democratically elected government that retains power for a second or third term.

When this happens anywhere else in India, the mainstream media are quick to declare it as a victory for good governance, though they have always been much more grudging of Left victories. That the Left Front government in 2006 was able to retain power to garner a record seventh term and even add to its tally of Assembly seats compared to 2001 indicates that it had an appeal among the electorate that was both unprecedented and remarkable.

Factors at play

Some would argue that the sharp decline in the number of seats thereafter suggests that the government then squandered this advantage.

Certainly the causes for the decline can and will be analysed threadbare inside and outside the various parties that formed the Left Front government. Many factors must have played roles, of which the poor handling of the policy of land acquisition for industrialisation is the one that is most commonly cited.

The proactive coming together of all sorts of disparate and otherwise conflicting political elements at both Centre and State level, with the sole aim of dislodging the Left from its bastion, was also definitely important.

But the combination of complacency and exhaustion that can be created by 34 years of uninterrupted rule should not be underplayed either.

This combination was evident to many external observers. Of course it was then rudely shocked by the experience of the 2009 general elections.

But it may be that the subsequent attempts at political revival among Left supporters were too belated and inadequate to cope with what is only a very natural human desire among the people for political change, even if the nature of that change is unpredictable or problematic.

But does this mean that the people of the State have decisively rejected the politics of the Left?

41% of votes

A detailed look at voting shares provides a more nuanced understanding. Chart 2 indicates that even in this latest Assembly election, when the verdict of the electorate appears to be so decisive against the incumbent government, the Left parties still managed to garner more than 41 per cent of the votes. This is still no mean achievement for a government that has been in power for nearly 35 years.

To put this into perspective, it should be noted that most State governments in India are holding on to power on the basis of much smaller vote shares, generally well below 40 per cent.

This includes the Congress government in Andhra Pradesh (whose position appears much more tenuous after the Kadapa by-election) and the Congress-NCP coalition government in Maharashtra.

This also includes the Nitish Kumar government in Bihar, which is the mainstream media's current favourite and is being portrayed as a model for Mamata Banerjee to follow. It is only because politics in West Bengal (as in Kerala) is much more polarised between two contending groups that the first-past-the-post system does not generate parties that can come to power with relatively small shares of the vote.

It may be more surprising that in terms of the actual number of votes polled, the Left Front has significantly improved upon its performance in the 2009 general elections, and has even come close to the number of votes it managed to get in its record-breaking seventh victory in 2006. Chart 3 shows that in this Assembly election, the Left Front managed to attract nearly 1.1 million additional voters compared to 2009.

Not only was the Left Front vote in 2011 very close to that in 2006, this increase was almost equal to the extent by which the Left Front had fallen short of the votes of the TMC-Congress combine in 2009.

Reasons for optimism

This helps explain the optimism that was evident among Left party cadres just before the results were declared.

This may partly reflect the disconnect between the parties and the people, as a result of which they did not anticipate the electoral debacle. It can also be partly understood when it is recognised that in fact many more people actually did come out to vote for Left parties than had done so in 2009. The disconnect partly comes from the fact that the party cadre apparently did not anticipate that many more people would turn out to vote for the Opposition.

Overall, there was a significant increase in the number of votes cast overall between 2009 and 2011, of nearly 4.8 million votes according to the Election Commission's preliminary estimates. This was in part because of a 3.7 million increase in size of the electorate, i.e. new young voters, and in part because voter turnout increased sharply.

The difference in this election is really that the Opposition combine of Trinamool and Congress parties managed to swing a much larger share of these new voters to vote for change in government.

New voters

Chart 4 shows that of the additional votes cast, the Left Front managed to get less than a quarter, and that nearly three-quarters accrued to the Opposition combine. It is also worth noting that more than half the new voters were women. Firstly, the number of women on electoral rolls increased somewhat more than men; and secondly, more of them voted than before.

While the male voting percentage increased from 82.3 per cent to 84.4 per cent, the female turnout went up from 80.3 per cent to 84.5 per cent, exceeding male turnout in a State where traditionally voter turnout amongst women voters has been much less than among men.

This is obviously a major aspect that the Left needs to introspect on. Whatever one may think of the result, there can be no denying that this shows that Indian electoral democracy is among the most vibrant in the world.

Obviously none of this changes the basic reality of this particular State Assembly election – that it has involved a major defeat for the Left that may have far-reaching implications.

But it can by no means be taken as showing that there is massive dimunition in Left support among the people of West Bengal.

Certainly it is not just premature but downright wrong to write off the Left as a major political force.

This result too is likely to have a significant bearing on how politics evolves in the State in future.

http://www.thehindubusinessline.com/opinion/columns/c-p-chandrasekhar/article2023879.ece

Recent Growth in West Bengal

C.P. Chandrasekhar and Jayati Ghosh
12.05.2008
(Article posted at MACROSCAN)

For the greater part of the past three decades, West Bengal has been among the middle ranking states of India, both in terms of per capita income and human development indicators. This has been despite the special feature of the state, that it has been ruled continuously by a Left Front government that has provided political stability and also, particularly in the first two decades, a clear orientation towards improving the conditions of workers and peasants.This has made West Bengal the most active state in respect of land reform in the past two decades, leading the rest of the country not only in recording and legal recognition of the rights of sharecroppers but also in enforcing land ceilings and distributing surplus and vested land. (It should be remembered that even now West Bengal distributes more land to landless peasants than it acquires, and certainly distributes more than any other state.) It also made the state a pioneer in the decentralisation of powers to the panchayats, well before the 73rd and 74th Amendments to the Constitution encouraged greater devolution in other states as well.While these measures certainly contributed to the breaking of the “agrarian impasse” in Bengal and allowed for more rapid and diversified agricultural performance in the state, in other respects the economic performance of the state has been below expectation. This reflects the inherent difficulty of an autonomous development trajectory within a single state, even with a federal system of government, and the role of broader macroeconomic processes in determining outcomes even within the state.To this must be added several other constraints on growth, which are essentially the effects of history and geography.

At Independence, West Bengal was among the more industrialised states of the country. Subsequently, however, a combination of factors meant that organised manufacturing industry generally stagnated, especially compared to other regions. These included the absence of a local bourgeoisie with an inherent interest in investing within the state; reduction in public investment in railways that had previously encouraged the local engineering industries; and national policies such as the freight equalisation policy that eliminated the state’s regional cost advantages from proximity to coal and steel resources.In addition, West Bengal has been situated in what has been a relatively poor and economically stagnant region of India, such that there have been very few economic growth stimuli coming from the surrounding region. Indeed, for the better part of the past two decades the economy of West Bengal has been the only dynamic one in the region.

Despite these constraints, it is not generally known that over the 1990s West Bengal was one of the fastest growing states in India, and actually showed the second highest rate of aggregate SDP growth among major states, after Karnataka. This tendency was even more marked in per capita terms, because West Bengal has been successful in controlling fertility to a greater extent than many other states.While agricultural output growth was the dominant reason for this, industrial output also grew rapidly, not so much in the organised sector but in the non-registered and unorganised manufacturing industries that proliferated as a consequence of greater rural prosperity.

For the past decade, West Bengal has had the largest number of and the most rapid growth in small-scale and cottage industries among all the states of India.However, much like small manufacturing elsewhere in the country, such small units in West Bengal have recently been adversely affected by neo-liberal economic policies implemented by the central government, which have led to rising costs and greater competition from both organised manufacturing and liberalised imports. The negative fallout of these processes on small manufacturers and traders has been particularly evident since the start of the current decade.These tendencies in turn form the backdrop to the new industrialisation strategy of the Government of West Bengal especially since 2004, which has sought to engage, attract and provide incentives for large corporate capital in order to increase the rate of industrial investment. This article considers the available evidence on growth trends in the state since 1999-2000.

Chart 1 indicates that after 1999-2000, West Bengal was growing slightly faster than India as a whole in per capita terms until 2004-05, after which its expansion has been slightly less rapid but still creditable. The per capita income of West Bengal is now slightly lower than the national average.Charts 2a and 2b show that growth up to 2004-05 was accompanied by even more rapid changes in the sectoral composition of output than have occurred in the rest of India. As for India as a whole, the share of the secondary sector has remained almost constant, increasing only very slightly. But the share of the primary sector (which in West Bengal is dominantly agriculture) has shrunk by as much as 7 percentage points in just five years, with the gap being taken up by services expansion.

Within services, only a few sub-sectors account for this growing share. The transport and communications sectors, trade, hotels and restauranats and public administration and community services have actually fallen in terms of share of State Domestic Product in these five years. However, banking and other financial services and real estate and business services have increased their respective shares sharply.The critical issue from the point of view of well-being of the people, of course, is how far the changes in sectoral composition of output have involved changes in employment patterns as well. Therefore, Table 1 presents some calculations of the relative shares in output and employment by major sectors in 1999-2000 and 2004-05, using NSS estimates based on the two recent large-sample Employment and Unemployment Surveys.

Table 1: Recent structural changes in output and employment in West Bengal

NSSO Employment and Unemployment 55th and 61st Rounds for work force data, referring to Usual Status Workers (Principal plus Subsidiary).
The evidence presented in Table 1 is disconcerting. While the share of the primary sector in outout has fallen sharply, as noted above, its share in employment has barely changed at all, and it continues to account for around 46-47 per cent of the work force. This is also true of India as a whole, of course, although the absolute share of the primary sector in employment is lower in West Bengal (at less than half of all workers), and the decline in share has also been smaller than in the average for India.But the manufacturing sector has also declined in relative importance, to some extent in terms of the share of output and even more in terms of the proportion of workers engaged in such activity. Meanwhile, the services sectors that have accounted for the biggest increases in share of output have increased their share of employment to a much lesser extent. In particular, financial, real estate and business services accounted for 23 per cent of the State Domestic Product in 2004-05, but only 2 per cent of the work force! So both in the manufacturing sector and in the more dynamic services sectors, growth of output has involved very little expansion in employment.This is of course in a nutshell the central problem of development today, not only in West Bengal but in all of India. Clearly it cannot be solved by a concentration only on corporate-driven growth in industry or services, as such investment is typically more capital-intensive and generates less employment per unit of output than investment by smaller producers. So the state government obviously has to develop a multi-pronged strategy for employment generation that encompasses several different approaches.There is a further issue on the nature of recent growth in West Bengal, which is in terms of its regional spread – or rather, the lack of it. Post-1999 income growth has been overwhelmingly concentrated in the metropolitan area of Kolkata and the surrounding hinterland, thereby widening income gaps between Kolkata and the rest of the state that were already very large.Chart 3 show the disparity between per capita income in Kolkata and in all other districts in 2004-05. No other district had a per capita income that was even half of that of Kolkata, not even those that are contiguous or nearby the capital. More than half the districts had per capita incomes of around one-third that of Kolkata, or even less. While it does not appear on the chart, it should also be noted that for almost every district, the per capita income gap with respect to Kolkata has actually widened since 1999-2000, indicating that the recent pattern of economic growth has accentuated spatial inequalities within the state.

Finally, of course, it is well known that growth in aggregate income need not always translate into improvements in material consumption of the people in general. This is evident from a comparison of the per capita income of the districts with estimates of mean per capita consumption obtained from the NSS 61st Round consumer expenditure survey. Table 2 presents this information.The district-level data on per capita consumption is derived by using Small Area Estimation techniques to arrive at estimates with the least variation for each district. They do have a number of limitations, since the sample sizes are generally not large enough to permit generalisation. Nevertheless, the data presented in the table reveal several interesting facts. Firstly, and expectedly, there is substantial variation between the per capita income and mean consumption in general and across districts. Second, in several cases the variation is so large as to change the rank of the district quite significantly, as for example for North 24 Parganas (where the rank improves hugely for per capita consumption) and Jalpaiguri (where the rank falls sharply for per capita consumption).

Table 2: Per capita income and estimated per capita consumption in the districts of West Bengal, 2004-05


While the disparities between Kolkata and the rest of the state in terms of per capita consumption were also large, they were slightly less than has been observed for per capita income. Overall, this table suggests the need for caution in interpreting per capita District Domestic Product as an accurate indicator of either consumption or overall well-being of the local people. It is evident that the estimated per capita consumption in the different districts was somewhere around one half and one-third of the per capita output. Assuming that workers and small peasants consume all or most of their income (and may even dissave through debt) this suggests a very large share of surplus in the form of profits, rents, etc. This knowledge allows for a further refinement of the basic development question mentioned earlier: how can existing surpluses be tapped and mobilised to ensure both expansion of productive capacity in a way that creates gainful employment opportunities and better material and human development conditions for the people? It is this very difficult question that must be answered if the development strategy of West Bengal government is to be successful in creating unambiguous and widely welcomed gains for the citiziens of the state.

(For table and chart, see www.macroscan.com)