West Bengal Today An Anticipatory Post-Mortem

Post-Mortem Sumanta Banerjee The mess the West Bengal CPI(M) finds itself in today can be traced to two factors: first the party's partisan and unprofessional attitude towards the running of the state administration and second, as a consequence of the party's policy at various junctures to align with and to utilise lumpen elements in order to demolish political challenge, the rise of the underworld as a powerful arbiter both in politics and in civil society THE culture of the Congress(I) seems to have finally come to fruition under a Left regime in West Bengal. With almost two rapes every day (according to the West Bengal state government sources), large- scale rigging and violence in the recent Calcutta Corporation elections, and the hegemony of underworld goons in alliance with the police over Bengali society, West Bengal can now feel proud of at last catching up with those parts of India which form the core of the 'national mainstream', and where such trends have been established as norms for several decades.