The Communist Party of India (Marxist), in an internal party note, has said slogans such as “BJMool’ describing the Trinamool Congress and the Bharatiya Janata party (BJP) as two sides of the same coin have created confusion among the people and did not work for the party in the recent West Bengal Assembly elections.
“The understanding of the CPI(M) is that the BJP is not like any other political party, since the BJP is governed by fascist RSS. This is party’s understanding. But during the election some confusion was created that BJP and the TMC were alike. Slogans like BJPMool and calling BJP and TMC two sides of the same coin gave rise to confusion,” an internal note circulated by the party earlier this month said.
The document says the internal assessment of the party is “the BJP and the TMC are never the same. But something that needs to be kept in mind is that from the very start of Trinamool, its registration and the symbol, everything has been done as per instructions of the RSS. One of the characteristics of the BJP is that the party which takes its support it wants to gobble it. In the 2019 Lok Sabha polls, the contest between the two parties is not fixed,” the statement said.
During the run-up to the 2021 Assembly polls in West Bengal, not only the senior CPI(M) leadership was heard raising slogans like BJMool during the Assembly polls but described the political contest between the BJP and the TMC as “shadow boxing”.
Ideological question
The note titled “Circumstances during elections and our work” tries to resolve the ideological question which not only the CPI(M) but most of the Left parties in the State are grappling with — who is their bigger enemy in West Bengal, the BJP or the TMC. Political observers feel that several years after the former Chief Minister and veteran communist leader Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee gave the slogan “BJP Hatao Desh Bachao, TMC hatao Rajya Bachao [Defeat BJP to save country, Remove TMC to save State”], the party has not been able to give a new clear message to its supporters.
It has taken two humiliating defeats for the CPI(M) to address the question who their bigger political opponent in the State is. In 2019, the CPI(M)-led Left Front failed to win a single seat of the 42 Lok Sabha seats and in the 2021 Assembly polls also, it failed to win a single Assembly seat.
Many psephologists and political leaders believe that committed cadres of the Left voted for the TMC to keep the BJP out of power in the State. The 2021 Assembly polls saw a complete decimation of the Left Front with its vote share plunging to a meagre 4.73% and the Left failing to elect any member to the Assembly almost after five decades.
The issue was also discussed by the party leaders in Kolkata on Thursday, the occasion of 133th birth anniversary of Muzaffar Ahmad, one of the pioneering figures of the communist movement in the country. Senior CPI(M) leaders, including State Secretary Surjya Kanta Mishra and Polit Bureau member Md. Salim argued that slogans such as ‘BJMool’ were never meant to give the impression that the BJP and the TMC were the same.
‘Congshal’ terminology
Mr. Salim referred to a terminology “Congshal” used by the Left parties in the 1970s to refer to the Congress and Naxals, who were political opponents of the Left parties.
“Did we not refer to the Congress and the Naxals as Congshal in 1970s? But did it mean they were one? They are two different parties,” Mr. Salim said. He argued that such coupling meant that the two political forces complement each other and serve each other’s purpose.
