Pandua (West Bengal): Fifteen years after losing power in West Bengal, the Communist Party of India (Marxist) is trying to reinvent itself by going back to an older playbook. The party’s Bangla Bachao Yatra (Save Bengal March) is trying to revive its mass-line politics of the 1960s and 70s, when it was an opposition force rooted in the struggles of workers, peasants and students.In a political environment currently defined by religious polarisation, party leaders say the yatra has been designed to shift the public discourse towards class and livelihood issues. The key concerns being highlighted include the plight of migrant workers, microfinance debt, river erosion, agricultural distress, collapse of local industry and the precarity faced by women and agricultural labourers.In Hooghly district’s Pandua, where families survive on agriculture and migrant-worker remittances, this turn is visible.Rabi became visibly emotional while speaking on stage, as part of a new format the party has rolled out during the yatra. “My family has four members. My husband is bedridden with tuberculosis. My son works in a cloth mill in another state and sends maybe one or two thousand rupees a month,” said Rabi Singh, a daily labourer who belongs to a Scheduled Caste. “Work under the rural job schemes has stopped. Like all the poor, I am now unemployed. Still, I’m somehow keeping my daughter in M.A. at Burdwan University,” she said.CPI(M) central committee member Minakshi Mukherjee and agricultural labour leader Banna Tudu offered Rabi support, promising that the party would try to help with her daughter’s higher education. Another homemaker, Lakshmi Das, who also participated in the rally, spoke about microfinance: “They pushed us to take loans to run our homes. We thought it was like the old self-help groups, with easy terms. Now they want 15 per cent interest per week. If we don’t pay, they make the police call us and send court notices. We have no income – how can we pay this?”The yatra began on November 29 from Tufanganj in North Bengal’s Cooch Behar district. The formal route is approximately 1,100 kilometres, though parallel rallies across districts bring the total distance covered to an estimated 1,500 km.A ‘para baithak’ or mohalla meeting by the CPI(M) in Murshidabad. Photo: Joydeep SarkarCPI(M) state secretary Mohammad Salim told The Wire that the yatra is aimed at confronting both the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and the Trinamool Congress (TMC), and rebuilding contact with people’s everyday struggles.“We are exposing BJP’s divisive politics and anti-people policies, and the TMC government’s corruption that has pushed ordinary people into crisis,” he said. “But we’re not just speaking, we’re listening – to tea garden workers in unbearable conditions, Adivasis whose land is being taken, people facing river erosion, handloom workers and jute farmers in distress, migrant workers abused and underpaid, workers thrown out after industrial closures.”The format of the yatra, party leaders explained, deviates from traditional rallies by featuring ordinary citizens such as agricultural labourers, mothers of deceased individuals and unemployed youth as key speakers, rather than reserving the microphone solely for party leaders. The party aims to use the platform to generate organisational and legal action based on the grievances shared.The Wire followed the yatra last week as it entered Purba Bardhaman’s Memari via Satgachia in Nadia.“We are growing very little potato this year,” said Pintu Hansda, an Adivasi youth from Gantar village in Purba Bardhaman. “There is no work, so we are forced to cultivate just to survive. We didn’t know our legal rights.”“In Purba Bardhaman alone, over 9.14 lakh job cards are lying in dustbins. These are the poor people’s right-to-work cards. To punish them politically, their rights have simply been thrown away. No work, no income. Where should the poor go? That is why this yatra is calling for struggle across the state,” said Mukherjee, who is one of the emerging faces of the party in West Bengal.The yatra is also an opportunity for the party to translate political speeches into small institutional interventions.For instance, in Pandua, where microfinance debt is a major concern, a legal aid centre was opened to provide families trapped in the debt cycle and run campaigns against taking out predatory loans. In Murshidabad as well, a migrant worker’s mother arrested as a suspected Bangladeshi inaugurated a party-run help centre to assist workers who travel to other states – helping with documentation, legal advice, wage disputes, accidents or harassment. For a district that sends out large numbers of migrant labourers, it is both a humanitarian and political step.In Nadia, the mother of Tamanna Khatun, a schoolgirl killed in a bomb attack allegedly perpetrated by TMC supporters, addressed a rally, while the father of a jawan named Jhantu Sardar, who died in the line of duty, joined leaders on the dais. The party used these appearances to connect livelihood issues with themes of loss, political violence and sacrifice.Sabina Sheikh, the grieving mother of Tamanna Khatun, the schoolgirl killed in a bomb attack allegedly by TMC supporters, addresses a rally during the Bangla Bachao Yatra in Kaliganj, Nadia. Photo: Joydeep SarkarAt Mogra in Hooghly, on a winter evening around 8 pm, people waited on the roadside for the yatra to arrive. One elderly member of the audience observed, “When meetings happen inside homes, on roadside corners, on small stages and when the mic is not just with leaders but with common people, that’s when trust returns.”According to the organisers, they have reinitiated ‘para baithak’ or small informal gatherings, a tool the party had forgotten for some time, to connect with people. The party, criticised for years as bureaucratic and distant, can be seen using these efforts to attempt to rebuild face-to-face relationships around everyday concerns. The question remains: in a deeply polarised political climate, would these efforts yield any result?“What’s notable is that local issues are being raised in front of the leadership. Its impact will depend on whether the party can build movements at the local level and actually draw people into struggle. It’s too early to say how much it will reshape state politics,” warns political analyst Subhamoy Moitra. For now, what is clear is that the CPI(M) is trying to move West Bengal’s political conversation away from a narrow communal binary and back towards work, land and dignity – using methods that look strikingly like its opposition-era politics of half a century ago. This is also an attempt to claw back relevance in a state where the party’s vote share has collapsed, its organisation has thinned out, and it has been squeezed between TMC and BJP. The Bangla Bachao Yatra is scheduled to conclude on December 17 at Kamarhati. The party’s social media accounts are full of professionally made short documentaries highlighting the issues facing the state. However, beyond the online outreach, what the party does with the stories it has collected at the ground level, and how it translates those narratives into sustained organisational and political results at the ground level, will decide whether this is just a one-off spectacle or not.