Some years ago, I wrote for The Wire a tribute to Leon Trotsky on the anniversary of his death. Among reader mail, there was one from a postgraduate student of one of Kolkata’s (and the country’s) premier universities assailing the piece for ‘misrepresenting history’. I had, the student wrote, turned history on its head by referencing Stalin’s hounding of political opponents because all that was ‘a big lie’.The fiery missive went on to commiserate with poor me for still believing in stuff that had been discredited ‘at least fifty years ago’. There was no effort in that mail to substantively engage with Trotsky’s politics so as to critique or refute it. Repudiation, it seemed, was all that mattered.I recall that exchange (and a few similar others on different occasions) now because it tells me several things about Bengal’s once-proud Left. One, that often it not only had a closed mind on things, it actually liked to flaunt that attitude, secure in the belief that there was no second way of looking at something. And two, that there were only ‘us’ and ‘they’ – and, like George W Bush famously said, “whoever isn’t with us is with them, i.e., the enemy”.When insularity becomes a virtueThe closed mind, I dare say, has been a bane of the Left in Bengal. On some issues, it’s true, the Left everywhere insisted on staying proudly hidebound at certain points in time. But overall, the movement has moved on and readjusted its sights to reality on many matters in course of time. The flawed – or, at best, mixed – legacy of Stalinism is generally recognised across worldwide Left today, but scarcely so in Bengal.In the 1970s, when the two of us first read Isaac Deutscher together, my father struggled to come to terms with Stalinism’s whole picture, though he was too astute to hold on to his old beliefs around Stalin for long. But it’s fairly common even today – and my young correspondent was proof – to claim that the Soviet Union collapsed on itself because it had strayed from Stalinism’s straight and narrow path.Even Prof Ashok Mitra, a brilliant mind and a wonderful polemicist and essayist, seemed to believe to the very end that, but for the accidental presidency of Mikhail Gorbachev, the sun wouldn’t have set on the USSR’s long day of glory. And even my fairly recent peek into a party office in suburban West Bengal discovered on its walls the holy tetrad of Marx, Engels, Lenin and, yes, Stalin. Maybe the office of another party of the Left adds another photo to the tetrad: Mao Tse Tung’s. We are all secular theists, thank you!And not always secular, too, at any rate in the original meaning of that word. It’s quite common these days for proud Bengali leftists to be conspicuously religious. This comes with its expected concomitants. Someone I have known and respected for many years as a dedicated communist activist was visibly shocked when I happened to mention that, while at college, cheap beef rolls were our favourite snack. He didn’t have, he said, anything against beef rolls per se, yet he found it hard to reconcile to the fact that someone he liked should relish beef!And the complete dyslexia that seems to have taken hold of much of the Bengal Left’s grey matter! Even back in the 1970s, I often overheard my father gently reproving young activists for having given up on reading anything other than newspapers. Study circles and book clubs were not unknown commodities when we were kids, even in our provincial backwaters, but such things had dropped out of sight by the seventies. Personal commitment was still not uncommon among activists, many of whom were still willing to stake their future on the victory of the cause, but literacy in the fundamentals of their embraced ideology was at a steep premium. Slogans – and some good intentions – were all that mattered.1977, the true watershedAnd then came 1977, and everything changed with it. I didn’t live in the state by then, but it was as though I could still caress the sense of hope that was suddenly washing over everything back home. Some canny analysts have done brilliant assessments of the stellar achievements of the Left Front government’s first few years in office. Equally sharp minds have probed its failures and showed where those failures came from. All that is beyond my remit in any case. I will only try to look at the Left’s three-decades-plus in power through the prism of what came after.No sooner had the Left government been dislodged from power in 2011 than the winner – the Trinamool Congress (TMC) – assumed control of every lever of power at lightning speed. And not the levers of power alone: the TMC seemed successful in turning the page on the Left’s politics and ideology with astonishing swiftness. The Left resisted, of course, but only weakly at best.Also read: The Assembly Poll Results Take Us Back to the 1967 Moment: Not the End but the Beginning of the Real FightAnd soon enough, the resistance’s back was well and truly broken. Left activists and members deserted the mothership in droves. From a distance, it seemed extraordinary that what till recently had looked unassailable was coming apart at the seams so incredibly rapidly. Even the Left’s hold over intellectual elites began to weaken dramatically.So what went wrong?Anti-incumbency did, of course, feed into the debacle, and thirty-four years of uninterrupted power couldn’t but have come at significant cost to clean government. Job creation inevitably lagged behind expectations and promises. In the later years of Left rule, graft and personal corruption of some ministers and party functionaries also began to emerge as important issues in the public domain.Ever the old-school communist, Ashok Mitra complained in his memoir of some top leaders scoffing at old-world propriety in the matter of using government resources in non-governmental matters. He left the Cabinet, though the venerable Jyoti Basu, his chief minister, wanted him to stay on. Mitra felt the government was being pressured into making far too many compromises on the original principles of transparency and probity.All that was true, but could hardly have tipped the scales in the Trinamool Congress party’s favour in 2011. There’s no question that most top Left leaders were not tainted by financial corruption, though retail corruption had been climbing steadily through the later Left years. At any rate, the kinds of scams dogging the TMC’s every step in recent years were unheard-of before 2011.And yet the Left in power had corrupted the administration in ways that had not been known earlier. West Bengal had morphed into a party state, where the party apparatus came to be so thickly enmeshed with the government’s administrative machinery that the two became virtually indistinguishable.From the state level down to the mohalla, the party decided on practically everything: job appointments, routine transfers, property disputes, resource allocations, distribution of relief in emergencies … the works. I have even known about family frictions being arbitrated by avuncular local leaders as a matter of course.A friend seeking to register a property he had purchased was asked by the registering authority to ‘go sort it out’ with a local party apparatchik who was trying to decide who had the first right to buy that property — my friend or a cooperative society formed by party-affiliated local teachers. Securing a job transfer to a preferred location had to be first cleared by the party in many cases.In some of the essays in his magnificent Field Notes from a Waterborne Land, the writer Parimal Bhattacharya documents the nexus between the party and the local administration in stark detail.Where did this leave the party when power deserted it?In the party state, the party minus state power has no leg to stand on. Besides, organised systems of distributing favours inevitably create privileged pressure groups even in the best of times. Here, many years of the same favour networks not only engendered corruption, however localised that may have been, but also made those networks the proxies of the party.A time came when the proxies became the principals.Add to that the cultural insularity that had taken hold of the party after years of uninterrupted, raw power. The intellectual arrogance that’s often a character trait of well-meaning activists believing in the infallibility of their mission served to harden that insularity. So, unknown to its leaders, the movement was eviscerated by the years in power. Which is why, once that power slipped from the party’s hands, its proxies jumped off the sinking ship and into the new power hierarchies without the slightest shilly-shallying.Also read: Has the CPI(M) Forgotten its Strong Federal Roots?What had been – or looked like – the Left’s carefully crafted networks of power overnight metamorphosed into the new party in power – the TMC. And since the TMC’s rhetoric was stridently populist and anti-establishment, there was, semantically speaking, not much to choose between the Left and the TMC also, at any rate to begin with.So while power changed hands, there was nothing by way of a complete break with the past. West Bengal stayed a party state – with a new slate of leaders. There was serious political repression during the TMC’s first years in office, but since the Left’s once-famous cadre base had fractured overnight, there was no real organised resistance to that repression.A depoliticised stateAfter the first few years under Left rule witnessed a great efflorescence of (mainly the visual) arts, including cinema, Bengal’s culture fell into a status-quoist rut. Virtually unchallenged political power and the Left’s customary intellectual arrogance hastened a process of large-scale depoliticisation of cadres. So when the Left government was dismantled in 2011 and the TMC stepped into its shoes, the transfer of power did not feel like the violent dislocation it might have been expected to be on every front.In effect, much of the Left transitioned on to the TMC’s platform virtually seamlessly. The proud Bengal Left had been hollowed out of its politics, maybe not fully but substantially.That’s mainly why supporters and activists of the Left quietly voted for the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in large numbers, both in the 2019 and 2024 parliamentary elections and also, I suspect, in the recently concluded assembly elections. From all appearances, vast swathes of Left-leaning Bengalis are also reasonably happy – for the time being, in any case – to have the BJP in power in the state. In many ways, the TMC’s rule was no doubt a huge nuisance.Yet it would have required a massive leap of faith some thirty or thirty-five years ago to imagine the present state of the Left’s psyche where the BJP’s politics becomes an acceptable option. It’s a fair guess that if my father or his brother were alive today, they would have died of shame.This is the concluding piece in a two-part essay on Left politics in West Bengal. Read part 1.Anjan Basu can be reached at basuanjan52@gmail.com