Electoral Politics in West Bengal: The Growth of the United Front

Abstract

IT TEST BENGAL is one of two states in the Indian Union where India's Communist parties have gained a predominant share of the decisionmaking power of the ministries. From March 2, i967, when the Congress party of West Bengal failed for the first time since Independence to gain a majority in the state Legislative Assembly, until November 2i, i967, when the Governor of the state appointed a successor ministry, West Bengal was governed by a coalition of fourteen parties, including both the Communist party of India (CPI) and the Communist party of India-Marxist (CPM). Again, after a period of President's Rule in i968, the same coalition of parties was returned in the elections of February i969, this time with a much larger number of seats in the Legislative Assembly and a much larger role for the two Communist parties. The growth of communism in West Bengal is only one aspect of the complicated political situation obtaining in this small, truncated state. Politicization of Bengalis into modern forms of organization began almost from the inception of British rule in India, and was quickly accentuated in this century by the first partition of the Province of Bengal in I905 and the shifting of the capital of British India from the Bengali-speaking city of Calcutta to the traditional center of imperial power in New Delhi in i9i2. In response to these two events Bengal's political leadership launched a number of political movements, some directed against the British, some directed against the Gandhians in the Indian National Congress, almost all seeking to reclaim the dominant position in India's political life that Bengal had attained in the late nineteenth century. Political activity reached a peak of intensity in the early i94os, when Calcutta and its surrounding areas were being occupied by more than 200,000 Allied troops, the Muslim League was agitating for partition, and the Congress and Marxist-left parties were engaged in a Quit India movement that drew heavily on the terrorist tradition of Bengali political life. No sooner had this peak of political activity been reached than Bengal witnessed in rapid succession a major famine in I943, the second partition of the province in I947, and large-scale communal riots that began in August i946 and culminated in the influx of more than five million refugees during the following twenty years. In the midst of the great economic hardship that resulted