Author: Editorial
Publication: The Indian Express
Date: December 3, 2005
URL: http://www.indianexpress.com/archive_full_story.php?content_id=83157
Introduction: Bengal's CM can make history, by helping EC to help his state
The Bihar poll was spectacular not simply because it brought the collapse of a 15-year old regime. It was spectacular, most of all, because it was conducted in a visibly free and fair manner in a state that had earned a deservedly formidable reputation for being the country's political badland. The Election Commission's and its intrepid advisor's clean-up operation in Bihar would have appeared almost mythical in retrospect had there not been the painstaking build-up and determined follow-through. Now that CEC B.B. Tandon has pledged to use the EC's ''Bihar experience'' to conduct Assembly polls in West Bengal next year, we hope he stays the course.
The ruling regime in Bihar was known to employ the full weight of state resources to bolster its electoral prospects in crude and brazen ways. By all accounts, it's a more refined story in West Bengal. Here, the incumbency is even more long-standing - the state has returned a CPI(M)-led regime to power for six successive elections, each time with a definitive majority. Each time, too, there are murmurs from the Opposition of ''scientific rigging''. Arguably, that could just be the loser complaining of sour grapes. Except that there are reasonable grounds to suspect that not all of the CPI(M)'s longevity flows from its durable hold over its social base, or indeed the index of opposition disunity. The distortions may or may not be enough to alter the overall character of the mandate, but they have appeared to be disquietingly regular. There is the role played at election-time by the partisan Coordination Committee of State Government Employees and the politicised police force. Then, the large number of booths where the winning candidate polled 90-95 per cent of votes and the eerie absence of the Opposition campaign in large swathes of the state. Also, manipulation of voters lists and accounts of false voting on polling day.
A combative EC, fresh from a job well done, is exactly what the state needs. The nation may yet find that the CPI(M) has nothing to hide at all. In that case, we shall bury the doubt and salute the party's unique longevity. But if the mandate is being touched up, albeit in non-violent and superbly coordinated ways, it's time we knew. Buddhadev Bhattacharya is probably Bengal's most dynamic chief minister in recent history. He can go down in history as its most remarkable - if he helps the EC.