National News Service, Kolkata, 18 May 2006: The Communists are back. West Bengal is the only State where there is no incumbency factor, election after election. It is as if they have worked some kind of miracle and the people of West Bengal live in El Dorado.

In the last 30 years West Bengal has slid in all economic indices. In 2001 the number of unemployed registered with the Employment Exchange was 5,500,000. Today the number is 7,500,000. Is it the unemployed hordes that went out and voted for the left front?

In the Durgapur-Asansol industrial belt, 80% of the factories have shut down. Have those people who lost their livelihood descended into mass dementia and gone and voted for the left front?

Starving father and child in Amlasol

The living conditions in the villages are desperate. In Amlasol in West Mednipur people are dying of hunger – now. Their living standard harks back to the Middle Ages – without electricity and without clean water. In an act of mass lunacy they went to vote for the left front.

Yet an apparently clean election shows that they have won 50% of the vote. Houdini is dead and P. C. Sorcar, Jr. is a pale imitation of his father; otherwise we could have attributed it to magic. We have to go back in time to see the real reasons for the CPI-M election win.

In 1977 when the CPI-M first came to power, Jyoti Basu unconditionally surrendered to Indira Gandhi, assuring her that he and his party would remain loyal servants to her and her descendants, or anybody nominated by her or her descendants. This has indeed been borne out by the fact that no Congress Government, aside from a few noises now and then, has ever threatened the left front in West Bengal. On the contrary they have done everything to sabotage the opposition. They have planted their agents such as Subrata Mukherjee in the opposition to try and implode it from within, or nominated conniving political operators like Pranab Mukherjee to negotiate oppositional unity. Nor has the left front ever threatened any Congress Government at the center.

Spineless Chief Electoral Officers nominated in West Bengal, and Election Commissioners like M. S. Gill, have actively supported the murder of democracy in West Bengal. Things reached such a level during the last Lok Sabha Elections that it caused acute embarrassment and the Election Commission had to show it was doing something. The great brains that ran the Government came across a brilliant plan by telling the Election Commission to put up a great show of righteousness, so that the public would be fooled into believing that the Commission is no longer turning a blind eye to poll-rigging.

Then the government told them to delete the names of 20 lakh voters from the opposition and add 18 lakh voters to the left front. The opposition never knew what hit them. In the opposition party all are leaders, and very few workers exist. They assumed that the Election Commission had deleted the names of bogus voters. The Election Commission then sent out observers (read bureaucrats) who put up a great show in red bastions, deleting four or five names with great fanfare and media attention.

Then came phase II of the plan, when Budha Bhatacharya declared himself a capitalist. According to Einstein’s theory, the universe at infinity folds back onto itself. Hence, a die-hard communist could become a capitalist as the leftists have reached infinity. As Shrii P. R. Sarkar, the founder of the Proutist movement has said “Capitalism turns men into beggars and Communism turns beggars into beasts”. This explains why the leftists in West Bengal are beggar-beasts. This declaration (of Buddhadev Bhattacarya declaring himself as a capitalist) allowed the Marwaris (promoters) and assorted capitalists to declare that Budha Bhattacharya was their Indian idol. They proceeded to launch a media campaign that bamboozled the inhabitants of this god-forsaken state. Their campaign puts to shame earlier masters such as Goebbels and Berlusconi.

The promoter mafia and assorted capitalists were promised a free hand in all their activities and were promised that the police and bureaucracy would be at their beck and call. A prime example was that as soon as the left front won the Royal Calcutta Golf Club, now run by a media moghul, they shut two gates used by local residents as a shortcut and for morning walks. When these hapless citizens protested, they were ruthlessly lathi-charged. Welcome to the new beggar-beast land.

The last phase was a precursor for things to happen on a national scale. The Election Commission came up with another toy some years back called the Electronic Voting Machine (EVM). This is basically a programmable voting machine. One presses a button against a symbol and a vote is recorded against that symbol and stored in memory. The memory is then read and the totals tallied from all the EVM's.

This unit has a Programmable Read Only Memory (PROM). What happens if the unit is programmed to give a certain percentage of votes to the ruling party? These units are left open during the election period, and only a cursory check is made before the elections are held. If the opposition is impotent, no checks are made. Even if an error is noticed, it is then categorized as a malfunctioning EVM and replaced by another just before the vote, with no time to investigate the new machine.

The most disturbing fact is that these units are manufactured and maintained by government undertakings, whose functionaries are appointed by Ministerial dispensations. In most democratic countries with a tinge of civilization, electronic voting systems are posted in the public domain for public scrutiny, so that any shortcomings can be brought to the attention of the authorities. Not so in India where the shortcomings are so glaring that these units would not stand public scrutiny. The biggest test of all is that if these EVM's were so good and so efficient, why have they not adopted these in other countries? This speaks volumes about the integrity of Indian EVMs.

Shrii Prabhat Ranjan Sarkar blessed Jyoti Basu, telling him that he wished him a long life so that he would one day see his beautiful garden whither away. We are all waiting to witness the withering of that beggar-beast garden.