But that was just the tip of the iceberg. For many, Bengal’s problems came out into the open when the Left tried to capture land from farmers by force, sparking violence in Singur and Nandigram. Orissa was a distant second, with less than 5% of families in such dire straits. In 2007, the National Sample Survey ( NSS) found that nearly 11% of families in Bengal faced starvation during several months of the year, the highest among any state in India. In the last years of Left rule, more people were starving in Bengal than in any other Indian state. By the time results were out on Friday the 13th, Deb and about a dozen other Left ministers had lost. In other words, people could starve, but they’d vote for the Left anyway. “The Left Front’s success,” he said, “is due to the heightened political consciousness of the people of Bengal, utterly devoid of material considerations.” Was the Bengali voter blind? Or did something force them to vote the way they did? During the campaign we asked Gautam Deb, the CPM’s ex-housing minister, for his take on this riddle. Healthcare and education were ruined, graft mushroomed and political violence became endemic. The Left is finally out of Bengal, leaving behind a riddle: how could one party, the CPM, rule a state for 34 years, while presiding over its overall decline? In that time, industry fled the state, farm growth tapered off, and Bengal’s poor became worse off than poor folks in most other states.
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