The Election Commission, like god, helps those who help themselves. A five-phase poll, as the EC has decided for Bengal this time, has never happened anywhere in the country before. Not even in Jammu and Kashmir, where the longest polls were spread over four days, as in the last elections in Bihar. Understandably, Mamata Banerjee and other opposition leaders are delighted. But are they doing enough to help themselves?

These parties may be right in claiming a moral victory from the EC?s decision. No one should be in any doubt as to why the EC decided to stagger the polls over five phases. It could not have been dictated by Bengal?s law and order situation. Many other states have much worse law and order problems. Nor was the move prompted by the Maoist threat in some parts of Bengal. At least six other states face worse Maoist threats. In the estimate of the Union home ministry, 165 out of the country?s 602 districts are affected by the Maoist rebellion. In Bengal, only a few blocks in three districts ? Bankura, Purulia and West Midnapore ? face the danger.

The EC?s move was clearly influenced by persistent complaints by the opposition parties about large-scale rigging of the votes by the left. One could argue, as the leaders of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) have done, that this is a very partisan step. There is little logic in distrusting popular mandates just because these have favoured the left in six successive elections.

True, this does not happen anywhere else. But no other state, the leftists say, has the kind of organized politics that has come to prevail in Bengal. This politics is believed to be a legacy of two things in particular ? partition of Bengal in 1947 and the land reforms introduced by the first United Front government in 1967 and formalized and consolidated by the first Left Front rule in 1977. If the first created a huge population of the dispossessed whom the left took under its fold, the second made the rural poor the centre of a new political power structure.

Others dismiss all these arguments. To them, Bengal?s organized politics is all about electoral rigging. They support the EC?s decision on the ground that it has a constitutional duty to allay the opposition?s suspicions. If the left really enjoyed the popular support that it claims to do, the second argument goes, why should it be upset about the EC?s decision?

The problem with such arguments is that they never end. You believe what you want to believe. And, as the saying goes, every faith creates its own facts.

However, one thing is for sure. The EC may have helped the opposition parties in creating the so-called level playing field. The game has to be played by the parties themselves. But some leaders of these parties seem to think that the EC can win the game for them.

They point to the last Bihar elections. Didn?t the EC or, K.J. Rao to be precise, end the 15-year reign of Lalu Prasad ? It is amazing to find that the opposition?s hopes for an end to left rule in Bengal have come to rest on the EC. Now that Rao is out of the EC under unexplained circumstances, would Mamata Banerjee see it as the end of her hopes?

The facts about the Bihar polls are actually very different. Once again, the EC created conditions for fair polls. Any more credits to the EC would be entirely fortuitous. The vote share of the Rashtriya Janata Dal had been sliding long before the last polls. But even after all that the EC did in Bihar, the RJD managed to retain the vote share that it had had in the previous elections.

If you look closely at the last four elections in Bihar, two to the Lok Sabha and two to the assembly, you cannot miss a simple electoral pattern. Lalu Prasad won when Ram Vilas Paswan and the two communist parties were with him. He lost when Paswan deserted him. It happened in the 1999 Lok Sabha elections. It happened again in the assembly polls in October-November, 2005.

So it would be more correct to argue that Lalu Prasad was defeated not because of the EC?s steps, but because of the division in the United Progressive Alliance. The numbers suggest that despite the EC?s measures, Lalu Prasad would have still won the last polls in Bihar if only he could keep Paswan in the UPA?s fold. Remember that while the vote share of Paswan?s Lok Janshakti Party dropped dramatically from what it had been in the February 2005 elections, the RJD?s share was more or less intact. True, the division was caused by the way Lalu Prasad had ruled Bihar.

The over-emphasis on the role of the EC in Bihar also ignores another important fact. The sustained anti-Lalu Prasad campaign by the Janata Dal (United) and the Bharatiya Janata Party had set the stage for the division in the UPA and therefore, the fall of the RJD regime. Add to all this the importance of caste in Bihar?s politics.

Turn to Bengal and you will see quite the opposite picture. Unlike in Bihar, the ruling Left Front in Bengal has managed to retain its unity over the past 29 years. The CPI(M)?s smaller partners have often cried foul over the Big Brother?s hegemony, but they have stayed together because they do not have many options.

The opposition, on the other hand, has remained divided and disorganized. Mamata Banerjee seems to be in an unending search for electoral allies. She allied with the Congress in 2001 only a few weeks after breaking off with the BJP. This time, she decided that another flip-flop would be bad even for someone so unpredictable as she. So, she has allied with the BJP, although she differs from it on almost all important issues. She knows it is an uneasy partnership and hence her decision not to campaign with the BJP from the same platform.

But even as she chose to align with the BJP, she kept asking for the illusory ?mahajot? ? the grand alliance ? that would include the BJP, the Congress and the Trinamool Congress. The Congress too spoke in many voices. They also talked of informal arrangements for the mahajot in as many seats as possible. The BJP too openly advocated the line of a united opposition or of at least a not-so-open understanding among all three parties. The saffronites have been trying this in Kerala for the past few years without much success.

The extraordinary thing about the whole exercise is that almost everyone involved in it knew that it would not succeed. Why then did they spend so much time on it? The answer is that each of these three parties were trying to spread confusion in the ranks of the other. Sonia Gandhi would have been happy to wean Banerjee away from the BJP once more. The BJP would have been happy to use the Congress, in addition to Banerjee, to make inroads in Bengal. Banerjee too had her own design ? she dangled the mahajot carrot to Congressmen in order to try and lure them to her fold.

The result is that barely a month before the first phase of the polls on April 17, the opposition camp is in total disarray.

However, even a disunited opposition can throw a serious challenge to a ruling party or group. Even though the left in Bengal was divided in two camps in 1967 and 1969, it managed to defeat the Congress. The Left Front too was not what it is today until 1982, when the Communist Party of India joined it.

Post-poll scenarios can force a unity that the parties fail to achieve before the elections. But as things stand today, the opposition in Bengal does not seem to be prepared enough to reap the benefits that they claim the EC has given them.