May 10: “Regimes are most vulnerable when they try to modernise.” That is how Gordon Chang begins his Coming Collapse of China, once considered the ultimate book of prophecy about the imminent end of communist China.

Conventional wisdom is that communist rule in China has saved itself — so far — by modernising through capitalist reforms. But then, China’s rulers, unlike Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee, face no democratic elections.

And if he or the CPM has rarely faced so many enemies as in these panchayat elections, it has much to do with his new-found zeal to modernise Bengal. One has only to look back at the backdrop to the Assembly polls two years ago to understand this.

In May 2006, Bhattacharjee went to the polls with his development mantra and made it a winning one. Over the past two years, he has kept swearing by — and acting on — it. But that is now his problem — what in 2006 was a political asset has now become his biggest liability.

Between an overzealous CPM bent on using strong-arm tactics (Nandigram) and a battle-hungry Opposition, they have made development a dirty word in Bengal. That is the big picture in these rural polls — development means land acquisition and also opening up agriculture to commercial enterprise, which, in turn, mean upsetting the patterns of rural politics.

That explains why the disunity in the Left ranks is the most important feature of these elections. It is not as if the Left has not had problems within itself in earlier rural polls. In 1983, the feud between the CPM and the RSP got so bitter that the latter openly called the former a party of “social fascists”.

Even in the last panchayat polls, the Left parties fought each other in at least half the districts. Political strategies are never easy to implement for 50,000-odd seats, as micro-level factors will always play their part.

But the political dynamics of the disputes this time are completely different. In earlier cases, the differences were purely over the bargain of seats, which reflected the smaller parties’ anxiety to secure as many seats as possible. The anxiety is still there for the RSP or the Forward Bloc, but this time the battle for seats has an ideological element that relates to the development debate.

This ideological backdrop to these polls has the CPM pitted against not only Mamata Banerjee, a partially revived Congress and its partners in the Left Front but also against sundry groups of Left liberals who took Calcutta by storm with their huge rally last October to protest the Marxists’ recapture of Nandigram.

Add to all this the Maoists, who would join hands with just about anybody to weaken the Marxists.

Could the CPM have avoided this challenge? The party’s argument is like this. It knows the risks in the attempts to “modernise” Bengal by shifting the economic focus from agriculture to industry. It knows that taking away land is as politically risky as giving it to bargadars (sharecroppers) and the landless was politically paying for it in earlier decades.

But the party also talks of the even greater risks in letting things stay as they are.

There have long been diminishing returns from the land reforms of the ’70s and the ’80s. Agriculture is no longer enough to feed expanding families. In most parts of Bengal, farm labourers no longer get the daily wages they used to get 20 years ago.

The inadequacies of agriculture have also led to a new inertia – and even anger - about the panchayati raj (recall the ration riots). Also, Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee is right when he says that farmers’ children who now go to college and university have different social and economic aspirations.

What the party does not admit, though, is that its government has let things stay as they were for far too long. It has failed to make farming a viable commercial activity. The result is that Bengal’s production of vegetables, for instance, may be the highest in India, but 30 per cent of it is wasted because there is no marketing mechanism or commercial use of it worth the name. This is true of other produce as well.

So the new development charge is no longer a question of choice for the CPM. No matter what the challenges and the risks are, it thinks that not taking the plunge would be riskier for the CPM’s rule in Bengal.

How are all these going to be reflected in these polls?

The CPM’s organisation and its power to distribute favours from the government’s coffers still give it a huge advantage over its rivals. But it clearly is on the defensive this time. How it meets the challenge in the villages, its traditional power base, will determine what lies in store for it in next year’s parliamentary polls.