Red-faced

The results of the Lok Sabha elections proved far itchier for India's communists than did the scorching May heat in smouldering West Bengal. Not since 1977 had the Communist Party of India (Marxist)-led Left Front experienced such an electoral debacle in the state. By the time it was all over, the CPI (M) tally plummeted to nine out of the 42 Lok Sabha seats in Bengal; while the party's left allies – the Forward Bloc, the Revolutionary Socialist Party (RSP) and the Communist Party of India (CPI) – won just eight seats among them. All the rest went to the opposition: sticky days, indeed.

In the last three years, Bengal has had two elections – the State Assembly polls in 2006 and the recently concluded elections to the national Parliament. In the former 294 seats were up for grabs; in the latter, 42. This time around, Chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee, the poster boy for India's Marxists, seemed to have lost the support of the proletariat and the middle class once and for all. Instead, he was devoured by the revolution – from agriculture to industry – that he had been trying to bring about in West Bengal, a state that has long been considered industrially backward compared to other Indian states. It was in the early 1990s that former Chief Minister Jyoti Basu took the first step for industrial revival. But after Bhattacharjee came to power at the end of 2000, after leading the Left Front to victory, he decided to make Bengal's industrial revival his central agenda. The real push eventually came in 2006.