Producing local neoliberalism in a Leftist regime: neoliberal governmentality and populist transition in West Bengal, India

ABSTRACT

This paper presents a theoretical reassessment of a contentious chapter in India’s economic liberalisation – the case of West Bengal, a state ruled by the pro-labour ‘Left Front’ coalition, led by the Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPIM) from 1997 to 2011. The onset of neoliberalism in India had naturally created a serious political dilemma for the CPIM, but it eventually transitioned to a private-industrialisation agenda, thus prompting serious questions of ideological deviation. While the political-economy of the CPIM/Left Front and its industrial fortunes have been extensively scrutinised, this study introduces a rather different theoretical perspective to the story. Going back to the initial period of policy transition (c.1994), it uses the analytical categories of local neoliberalisms and populist transition to show how the state of affairs in West Bengal under the CPIM was demonstrative of a particular variant of interventionist neoliberal governmentality, characterised by a gradual intensification of pro-market impulses. Furthermore, the study also contextualises West Bengal within wider political economic trends, arguing that pro-market transitions by populist regimes tend to be characterised by a series of mobile calculative techniques of governing, embedded in local historical and geographical specificities and localised relationships.

KEYWORDS:

• West Bengal
• CPIM
• Left Front
• local neoliberalism
• neoliberal governmentality
• populist transition

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Ritanjan Das received his PhD in Development Studies from the London School of Economics and Political Science, and is currently a senior lecturer at the Faculty of Business and Law, University of Portsmouth, UK. Dr. Das works in the domain of political economy of development, and specialises on India/South Asia. His current research focuses on development politics, state and the market, communism and Marxist political philosophy, land, dispossession, power and cultural identities in contemporary India. He has recently published his first book, titled Neoliberalism and the Transforming Left in India: A Contradictory Manifesto (Routledge).

Notes

1 See, for example, Bauer (1981), Little (1982), Krueger (1992), Lal (1983), and Nelson (1990).

2 The term ‘state’ in India indicates regional province, and not the entire nation.

3 A nine party coalition, with the CPIM being the dominant partner. Other parties were: All India Forward Block (FB), Communist Party of India (CPI), Revolutionary Socialist Party (RSP), Marxist Forward Block (MFB), Revolutionary Bengali Congress (RBC), Democratic Socialist Party (DSP), Revolutionary Communist Party of India (RCPI) and West Bengal Socialist Party (WBSP).

4 Between the 2006 and 2011 elections, the CPIM’s vote share reduced from 176 to 40.

5 There might be an argument to use the term ‘regional’ neoliberalisation instead of ‘local’ as the appropriate scale at which to locate state-level transformations in contemporary India. This would fit with other ‘subnational’ accounts of economic changes in India, such as Sivaramakrishnan and Agrawal’s work (2003) on ‘regional modernities’, Kohli’s (2012) tripartite approach, Snyder’s (2001) and Tillin’s (2013) accounts of subnational variations. However, I have decided to stick to ‘local’ neoliberalism as it denotes a wider scholarship in economic geography and has been a standard terminology for some time, thereby allowing to present the West Bengal story as a part of similar stories of transition elsewhere.

6 Source: Interview with author; 31st July 2009, New Delhi.

7 Source: Interview with author; 22nd December 2009, Calcutta.

8 Source: Interview with author (anonymity requested); 30th June 2009, Calcutta

9 Source: Interview with author; 15th June 2009, Calcutta.

10 Source: Interview with author; 20th June 2009, Calcutta.

11 Source: Interview with author; 15th June 2009, Calcutta.

12 Source: Interview with author; 22nd September 2009, Calcutta.

13 Albeit the paper is located at the local or subnational level, it is important to note that by examining/comparing similar modes of such neoliberal interventions elsewhere, it is possible to achieve what Sinha (2015) calls ‘scaling up’ or. The theoretical apparatus of local neoliberalism, while subnational-sensitive, also provides distinct points of departure (for e.g. the sequence of events during the proto/roll-back/roll-out phases) to compare and develop new-typologies of cross-regional analysis.