User:Monobina Gupta

Monobina Gupta is a veteran journalist. After doing M.Phil in history from Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi in 1987, her journalistic career began in 1989. Since then she had worked with The Patriot, The Telegraph, Mail Today, and Indo-Asian News Service.

She covered and wrote extensively on the new political dimensions that started in 1989 with the National front government led by V.P. Singh and the fractured electoral mandates that are now here to stay post-1996.

Her specialization in coalition politics, especially the Left parties and the Congress in parliament gave her an opportunity to see how these two groups walked a tight rope on tricky issue like economic reforms and foreign policy and how issues were thrashed out behind closed doors.

She now contributes to the edit/op-ed pages of Times of India, Hindustan Times, Economic Times and New Indian Express.

Along with politics she has also extensively covered education, health and gender issues at the level of policy and legal interventions as well as the changes at grass-root levels. She contributed opinion pieces on primary and higher education (universalization of primary education, introduction of 27% OBC quota in higher educational institutions, the status of primary education in terms of teacher absenteeism, poor quality of teaching, the impact of the mid-day meal scheme etc)

Monobina recently wrote a book titled ‘Left Politics in Bengal’- Time Travels among Bhadralok Marxists published by Orient Black Swan.

Left Politics: Time Travels among Bhadralok Marxists is a political narrative of contemporary history tracing the remarkable journey of CPI-M, the largest communist party in India from the 1960s to the present day. The pulse of this narrative lies in West Bengal, the cradle of Marxist politics, the state, which seems poised to make a historic transition in the assembly elections next year. The author tells the story of how CPI-M, once a radical entity, came to power in West Bengal in 1977, and continued to win election after election for thirty three long years. The book is being released at a time when this comfortable electoral equilibrium, seemingly shattered, could well change in 2011.

The book also dwells on the CPI-M’s emergence in national politics as the ‘kingmakers’ who made and unmade fractured coalitions at the centre. The narrative begins by situating West Bengal and the CPI-M against a background of cultural radicalism, political turmoil and worldwide resistance to US imperialism in the 1960s. The book also traces the CPI-M’s militant struggles – from the food movement to the one paisa tram fare hike, the high levels of political violence, the beginnings of the Naxal movement and the politics of armed insurrection. A political outlaw, the CPI-M, bore the brunt of violence unleashed by the ruling Congress.

The book tells about transition that led to the CPI-M becoming the ‘establishment’, and its steady degeneration since then. The party that had once distributed land among peasants, giving them tenure rights, resorted to state sponsored violence in 2006 to force peasants in Nandigram and Singur to hand over land for industrialization. Today the Left stand encircled by restless forces spreading from Kolkata, to Lalgarh and Gorkhaland. Even intellectuals are calling for change, the very section that had once stood with the CPI-M.

The author raises questions about not only the functioning of the CPI-M, but of communist parties throughout the world. Underlining the shifts in the party’s stance on economic reforms, particularly after West Bengal under Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee began vigorously pursuing liberalization, the book underlines the dichotomy and the double speak of the party; while the CPI-M tacitly supported some of these reforms in West Bengal, it continued to criticize them at the centre.

Emphasising both the representation of the Left in popular mentality and the institutional changes wrought by the party in government, the author in this book creates a nuanced portrait of an over three-decade-old government’s fall from grace.