West Bengal Changing Colours, Changing Challenges

On 13 May 2011, Mamata Banerjee, leader of the All India Trinamool Congress, defeated the Left Front to become the state s first female chief minister. It was her rallying cry of poriborton, and her slogan, Ma, Mati, Manush (Mother, Earth, People), which captured the imagination of the people and led to her landslide victory, ending the decades-long dominance of the Left Front. But what triggered this change? And what were the conditions which enabled the Left Front to win election after election in West Bengal with huge margins up to 2006? Then again, when they seemed to be firmly entrenched, how were they routed at the hands of a leader who had cobbled together a party consisting mainly of defectors from the Indian National Congress? Sitaram Sharma, journalist, diplomat and author, attempts to delve into these questions, lucidly unravelling cause-and-effect links through a careful exploration of the turbulent world of Bengal politics from the partition of Bengal in 1947 to the Leftward swing in the 1960s-70s, the gradual downfall of the Communist party culminating in the Singur-Nandigram incident, and the final blow, in 2011, when Mamata Banerjee came to power in this powerful and incisive exposition of the current affairs of West Bengal

Sitaram Sharma began his career in journalism as Assistant Editor of a local Hindi weekly and later, as Editor of an English weekly called Caldust. He was also a special correspondent for Onlooker. He went on to become Editorial Advisor at Business Economics. As Honorary Consul of Republic of Belarus, he is an active and popular member of the diplomatic corps in Kolkata. He has authored books on the United Nations and has participated in national and international conferences across the world on issues ranging from new world economic order and human rights to climate change. He was recently appointed Chairman of the Maulana Abul Kalam Azad Institute of Asian Studies, Kolkata, a centre for research on social, economic and political developments in Asia, under the Ministry of Culture of the government of India