It is like all 11 of the reigning champions kicking off a match against a truncated team of laggards with its goalkeeper missing and defenders in disarray. In the May 11 elections to West Bengal's three-tier panchayats, the sixth since 1978, there is no prize for guessing who will get full control of rural self-government. It is the ruling CPI(M). And the victory has been sweetened in advance with the Opposition not in the fray in many places. For the 46,746 seats for the gram panchayats (GP), panchayat samitis (PS) and zilla parishads (ZP), the CPI(M)'s principal opposition, the alliance between Mamata Banerjee's Trinamool Congress and the BJP, could file nominations only for 32,434, leaving 14,312 seats (30.61 per cent) uncontested or open for a token contest with the friendly Congress. In the previous panchayat elections in 1998, the alliance had contested all but a few hundred seats, and, with local level cooperation of the Congress, the Opposition had bagged 42 per cent of the polled votes. It resulted in a reasonable number of non-Left "boards" being formed at the sub-district level. Consequently, rural Bengal did not look a completely one-party set-up.

FLYING HIGH: A Marxist show of strength in a rural block to intimidate opponents

Evidently, the Marxist leadership did not relish the countryside being painted with too many colours. For a month-till the process of filing of nominations and its withdrawal ended on April 22-it indulged in a tactic unprecedented in elections: unleashing administrative, social and political pressures to prevent potential opposition candidates from contesting. Pressure, in this context, is the shorthand for threat.

At Goaltore, a one-horse town in West Midnapore district, 25-year-old Samaresh Bidya, Trinamool nominee for Goaltore Mahashilai village panchayat, was in tears as he sat in a dingy room surrounded by a gaggle of Trinamool and BJP leaders who tried to dissuade him from withdrawing his nomination. "They have threatened to send a white sari to my sister," said Bidya in a choked voice. "They" means the local CPI(M) bosses. The gift of the white sari is the rural code for a threat to kill the husband of its recipient. Bidya's sister, Monika, is married at Dhadhika, the citadel of CPI(M) strongman and minister Sushanta Ghosh. For those who live in the area, the threat is far from empty. Bidya's next call was at the office of the block development officer (BDO), with a duly filled-in withdrawal form, the official formalities having been taken care of by the local CPI(M) leaders.

Bidya's is not a rare example of surrender, nor is it particularly cowardly, given the odds. The more obstinate among the aspiring opposition candidates have seen their barns set afire or looted, or a new dispute started on their holdings. The threat becomes more real with the police coming into the picture. A typical example is the plight of Badal Hansda, former CPI(M) worker who joined the BJP on the eve of the 1998 panchayat elections and organised a tribal women's wing for the party, with one of its candidates being able to make her way to the Kankanali gram panchayat in West Midnapore. As Hansda came under the CPI(M)'s watch, he was framed as, first, a People's War Group Naxalite, and later as an activist of the Kamtapur Liberation Organisation, the outlawed secessionist group active in north Bengal. After being imprisoned for 14 months without trial, Hansda has quite expectedly lost his old fire and the area is quite safe for a Marxist sweep this time round. In places where the Trinamool-BJP alliance could finally put up candidates, there has been vengeance not only on them and their relatives but even those who had proposed their names. The mildest form of such vengeance is "social boycott', which implies that no farm hand will agree to work on the offender's field, or the community pond or tube well is closed to him and his relatives.

The pre-poll smoking out of Trinamool-BJP is complete particularly in those stretches of south Bengal where the alliance gave the Left a close fight. At Keshpur, the epicentre of an armed confrontation between the CPI(M) and Trinamool during a by-election in 2000 for the Panshkura Lok Sabha constituency, the alliance had managed to win, in the 1998 panchayat polls, 62 of the 243 GP seats and 10 of the 47 in the PS. Today, after four years of the state-aided onslaught on the Opposition, there is not a single candidate in the block from the alliance, and a lone Congress candidate for the three ZP seats. In the Arambagh sub-division in neighbouring Hooghly district, where the alliance won 24 of the 64 village panchayats in 1998, it has now fielded candidates in just one of the six blocks. "We have been subjected to a selective cleansing, being kicked out of areas where we have shown strength," says Mukul Roy, general secretary of the Trinamool Congress.

SITTING DUCKS: Trinamool candidates who were forced to withdraw their candidacies

Marxist leaders have responded to the charge in two ways. One is a sense of injured innocence, like Chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharya's order to the BDOs and the police to help opposition candidates file their nominations, if help is needed. As it happened, the help was offered on the last working day before the last date for nomination filing, and the date expired before local officials got to know what the order was. The other response of the CPI(M) has been of sheer ridicule. As Anil Biswas, the all-powerful party state secretary, says, "The problem with Trinamool is that it can't find candidates." Dipak Sarkar, a West Midnapore district secretary, is bemused: "If the Opposition thinks elections are a once-in-five-years wonder, does it expect us to offer it an elementary course in electoral politics?"

In the pre-poll slugfest of sound bites, what gets drowned in the din is the level of freedom of choice that the electorate can hope to expect in a state ruled by a single party (and its signboard coalition partners) for over a quarter century. The BJP's scholarly state President Tathagata Roy calls it "the inertia of long rule". It manifests itself intensely in rural society, where the price of political opposition must be paid at a personal level, in day-to-day life. Mukul Roy says that the "dumbing down" of the electorate by the CPI(M) has been tailored to win the maximum Lok Sabha seats in the 2004 general elections.

Whatever its strategic motive, the control of the local bodies is crucial to the CPI(M) as it holds the pipeline down to eight of every 10 paise spent on welfare. And selective disbursal of welfare fund is the secret of the party's continual electoral success. In 2000, the Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) gave a picture of the extent to which the panchayat books are cooked up. It noted that there was no internal audit worth the name and hardly any declaration of annual accounts. While the state Government agreed to subject the panchayats to full CAG scrutiny only from this year, there are complaints everywhere of corruption and nepotism and, worse still, of the party's "local committee" deciding who would get how much of the welfare rupee and who will grab the contract for every culvert, every embankment and every mile of the country road.

The Left Front, in its first quarter century of power, thrived on all this, and a lot more by creating jobs for the loyal. With the pressure of debt mounting and their hesitancy to raise the tax receipt, the Marxists are entering their next spell in office with a firmer grip than ever on the delivery point of welfare largesse.