If Bengal’s communists have changed their old ways, should Ms Mamata Banerjee be far behind? There have been reasons to hope that her politics of noisy, sometimes violent, street shows is changing to more substantial stuff. It is not difficult to see why this is happening. The obstructionist politics of earlier decades has become largely irrelevant even in Bengal. The Marxists have had to change their ways, not only because they have been ruling the state for nearly thirty years, but also because all politics now is about strategies for economic development. Ms Banerjee’s recent meeting with Bengal’s entrepreneurs would suggest that she too accepted the basic change in political discourse. That the state’s principal opposition leader took the initiative to explain her stand on the government’s industrialization programmes suggested a shift in her political strategy. She was obviously anxious to correct her anti-development image in Bengal’s business community. Her party’s poor showing in the assembly polls in May proved how disastrous that image had been for her battle against the Marxists. Mr Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee and his party, the Communist Party of India (Marxist), on the other hand, won a massive mandate by inspiring hopes of a new economic dawn in Bengal.

However, Ms Banerjee’s break with her past politics is still somewhat uncertain. That showed when, on the eve of her meeting with the entrepreneurs, she relapsed into her old ways. And she continues to oppose the government’s moves to acquire farmland for new industries. She presents unrealistic alternatives, such as the acquisition of land of closed industrial units to facilitate new ones. It cannot be unknown to her that most of such land is either too small for big projects or locked in litigation. Her opposition to the acquisition of agricultural land smacks of old, confrontational politics. If it is bad politics, it is worse economics. This populist politics is no help even to the farmers whose incomes from agriculture are dwindling and who desperately need to move to other jobs. Ms Banerjee can fight the Marxists on many other issues. But she will remain a loser if she is out of step with the new realities.