Syed Iqbal, or Iqbalda as everyone calls him, is a soft-spoken man with an air of calm dignity. But as he tells us about the situation in his neck of the woods — the Ilambazar block which now falls under the post-delimitation Bolpur Assembly constituency — the calm slowly deserts him and words like “atonko” (fear), “shontras” (terror) and “bisrinkhola” (anarchy) are repeated endlessly.

Elections are round the corner and Iqbalda’s hopes centre on the Election Commission — if there is no rigging, if there is no booth-capturing, if there are free and fair polls, then his party will certainly win.

The next day in Bolpur town we hear the same litany of ifs. Dilip Ganguly, far more excitable than Syed Iqbal, is in a state of great agitation. Reports are coming in from not just Bolpur but the adjoining constituencies of Nanoor, Labpur, Dubrajpur and further afield of “booth capture” well ahead of the polls.

He reels off the numbers — 21 booths in Nanoor, 12 in Labpur, another dozen in the Ilambazar block of Bolpur. “How can we win if so many booths have become ‘no entry’ for us?” he asks us in a tone that is both angry and plaintive, before he regains a measure of composure and adds: “But if the polls are free and fair, we will win everywhere.”

So what else is new? Haven’t we heard all of this before? In practically every election that has taken place in Bengal over the past three decades, the Opposition has cried itself hoarse about “rigging” and “terror” and “booth management” that prevented its supporters from casting their vote. What is so different this time around?

Well, what is new and strange and bewildering is that it is not the usual suspects who are doing the complaining any more. Syed Iqbal is the veteran zonal committee secretary of the CPM in Ilambazar and Dilip Ganguly the formidable party secretary of Birbhum — a district which, alongside Burdwan and Bankura, comprised the “Lal Durgo” or the unassailable Red Citadel of the Party not too long ago.

It is they, leaders of a party helming a government with a three-fourths majority, who betray the anger and frustration, the fear and helplessness of a beleaguered opposition while the local Trinamul leaders strut about with the swagger of schoolboys who have taken over the principal’s office.

When the tremors from the earthquake — with its epicentre in Nandigram and Singur — slowly spread across rural Bengal, Birbhum withstood the devastation better than most. In the 2008 panchayat elections, the Left managed to retain control of over 100 of the 167 gram panchayats in the district. In 2009, the Birbhum Lok Sabha seat fell to the charms of Trinamul’s Shatabdi Roy but the CPM managed to win the freshly reserved Bolpur seat by a margin of more than one lakh votes.

In the municipal polls last year, all six municipalities in the district — Bolpur, Suri, Rampurhat, Nalhati, Dubrajpur and Sainthia — were won by either Trinamul or the Congress. That did not perturb the CPM leaders too much for the urban vote had never been theirs to begin with — it was the rural masses who mattered.

But as we criss-cross the district — from the sylvan beauty of Santiniketan through interior rural roads lined by paddy fields and bamboo groves and mud and thatch huts, and then past towns like Suri and Rampurhat — a strange irony unfolds. The CPM’s warning against the “anarchy” and “chaos” that awaits Bengal if it loses is finding a resonance among sections of the urban and semi-urban middle class but the rural masses, as it were, are completely in thrall of the “poribortoner hawa” (the winds of change) that is raging through their midst.

Although no one can quite articulate it, everyone seems to intuitively know that this election is not about replacing one set of rulers with another in Writers’ Building; it portends something much more fundamental, almost elemental, it threatens to alter a whole way of being, to usher in entire new ways of seeing.

For Left sympathisers, the CPM — despite its numerous shortcomings — represented a certain order and discipline, espoused principles based on an ideology, and offered a reassuring stability. Since 2009, that stable order has been shaken to the core and suddenly the world has turned topsy-turvy.

Back in Ilambazar, Syed Iqbal had told us how after the election results of 2009, it was not just the known Trinamul and Congress workers who had become assertive.

With the CPM on the back foot, all kinds of “goondas” and “ruffians” and “riffraff” who had been kept at bay all these years had donned Trinamul colours and were now “terrorising” the people in the name of “poriborton”.

Sushmita Das (name changed), a young professional living alone in Bolpur, tended to agree. “The CPM was far from ideal but the Trinamul goons have no discipline, they fear no authority. I never felt unsafe before but now I avoid the streets at night because they pass comments that a CPM cadre never would,” she says.

In Rampurhat, a retired college teacher who wishes to remain anonymous is equally scathing of the “change” that is on the anvil. Once an ardent communist, he severed his ties with the CPM many years ago. But now that the Left Front is under siege, he lists all its many “pro-people” policies over the last 34 years and says: “The trouble is, the new generation does not know what the sixties and seventies were like — the violence, the anarchy, the semi-fascist terror on the streets. If the Left Front goes, the neo-fascists will take over and it will be 1971 once more.”

It is this same sentiment that prompted a section of Santiniketan’s prominent citizens, led by expelled CPM leader Somnath Chatterjee, to issue a leaflet earlier this week asking people to usher in the eighth Left Front government to ensure “peace and stability”.

This is what has given the CPM a measure of hope — that after seeing the “bisrinkhola” of the past two years, the people who had deserted the party are now returning. “Aamra recovery korechhi (we have made a recovery)” and “lokera back korchhe (people are coming back)” are two Benglish phrases we hear repeatedly.

In Birbhum’s countryside, though, we see no signs of it. Everywhere we stop — at wayside tea stalls or under the banyan by a village pond — the people tell us without hesitation, “Ebar to TMC, ebar Mamata hobe mukhyomantri.” And some add with glee, “CPM to ekebare side hoye gachhe.”

Rarely does the ordinary Indian voter reveal which way the wind is blowing, and it usually takes a reporter much patient probing and subtle subterfuge to get a sense of their leanings.

But this time in Bengal, a dam seems to have burst and years of enforced silence and circumspection have been replaced by the garrulousness of teetotallers who have suddenly taken to drink.

We gradually realise that both “stability” and “anarchy” have assumed different meanings for different sets of people. For sections of the middle class, stability is something they value even if they bemoan the “stagnation” of Left rule.

But here in rural Birbhum, where the Party’s hegemony was supreme, where the Party was Big Brother in every sense of the term — offering protection, providing succour, settling family disputes, decreeing codes of behaviour —even its benevolent embrace (leave alone its not-so-benign aspects) could be stifling. And once Nandigram struck a blow to that hegemony and the Party’s grip began to loosen, everyone became heady with the newfound freedom and are still intoxicated by it.

They cannot be bothered to analyse all the good things the Left Front did for them or how a new government can change their lives. All they say is that they are fed up with the CPM and that change for the sake of change is good enough for them.

Left leaders still believe that logic and reason are on their side — that at the time of voting, the mass of rural peasantry will remember with gratitude what they received from successive Left Front governments and see through the empty promises of the “Right-wing” combine.

But if there is indeed a pro-Left undercurrent working against the vociferous and palpable wave for change, then it is much too invisible and silent right now, and is likelier to make itself felt in 2016 rather than the coming May 13.