A SEMINAR was organised at the centenary hall of the Kolkata University on June 15 on the expectations of the people from the sixth Left Front government and the responsibilities that accompanied the feelings of expectancy. The occasion was the 36th anniversary of the Chhatra Sangram, the organ of the state unit of the Students' Federation of India.

The two principal speakers on the occasion, state secretary of the CPI (M) Anil Biswas, and the CPI (M) Polit Bureau member, Biman Basu have both been closely associated with the student movement. The former was the founder-editor of the mouthpiece while the latter was the founder-secretary of the SFI. Both spoke at some length on the somewhat broad-based topic that the students had chosen as the theme for the commemorating 36 years of unbroken publishing record of the Chhatra Sangram.

Anil Biswas chose the theoretical approach to dominate his speech. Expectations, he posited at the very beginning of his address, was a relative term when viewed through the prism of evolving ground realities.

The expectations that had overwhelmed the student community in the 1960s had been the need for a steady supply of rice in the rationing system, and of fuel to burn the lanterns that were an essential aid for the students to enable them to utilize the free hours of the evenings and nights, away from the uncertainties that marked the everyday struggle for livelihood.

For demanding a pau (less-than-half-a-litre) each worth of rice and kerosene per head per week from the unwilling hands of the Congress-run state government, Biswas recalled, dozens of students had to lay down their lives in the metropolis itself in the movement-struggles of 1966.

Expectations change. With the Left Front government coming to office riding the crest of a wave of immense popularity back in 1977, the levels of expectancy went a qualitative change what with a pro-people, especially a pro-poor government at the Writers' Buildings.

Demands arose for more schools, more colleges, and more universities. The students looked to the Left Front government for modernizing the syllabi at every level while doing away with the deadwood that had clogged the corridors of learning under the earlier Congress régimes.

The years that followed witnessed the pattern of expectations undergoing another kind of change. Here, said Biswas, was a clear example of the amount of goodwill that the Left Front government had managed to create among the students and among the mass of the people in general. For, the latest demands centred around tendencies that hovered dangerously close to an outlook of consumerism.

There was an innate possibility that the kind of expectations that currently sweep along the mindset of the students can very well lead to frustration and anger -- leading perchance to even the dictates of anarchic patterns of behaviour.

"It is time," declared Anil Biswas, "for a deep introspection among the students' community itself about how much one should expect from a Left Front government given the limitations within which this government has to operate."

While the newer expectations were not to be overlooked, continued the speaker, the ground reality of the evolution of a Left Front government in the midst of an increasingly dysfunctional national economy and a worldwide economic crisis must be viewed in the correct perspective.

The way out, declared the CPI (M) leader who had come up through the student movement itself, lay in unleashing a wide array of mass initiatives to supplant the efforts of the Left Front government for both a betterment of the education system and for creating a viable structure of employment that would centre around both jobs in the "conventional sense of the nine-to-five office workspace, and in the implementation of self-help schemes, utilizing the strong agrarian base of the province to build up the industrial infrastructural framework on."

In striding towards these changed scenarios, Anil Biswas made plain, "we are not going the way of the so-called "new Left" with which a section of the media would love to bundle us into a slot that is familiar territory to them in the wake of the debacle of the former Soviet Union and of the east European bloc countries and subsequent developments in some European and Latin American countries."

"We'" said the CPI M) leader, "believe in the tenets of scientific socialism and we also know that without development per se, it is not possible to continue the march we have undertaken towards the social changes that we aim for." The norms of development and its variations, however, added Anil Biswas "do not mark a departure from the path we have chosen to travel along, facing adversities as we do, at every step."

The International scenario and its uneven development, too, must be sought to be grasped by the student community in general and the student activists in particular, said Biswas. The term proletariat, he asserted, "presently has a wider range of social classes included in its politico-economic realm other than the continuing central focus around the working class." As such, said Biswas, the students "have a much more responsible role to play not merely in understanding the realities of expectations that the unbroken presence of the Left Front government has created but also in keeping firmly in mind the fact that the primary aim of a pro-people administration as run by the Left Front shall remain the eradication of poverty."

For this to become a reality, concluded Biswas, the students must widen their scope of studies and must be rigorous in seeking to heighten their levels of political consciousness while never becoming dissociated from the evolving mass movements taking place provincially, nationally, and internationally.

Biman Basu, on the other hand, chose to narrate in some detail the manner in which the Left Front itself evolved over the years right from the somewhat hesitant beginnings made way back in 1952 when the first declaration of intent by the Left to go in for mass struggles against the anti-people policies of the successive Congress régimes was made and implemented.

The movement against hike in tram fare of 1953 (when British Tramways was the proprietor of the city tram service), the struggle launched against the anti-student recommendations of the US academics that was blandly accepted by the Nehru government of the day, the outburst against the Bengal-Bihar merger attempt, the successive food movements of the 1950s and the 1960s, the struggle built up in solidarity with Vietnam's struggle against the US aggression, and the two United Front governments of 1967 and 1969 -- all contributed in the crystallization of the Left Front as the weapon of struggle for the people.

The Left Front, assured Biman Basu, was no mere electoral platform of convenience, and the when one spoke of the people's expectations from the sixth Left Front government, one must necessarily remember the historical backdrop of the growth of the Left Front itself.

Agreeing with Anil Biswas about the changing pattern of expectations of the people over the past 24 years of Left Front governance, Biman Basu drew the attention of the students to the manifesto of the Left Front released prior to the Assembly elections held earlier this year. The manifesto made plain that the basic task in the immediate future would be to reduce the incidence of poverty by at least 10 per cent. People living below the poverty line presently comprise around 25 per cent of the population of Bengal.

Biman Basu recalled how during the earlier days of the Left Front government, such basic demands as creation of at least 270 days work in a year, improving the lot of the minority communities, and the making of primary education free and compulsory had dominated the hearts-and-minds of the people.

Changes in the pattern became evident as the years roll by. The present-day scenario, commented Biman Basu, appeared to be slightly perplexing in that members of kisan families who acquired educational qualifications were no longer interested in keeping themselves attached to agricultural work any longer. This was a new situation that was loaded with possibilities. One way out to resolve the matter would be to impart newer agricultural technologies to these boys and girls so that they feel inspired to try their hand at improving the agrarian economic scenario.

Biman Basu urged upon the student community to come to grips with the realities and challenges that faced them as they grew up, and in that perspective he also called upon them to further strengthen the mass base of the Left Front and the Left Front government.

Both CPI(M) leaders agreed with the suggestions raised by the SFI leadership, who had spoken earlier, that fees for schools, colleges, and universities must be rationalized so that the poor and the meritorious were made exceptions to the general regime of the revised fees structure.