ABSTRACT
Chapter 1 questions the assumption that broad issues of Trinamool Congress (TMC) led land-related movements, Left Front’s (LF) atrocities have resulted in political change. It shows the importance of studying people’s interface with everyday politics for an enhanced understanding of the political change and its aftermath in West Bengal. It discusses the difficulties related to pinpointing the exact timeframe in which the 34-year-long left regime began to show symptoms of its demise. It teases out the key issues of party-based control of the Left era and its discontents, and addresses existing explanations and their flaws to arrive at the research questions of the book. This chapter gives an overview of the existing perspectives on local politics in India at large and in West Bengal in particular and also criticises them because of the lack of agency perspective and an overreliance on structural mechanisms in explaining local and everyday politics. With a comprehensive review of the available scholarly works, it shows how earlier scholars have failed to comprehend the dialectical nature of rural political choice and decisions. It argues for an attention towards political disagreements at different layers, factions, and power subversions by weaker sections at local level having potentials for political alteration.
