The best place to begin a memoir to Jyoti Basu has to be the so-called ‘historical blunder’ that blighted his political career and an anecdote associated with it because it sums up his seminal importance to the political life of West Bengal for a quarter of a decade. When the trial balloon was floated in 1996 mooting Basu for the prime ministership of the incipient United Front government, West Bengal was agog with speculation and heated discussion and arguments were being conducted in the parlours and the streets, pending the CPI-M politburo’s verdict.
It was then that one particularly acute observer of Bengal politics made the observation that the suggestion was preposterous. Why, he was questioned. Hadn’t Basu demonstrated beyond reasonable doubt great skill in managing a coalition, of taking people along? That wasn’t the problem, the observer replied and continued, “Just think of it. Who on earth will run the state?” Four years later, Basu demitted office and Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee came in to fill the vacuum. Despite the monster majority he won in 2006, in hindsight it is clear that that was the beginning, as they say, of the unravelling of Left rule in the state.
Basu’s greatest strength was his greatest weaknesses. He certainly wasn’t the stereotypical communist in the mould of the other great Bengal communist leader of his time, Promode Dasgupta, the party’s state secretary and chairman of the Left Front, when the front came to power in 1977. Whereas Dasgupta lived a spartan life in a party commune, Basu was very much the patrician, with his British education — his tutelage in communist politics was during his student days in England as a member of the now defunct Communist Party of Great Britain — and his fondness for comfortable life.
This patrician character gave Basu the handle to dominate his party after Dasgupta’s untimely demise during a trip to China in 1982. He brushed aside criticism and opposition to his decisions both from within the party and from the media and the public with equal disdain. What he said more or less went in West Bengal subject only to the scrutiny of the politburo and central committee — that too usually in matters of grave importance. But day to day, he was the unquestioned boss of the party and the state. The state secretaries who followed Dasgupta were very much his chosen ones — first Saroj Mukherjee and then Sailen Dasgupta.
This, however, was a critical weakness. To an unconscionable extent it cut him off from opinion within his party and from the moods of the people. It was not that Basu acted out of concert with his party. He did not.
In fact, he allowed, or encouraged, the party to invade every available space of political and public life, while he sat back in an attitude of masterly inaction as chief minister. The strategy of capture devised by Promode Dasgupta was in effect implemented by him. But of that more in a bit.
At this point, it would be useful to make an overall assessment of Basu, the longest serving chief minister India has seen. Will posterity’s verdict be a thumbs up or thumbs down? The latter, unquestionably. In his close to a quarter of a century in office (1977-2000), Basu as the head of a Left Front, coming to power with an enormous fund of popular goodwill and, as events were to prove, an unprecedented and unchallenged run in office, had a historic opportunity to show the world what a Left government could do by making West Bengal a model state, working within the ambit of a federal constitution to eradicate poverty, work for what the party is pleased to call the toiling masses and build a vibrant social sector.
And that is precisely what he did not do. Under his stewardship, West Bengal was allowed to wind down in almost all areas of life. Now, after almost 33 years of Left government, the state’s education and health system is in tatters. Its urban infrastructure makes a daily nightmare for those who live in West Bengal’s cities and towns. Other infrastructure, too, has crumbled — transport, communications, power, housing, you name it. Under Basu, encouragement given to irresponsible trade unions and rogue entrepreneurs had meant the flight of industry. Bhattacharjee’s attempts to revive it — most inadequately thought through — have yielded minimum results.
The tragedy is that Basu could have done it. He was the man behind the massive petrochemical project in Haldia — ironically close to Nandigram — with its welter of downstream industrial units made a huge difference to the district of undivided Midnapore and the state.
Had he shown the same resolve in pursuing industrial growth, West Bengal might well have been a different place. The big achievement of the Left Front government has been its epochal land reforms — Operation Barga — and some amount of rural welfare. But Basu’s contribution to that was peripheral.
So what accounts for this dismal record? The answer lies in the strategy of capture. The CPI-M figured out pretty early in its tenure that the easy road to power was not through the hard craft of good governance — it was through the creation of special interests (or vote banks) and the infiltration of all institutional spaces. So the party captured the trade unions, the white collar associations, especially those of government employees, educational institutions from primary schools to universities by packing them with its own unmeritorious flunkeys, the health system likewise, even citizens’ committees, Durga puja managing committees and neighbourhood youth clubs. Having done that it gave everybody a blank cheque — work if you wish, don’t if you don’t. Pay commissions inflated their salaries at regular intervals. Most benefits that flowed from government, which should have been targeted even-handedly at all citizens, were funnelled to party adherents. Having assured himself and his party of power and built up an inexorable cadre-staffed organisation, Basu realised he didn’t have to govern, deliver. And he didn’t. That actually was the historic blunder in his life, not the other one.
The supreme irony is that when his incompetent but well-intentioned successor tried to govern and change the status quo, he ran up against the great walls erected by Basu — and he failed to scale them. The odds were just too steep. So was it all a dismal record. Perhaps not. The only area in which Basu, ably aided by his one-time finance minister, the economist Ashok Mitra, indefatigably chased the question of centre-state relations and the flaws of the federal system, campaigning for greater powers for states, especially in matters financial. That was a contribution the nation should remember him for.
About the author:
Suhit Sen is a Kolkata-based journalist and researcher