Click to play videoSome would say God is not qualified to judge Jyoti Basu because he had never--not even in his weakest moments--uttered a prayer for an intervention by the Almighty. Even Karl Marx, whom Basu swore by in his early life, would have found it difficult to evaluate a life so complicated, and possibly enriched, by genuine contradictions. His admirers will insist that Basu’s was probably the most liberal face among Communists on Earth and would compete with that of Gorbachev’s. His critics will lash out at him and use intemperate language to describe the country’s longest-reigning chief minister as a failure. They’d say in the end he did nothing for Bengal. Yet, if you add up the bits and pieces of his remarkable life you’ll also realize that he did a lot for India: for the country’s secularism, Left consciousness, political equilibrium, ethnic relations and, in general, for democratic well-being.
Basu belonged to the era of the intellectual Bengali gentleman discarding his wealth and groping for the realization of an impossible dream. There were so many like him: Bhupesh Gupta, Indrajit Gupta, Syed Mansoor Habibullah throwing away an inheritance and infusing Marx, Lenin and Engels into their romantic lives. Basu who went to Loreto House, a girls’ school, for three years in his early childhood learnt to hide his delicate inner personality. Gana--that’s the way they called him lovingly at home--was never excessively fond of his successful doctor father, but he was very close to his mother and his sisters and passed out from St Xavier’s School with good enough marks that ensured him a passage to Presidency College.
If Marx conquered his intellect and life, it happened ironically in London under the influence of a Britisher of mixed (half Punjabi) parentage. Rajani Palme Dutta introduced Basu to texts of Marx and Lenin. In the mid-1930s, the young man was at war with General Franco's right wing supporters and anti-Communists as he prepared for the bar at Middle Temple in London. His first speech was expectedly in Hyde Park reasserting that British colonial masters should grant freedom to an enslaved India. Indrajit Gupta, who was a more practiced orator, had made his point before him and it was he who nudged Basu to the speaker’s corner. The shortish Gana, who had been quietly attending socialist thinker Harold Laski’s classes at London School of Economics in his spare time, made his first public speech with only a few fumbles. As you may have guessed rightly eloquence in English was not a problem to an Anglicized Basu. His Bengali wasn’t good enough when he was still being initiated into the art of politics. Years later, another Bengal chief minister Siddhartha Shankar Ray would take potshots at Basu for refusing his autograph to beautiful girls because he had never learnt to write compound consonants like “jyo” in Bengali.
Basu was an important member of the London Majlis and would ensure that leaders of the Indian freedom struggle who visited Britain got to meet prominent British politicians. He arranged Nehru’s meeting with highly-placed officials of the Communist Party of Great Britain. He even organized a few of the London meetings for Bengali icon Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose.
Basu came back via Mumbai to Kolkata in 1940 and immediately announced he was joining the Communist Party of India. A pall of gloom descended on his affluent family. They had planned to help him build a steady clientele but Basu remained a ``briefless barrister’’ and spearheaded the railwaymen’s trade union. He helped build CITU in a significant way in West Bengal. Jailed in 1945 when Communist leaders were imprisoned across the country, Basu became more involved with the party and with the editing of his party mouthpiece, Swadhinata. When he became a Leader of the Opposition in 1957 and immediately impressed the West Bengal Assembly with his dignified presence and parliamentary skills, Basu received tremendous support from Bengal’s tallest politician of that era. Dr Bidhan Chandra Roy mentored a little known Basu in the same way as Nehru had once raved about a new Opposition politician called Atal Behari Vajpayee.
Basu went through moments of intense personal grief. His first wife died soon after marriage in 1942; Basu’s mother was so shocked by her demise that she too passed away a few months later. Basu’s first child from his second marriage didn’t survive long. That explains why Basu and his wife, Kamal, doted on their only son Chandan. If Basu’s career suffered a taint it was for his sustained effort to help Chandan settle down in life. He went out of his way, even influencing the Abdullahs of Kashmir to admit his son to the Srinagar medical college. The Bengal Lamp scandal, that rocked Basu’s government in the late Eighties, occurred because orders were apparently placed with the company where Chandan was a junior employee. Chandan didn’t do as well in life as many thought he would. Whatever Basu’s critics may say, Chandan received support essentially by way of contacts and information. His Communist father did not dirty his hands to directly make money for him. Ironically, Basu helped other politicians’ children in the same way and seldom turned down requests from fellow politicians.
Basu may have been deputy chief minister twice in the volatile late sixties but his working life really flowered at the ripe old age of sixty-three. In 1977, a late bloomer Jyoti Basu took over as chief minister of West Bengal. No, he didn’t enforce and bring about land reforms on his own. He was helped in Bengal’s remarkable exercise of redistributing vested land among the poor, first by Harekrishna Konar and then by Benoy Choudhury, both stalwarts from the CPI-M bastion of Burdwan district. Thus Basu ruled to lend stability to a long unstable Bengal. In the process, he discounted that stability could also result in stagnation. Kolkata and its growth had no place in the CPM scheme of things as the Communists entrenched themselves in the countryside. Prosperity was replaced by mediocrity. Harping on egalitarianism led to vicious trade unionism, a frustrating culture of bandhs and the subsequent flight of capital. Basu fought against an unfriendly Congress government at the Centre as Bengal’s development indices plummeted to a new low.
While Basu concentrated on governance, his party built a ruthless electoral machine--a machine that wouldn’t falter under any circumstance. It was a machine created under the supervision of a Communist organizational genius called Pramod Dasgupta. Dasgupta’s death in the early Eighties meant Basu would be the unchallenged leader of Bengal. It meant Basu would have very little or no confrontation with a party manned by his juniors and disciples. Yet, Basu didn’t exert his personality. He ruled West Bengal in the way his party wanted him to, never disturbing the huge parallel government machinery that his party had cleverly put in place. Basu never changed himself into a risk-taking politician in the manner in which his successor Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee projected himself. He played safe often maintaining an awkward distance with his party but forever succumbing to the majority view. Basu, despite his occasionally harsh and unfriendly exterior, was an exceptionally accommodating man. That explains why smaller coalition partners continue to worship him.
Had his party allowed him, Basu may have tried to experiment with capitalism in a Deng Xiaoping way. He wasn’t given the space. His critics say he lacked the vision and was too afraid be disruptive and chaotic. Basu loved order, neatness. His dhoti and white kurta had never been a shade darker than spotlessly white. His pump shoes were always polished a gleaming black. He had his whiskey at the same time almost every evening. Even his London sojourns would be at the same time every summer. He desperately wanted to change Bengal. He didn’t know how to achieve that without changing his primary identity. There has been a remarkable consistency about Basu. He must have sworn to himself in his London days - once a communist always a communist. He fought in his own moderate way in party forums by presenting his views in a straightforward way. Once he was overruled, he submitted in a disciplined manner to the majority perspective. Along with Harkishen Singh Surjeet he had learnt the importance of holding on to what you have and of staying together through thick and thin. To Basu, the party was much bigger than the individual.
After Emergency, Basu played a significant role in Indian politics. His persona at the national level came with an interesting appeal. His relative honesty catapulted him to a position of great influence. Even with Indira Gandhi, the relationship was not one of simple enmity. His role in the Janata Party experiment of 1977 and his masterstroke that enabled the coronation of V.P. Singh as Prime Minister in 1989 are landmarks in the history of Indian Opposition. The country would have changed forever for better or for worse had Basu been allowed to become Prime Minister by his party in 1996. He called it dramatically a historic blunder. His admirers say it earned Basu the sobriquet: the best Prime Minister India never had. This writer feels that Basu would have possibly failed at the national level. He was too much of a Bengali bhadralok to deal with the intricate caste politics of the rest of India. Basu also didn’t have any idea of the aggressive Hinduism practiced in some parts of the country. His hatred for the BJP was instinctive. He called the party and its practitioners barbaric.
That is why when the BJP emerged as a major Opposition player Basu pushed the CPM in the direction of the Congress. At the eighteenth Party Congress of the CPM in 2005, the last party Congress he attended, Basu made an impassioned plea that secularism would have to be protected at all costs. Basu may not have sharply outlined his beliefs but his party knew that he would not have attempted severing ties with the Congress over the nuclear deal. Basu was so much of a pragmatist that his socialist views had been softening through his life. His critics would wonder why he never nudged the Left to accept reforms and become a party in the mould of the European Social Democrats. His supporters have argued that Basu was brought up on a syllabus of classical Marxism and didn’t have the audacity to try a different format, opt for a diluted version of the ism. A liberal Marxist, a great Parliamentarian, yet Basu couldn’t help his party discard the Stalinist perspective for a number of years.
Basu’s legacy is a fragile Left consciousness that has been losing relevance every moment after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Apart from that consciousness his biggest gift to Bengal is land reforms, something, which the city-dweller from Kolkata has never understood or never been able to reconcile with. He gave the Bengal’s poor dignity and self-respect but couldn’t guarantee prosperity as we have come to define the word after liberalization. Almost all modern Indian politicians except possibly those from the BJP have been inspired in some way or the other by Basu. He will be remembered not for his deeds and achievements but for what he was, what he came to represent. Basu’s first finance minister Ashok Mitra had once said that he (Mitra) was a Communist and not a gentleman. All his life Basu was a gentleman and never the perfect Communist.
With his death, the Indian Left will never be the same again.
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