The death of Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee – the last communist chief minister of West Bengal – comes as a severe blow to the communists in West Bengal who are struggling to survive. Many still look up to the veteran leader as a source of inspiration, seeking his direction to revive the relevance of Left politics.
80 years of age, he was suffering from a prolonged lung infection and was confined to his cramped two-room humble government flat on Palm Avenue in South Kolkata where he breathed his last yesterday morning.
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Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee was cast in a different ideological mould within the Left. As chief minister of West Bengal from 2000 to 2011, he was known for his pragmatic approach, though his vision of an industrialised West Bengal remained largely unfulfilled. Even though Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee was ousted from power by a popular anti-land acquisition movement led by the present West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee, he firmly and stubbornly believed that the path he had chartered was the right one for a state that was driven by acute unemployment and lack of industrial growth.
The failed Tata Motors project during his tenure as the chief minister was part of that dream and haunted him till the last day. Soon after taking over from the legendary communist leader of Bengal, Jyoti Basu, in November 2000, Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee began to showcase a different agenda and resolve for rapid industrialisation of the state.
He was prepared to employ any means necessary to achieve success. In both private discussions and public statements, he argued that the benefits of the land reforms implemented by the Left government in West Bengal since 1977 had peaked and were now clearly in decline. Bengal needed industry, he said.
Therefore, at a time when his fellow communist comrades were chanting slogans like, “Down with Tatas, Down with Birlas, Down, Down Capitalism,” Buddhadeb was the one who dared to loudly propagate, “I need capital for the state. I do not see the colour of money.” He went beyond the dogmatic shackles of the communists and jargon and trod a path drastically different from many of his comrades.
At the beginning of his second term as the chief minister in 2006, Bhattacharjee was able to rope in the Tatas for a massive investment in a motor car plant at Singur. Simultaneously, he brought in the Saleem Group from Indonesia to invest in a petrochemical Special Economic Zone covering existing Haldia and its neighbouring Nandigram areas. He enlisted the Jindals for a major steel plant in Jhargram and gave thrust to the IT sector, bringing in investments in Rajarhat-Newtown.
With a commanding mandate of 235 seats in a 294-member Assembly, Bhattacharjee declared that the only way to honour the overwhelming support from the 2006 election was to deliver a “Better Left, an Improved Left.”
Bhattacharjee drastically began to change the outdated communist vocabulary and advocated that strikes and bandhs should no longer be allowed. He vehemently opposed any loss of workman days because of strikes and earned wrath within the party. His Communist line was not acceptable to all within the party in Bengal and within the echelons of the Marxist hierarchy.
He began to face opposition from within as much as he faced from political adversaries post-2009 Lok Sabha election debacle. His plans began to backfire, and his party, along with its front partners, suffered heavy losses in the 2009 Lok Sabha election. Left Front coalition partners grew restive and threatened to walk out of the government.
In the face of growing opposition, Buddha began to adopt a hardline approach but was getting increasingly isolated. In the 2011 state assembly election, his government was defeated and he was trounced by his own former Chief Secretary Manish Gupta in the Jadavpur assembly seat by a margin of over 16,000 votes. A change of guard saw Mamata Banerjee of Trinamool Congress in the saddle.
Earlier, caught in a political crossfire, the Tatas had abandoned the Singur project. But before leaving Bengal, Ratan Tata was in tears and acknowledged: “We have taken the very regretful decision to move the Nano project out of West Bengal. This is the decision that has been taken with a great deal of sadness because we came here, two years ago, attracted by the investor-friendly policy of the current government, which we still have a great deal of respect for the leadership of Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee…… unfortunately, we also faced great agitation and great aggression on part of the opposition parties.”
Buddhadeb’s political career had been marked by controversies. In 1991, he was inducted into the cabinet of Jyoti Basu as an Information and Cultural Affairs and Urban Development minister but abruptly resigned in September 1993 following differences with the CM on alleged corruption. He described the Jyoti Basu’s cabinet as a “Cabinet of Thieves.” However, he was back in the ministry after several months.
Like Jyoti Basu, Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee used to dress up in spotless white pyjamas and kurta. His only outward extravaganza was his favourite 555 cigarettes that he would carefully pick out from the depth of his kurta pockets in ones and twos and smoke leisurely. Interestingly, he came from a Brahmin Bengali family who practised priesthood but he grew up as an avowed atheist and was attracted by communist ideology at a young age.
His political career spanned more than five decades from 1966 when he was inducted as a primary member of the Communist Party of India and was mentored by a legendary Communist figure in those days – Promode Dasgupta.
During the Vietnam War, Buddha joined protest marches and was elected state secretary of the Democratic Youth Federation, the youth wing of the CPI(M), in 1968. Rising through the ranks, in 2002, he was inducted into politburo as a member – the highest policy-making body of the CPI(M).
A graduate of Presidency College in Kolkata, Bhattacharjee was deeply immersed in cultural and literary activities. In 1993, post-Babri demolition he came up with a book titled “Bad Times” in which he put across his views on tensions between Hindus and Muslims.
One of his favourite pastimes was translating writings from the works of Russian poet Vladimir Mayakovsky and the Columbian Nobel Laureate Gabriel Garcia Marquez. After he slipped into solitary confinement in his flat, he wrote a two-part book titled “Looking Back.” In these publications, he reflected on the first five years of the CPI(M)-led Left rule in West Bengal. In the second part, he looked at the last 10 years of the Left regime, including the Nandigram and Singur projects of his government.
In his final years, Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee was a man with growing manifestations of isolation. The voice of aggression in him was gone. He avoided meeting people, barring a few from his own party. Unfortunately, his dreams of redefining Communism in West Bengal did not come true.
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