The unusual idealist

Jyoti Basu was unusual in all sorts of ways; he retired, as he said, “when you fall ill, you cannot even attend office and look at things. Then why should you function?” In his worldview, that of a “ Communist Marxist”, there is a time when you call it quits, because if you cannot be productively engaged then it is better to exit.
In his final months, when he took to his bed, Basu was miserable because he could not function. To his way of thinking, a Marxist goes down fighting at the barricades; a prolonged fade out accompanied by hordes of people in attendance is an ignominious end of a life committed to a struggle — the objective of which was a gloriously utopian world sans oppression, exploitation, violence, greed, exhausting competition where the liberated could live as a new breed of Communists.
In his heyday, he was brisk and businesslike, yet unfailingly courteous; a bhadralok in every way from his impeccably starched dhoti and kurta to the manner in which he communicated with all and sundry. Basu rarely used the familiar while speaking to comrades, associates and subordinates. He was never addressed in quintessentially Bengali style of adding “da” to the name. He was always Jyoti Babu. Aloof, private and passionate. The public persona masked a romantic idealist who committed himself to Marxism in 1938 in London, and till the end he remained a Communist, a Marxist.
That, however, did not make him a fanatic. Nor did he ever alter his manner to mimic caricature Marxists, disguised in uniforms, abrasive in their manners and determined to “blend” in with the “great unwashed”. Once at the Raj Bhavan in Darjeeling, sitting across from him on the lawn for an interview, the sun was blinding. Basu insisted on changing seats: as a gracious host he preferred to sit in the sun while his guest enjoyed the comfort of the shade. It did not matter to him that his guest was a youngster and he was already a legend.
He had a mischievous sense of humour and a dry, sharp wit, but he was miserly with words. Many years later, when Basu was hospitalised after a fall, I visited him, not without an appointment. He was frail and looked unhappy. There was a book on the table beside him. I asked if he was reading it; he glanced sideways and, with a straight face, made a very characteristic sound like a laugh choked, saying a visitor had gifted it for reading in hospital. It was a tome about Chairman Mao’s excesses in China. His message was clear: he regarded the gift as inappropriate, if not bizarre, a gift to an image rather than the individual.
During the wild years when Hindutva’s shrill message was inflaming passions, Jyoti Basu delivered well-aimed blows: he described the demolition of the Babri Masjid as “barbaric”, for which the BJP never forgave him. He described with characteristic wry humour the frenzy to cart bricks inscribed with “Shri Ram” as “brick puja”, and coldly denied that the Hindu faith had any place for fanaticism or any single interpretation.
History will judge Basu as a leader of the Communist movement in India from 1940 when he stepped off a ship in Mumbai and addressed his first public meeting. He went to London to become a barrister in 1935 and returned a Communist who told his father that he would not practice law but would live the life of a party whole-timer. His disinterest in the law was profound, and Basu recalled that he lost the case for the first brief he received. That convinced him that the law was not his calling.
From 1940 Basu was a loyal partyman. He disagreed with the party on many occasions, including his last big fight over what he described as a “historic blunder”, rejection of the offer of prime ministership in 1996. His disagreements ranged from accepting the party’s meddling in private matters like who he married to the need to develop an independent political line appropriate to the concrete conditions in India.
He even disagreed with the CPI(M) leadership in 2004. Having fought hard to reverse the party’s line on participation in a government led by the Congress at the Centre and won his argument, he wanted to seize the second chance that history had thrown up. Basu wanted the CPI(M) to join the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance government, if only for a limited period of two years. His reasons were simple: it would give the CPI(M) an opportunity to establish itself as a responsible alternative and facilitate its expansion out of the three enclaves of West Bengal, Kerala and Tripura. “People would know that there was a difference” — that was what he wanted.
If the CPI(M)’s timid leadership had gambled as Basu wanted, it would have been easier in 2008 to sell the withdrawal of support on the nuclear deal. While Basu disagreed with the party, he never challenged its authority. He vow of discipline forbade him to do so. In negotiating the relationship between the party and the government he headed in West Bengal, in the end Basu always bowed to the higher authority.
The errors of the CPI(M) have, therefore, been heaped on his head, along with the mistakes he made. His successes have become the party’s achievements, including land reforms that he pushed through in his first term as chief minister in 1977; Panchayati Raj, that became the model for the rest of the country; lowering the voting age to 18, that served as the first step for its later adoption at the all-India level, reservation for women in elected bodies, something yet to become law at the national level. While credit for the new industrialisation initiative, even though it has come a cropper after Singur, Nandigram and Vedic Village, is given to the Chief Minister, Mr Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee, it was on September 23, 1994 that Basu pushed through the new Industrial Policy Resolution, discarding old beliefs for the new liberalised economic policy. He goofed up and admitted the mistake over not introducing computerisation in the 1970s, and built Salt Lake’s Sector 5 high-tech hub to compensate and catch up.
History, however, might need to remember Basu not as the longest serving chief minister of West Bengal, a rare phenomenon of a Communist heading a democratically-elected government, but as an extraordinary leader whose imprint is evident in so many significant but ordinary ways. He converted a banned party into a parliamentary one, contesting in the 1952 general elections. He converted the promise of decentralisation and participatory government into reality through panchayats and municipal elections. He claimed respect for regional parties and leaders and established their role in contributing to the running of the government in New Delhi. He introduced a method of keeping score of government performance through the Common Minimum Programme.
Basu was an extraordinary leader and person. Despite his patrician style, he was a man the masses respected. He spoke to them in ordinary terms, delivering homely but profoundly political messages. He was prosaic. He was a dreamer. He was a man who thought with his heart and felt with his mind, enabling him to leap across cultural, social, economic and even political barriers in order to engage with the people, his people.

* Shikha Mukerjee is a Kolkata-based political
commentator