http://links.org.au/node/1531#comments
By Dipankar Bhattacharya
February 2010 -- Jyoti Basu, arguably the most familiar face of the
Communist Party of India (Marxist) -- CPI (M) -- in India and the last
surviving member of the party’s founding polit bureau, passed away in
Kolkata on January 17. In the course of his marathon political journey
spanning nearly seven decades, he served for an unprecedented 23
consecutive years as the chief minister of the Indian state of West
Bengal. Basu is also famously remembered as the only left leader who
had been offered the prime ministership of the country, in 1996, an
offer that was declined by his party even as Basu openly differed with
the CPI (M), calling its decision an "historic blunder".
Basu stepped down from power in November 2000 when his health started
failing, a graceful act which never really received the popular
recognition it deserved. Yet, even as he relinquished his official
responsibility as chief minister, he did not "retired" from his role
as a leader of his party. “Communists never retire”, was his famous
statement and he really lived it.
Beginning as a trade union organiser in the early 1940s, he was
elected to the central committee of the undivided Communist Party of
India (CPI) in 1951. [The CPI (M) was formed after a split in the
pro-Moscow CPI in 1964.] From 1953 to 1961, he was secretary of the
West Bengal provincial unit of the CPI and remained a polit bureau
member of the CPI (M) 2008. In 2008, he stepped down from the polit
bureau, but the CPI (M) central committee chose to retain him as a
permanent invitee to the polit bureau. Even though Basu never became
the general secretary of the CPI (M), along with EMS Namboodiripad and
HKS Surjeet, he left a defining imprint on the political evolution of
the CPI (M) until perhaps the decisive hour of 1996, when the party
differed from and prevailed over his political judgement (it was
another matter that four years later, the CPI (M) "updated" its party
program to include the possibility of participating in a bourgeois
government at the centre).
Centrist paradigm
In their own ways EMS, Surjeet and Jyoti Basu personified three key
strands in the centrist paradigm of the CPI (M)-– EMS as the party’s
principal ideologue, Basu as the party’s chief parliamentary
administrator and Surjeet as the party’s ultimate negotiator in
bourgeois politics.
Jyoti Basu belonged to the generation of early Indian communists who
got their first lessons in communist politics under the tutelage of
the Communist Party of Great Britain. Returning to the country after
finishing his study of law in London, he soon became a close confidant
of the underground core of the CPI leadership in Bengal. In 1944, he
became the founding secretary of the Bengal Assam Railroad Workers’
Union and it was from the railway workers’ constituency that he won
his first election to enter the pre-independence Bengal Provincial
Assembly in 1946.
All through the 1950s and until 1967, Basu remained the leader of the
opposition in West Bengal Assembly. In 1967 and 1969, he became deputy
chief minister in two short-lived UF governments. In 1972, the
Congress party regained power in West Bengal through a widely rigged
election. That was the only occasion when Basu lost, and the CPI (M)
boycotted the assembly until 1977 when the party surprisingly won a
clear and emphatic majority and went on to form government together
with its Left Front allies (the CPI was still in alliance with the
Congress and not part of the Left Front) under Basu's stewardship.
Most of the early leaders who had entered the communist movement in
India through the CPGB route had inherited the notions that prevailed
among communists in Britain and Western Europe. They had little
knowledge of, or interest in, the onward revolutionary march of the
Chinese communists, and in any case they did not see the relevance of
the Chinese experience in the Indian context. Even when peasant
uprisings like Tebhaga and Telanagana clearly indicated the
revolutionary potential of a profound rural awakening, and the
situation was pregnant with possibilities of a radical popular
advance, this leadership failed to recognise or grab this opportunity
and subjected the entire movement to the constitutionalist orientation
and parliamentary perspective they had absorbed from their CPGB
schooling. All through his marathon political innings, Basu remained a
typical representative of this breed, the only aberration being his
decision to side with the CPI (M) at the time of the split in 1964,
even as almost all his comrades from his London days remained with the
CPI.
Pragmatic
As subsequent years proved time and again, for him, this decision to
part ways with the CPI was more a practical political move and in no
way did it mean any rethinking of, let alone rupture with, the
reformist parliamentary perspective of the CPI. The growing popular
support for communists in opposition to the ruling Congress party in
West Bengal must have convinced Basu, the pragmatic political leader
of the masses, of the possibility of the left successfully challenging
the Congress party hegemony in state politics. His assessment proved
right as the CPI suffered its maximum marginalisation in West Bengal,
overtaken not only by the CPI (M) but also by parties like the Forward
Bloc and the Revolutionary Socialist Party (RSP). It was only by
returning to the CPI (M)-led fold after 1977 that the CPI could
subsequently save itself from becoming totally extinct. But the same
Basu remained a most vocal proponent of strategic partnership with the
capitalist Congress party in national politics, hoping that this would
reinforce the CPI (M)'s electoral edge over Congress in West Bengal.
Asked about the possibility of a Congress-led coalition coming to
power at the centre, in the midst of the May 2004 election campaign,
Basu's candid and precise answer to a TV interviewer was: “That’s what
we are hoping for, that's what we are working for.”(Walk the Talk,
Shekhar Gupta in conversation with Jyoti Basu, NDTV 24X7).
In their condolence messages, Congress party leaders have rightly
recalled Basu as a key architect of the Congress-led United
Progressive Alliance coalition which now rule India's central
government. When the CPI (M) eventually withdrew support from the UPA
in the wake of the Indo-US nuclear deal, Jyoti Basu had made it
abundantly clear that he did not approve of this course. Independent
Lok Sabha MP Somnath Chatterjee has now gone on record saying Basu had
advised him not to tender his resignation from the post of the
speaker. Another Basu protégé, Subhas Chakravarty, has ridiculed the
very idea of countering the Congress on an anti-imperialist plank,
arguing that anti-imperialist unity in India was unthinkable without
the Congress party. Incidentally, like the Basu interview in May 2004,
this interview, which turned out to be Chakravarty’s last TV interview
before his rather premature death a few weeks later, was also
televised in the middle of the May 2009 [national] Lok Sabha
elections.
Wishful thinking
Most Basu admirers tend to attribute the current slide of the CPI (M)
in West Bengal, as well as in national politics, to the party's
"growing deviation" from the Basu legacy. Many of them believe that
the rot started with the party preventing Basu from accepting the
offer to be prime ministers. Basu himself also believed that had he
become the prime minister of a Congress-supported United Front
(UF)government in 1996, history would have taken a different course.
Basu admirers believe that with his record of leading a coalition
government for decades, he would have given a stable coalition at the
centre too, thus preventing the [right-wing Hindu-chauvinist]
Bharatiya Janata Party from usurping power in 1998. And some even
argue that under Basu's leadership the united front government could
also have moderated the neoliberal economic agenda with an aam aadmi
("common man") flavour, thereby denying the Congress party the chance
to invent the UPA and recover its lost ground with the help of its
renewed pro-poor rhetoric.
These wishful thinkers forget that however quirky history may prove at
times, the balance of class forces does not take long to reassert.
Jyoti Basu leading a relatively cohesive Left Front government in West
Bengal under the absolute domination of the CPI (M) and Jyoti Basu
heading a disparate coalition at the centre with the backing of the
Congress party would have been two utterly different propositions.
Instead of announcing the arrival of the CPI (M) as a leading player
on the national political stage, such a government was more likely to
have put the party in an awkward predicament even in its established
strongholds and perhaps hastened its slide that was triggered a decade
later.
Record in West Bengal
Instead of speculating about what might have happened in national
politics, it is perhaps more in order to focus on what has actually
been happening in Basu's own West Bengal. Is the CPI (M) in West
Bengal today paying the price for moving away from Basu's legacy? In
West Bengal, the CPI (M) never really deviated from the course charted
by Basu and whatever is happening today in the state must be seen in
the logical context of Basu's legacy, which always privileged the
stability of power over popular struggles for social change.
In the late 1970s, Basu may well have begun with Operation Barga [land
reform program] and Panchayati Raj [creation of locally elected
panchayats (councils)], but when the choice came to move on to the
next step of giving ownership to sharecroppers and introducing
collective/cooperative farming, Basu simply allowed the momentum to
peter out and by the end of the 1980s the reversal of land reforms had
begun in West Bengal.
Likewise, the issue of federal restructuring of the Indian polity
through a bigger devolution of power and resources to the states, a
pet theme of the CPI (M) articulated consistently by Basu in the early
1980s, was also abandoned midway. The backlash of "national unity"
that gave the Congress party its highest ever majority following the
assassination of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi might have politically
pushed Basu temporarily on the back foot, but perhaps what really
drove him away from his one-time favourite mission of federal
restructuring was the 1991 paradigm shift in economic policies
engineered by the governments of prime ministers Narsimha Rao and
Manmohan Singh.
With the licensing era coming to an end, Basu argued that it no longer
made sense to fight with the central government over more economic
powers; what now had to be done was to woo private capital to come and
invest in West Bengal. For Basu too, it was time for the state to
retreat in matters economic and industrial, leaving the initiative
primarily with big private capital, Indian as well as foreign. Within
three years of the centre announcing the new economic policies, the
Left Front under Basu adopted its own version of new industrial
policy. Basu's new discourse stressed "industrial peace" and
discouraged "militant trade unionism" –- yet Bengal did not see any
rise in investment, all it saw was deepening of the problem of
industrial sickness, massive looting of employees’ provident fund and
rampant violation of wage legislation. Buddhadeb has only sought to
render this discourse more profound -– while Basu took three years to
adapt to the new policy paradigm of the centre, Buddhadeb did better
by anticipating the Special Economic Zone Act two years before
parliament passed it!
Basu and state repression
It was this new-found obsession with state-sponsored corporate-led
"industrialisation" that led to [the eviction of peasants from their
land and subsequent resistance] at Singur and Nandigram. When Singur
happened, Basu never questioned the state government’s decision to
acquire the land, he only asked why the CPI (M)-led Kisan Sabha had
not been pressed into service to prepare the ground for the government
and the conglomerate Tata Group to move in. There was also no
intervention on the part of Basu in response to the huge public outcry
against the serial massacres in Nandigram -– if he at all intervened
it was primarily to silence the debates within the Left Front.
Perhaps one could not expect any different response from Basu, whose
own tenure had been marked by a series of police shootings and major
massacres even though they never created the kind of impact that
Singur, Nandigram or Lalgarh did in a changed situation, thanks, in no
small measure to the new media environment of 24-hour TV coverage.
It is important to remember that, in May 1967, when the historic
Naxalbari peasant uprising broke out in Darjeeling district of north
Bengal, Basu was the home minister in the state cabinet and he
promptly responded with a one-track repressive policy, rushing
paramilitary forces to crush the revolt. Along with Pramod Dasgupta,
then secretary of the CPI (M)’s West Bengal unit, Basu was
instrumental in unleashing unmitigated state repression on communist
revolutionaries. The UF government was however soon to be replaced by
the infamous Congress regime of Siddharth Shankar Ray, which went on
to subject large sections of the left, sections of the CPI (M)
included, to a brutal reign of semi-fascist terror.
If in 1977, the CPI (M)-led Left Front won a clear majority in spite
of its still relatively limited organisational strength and political
reach, a major reason was West Bengal's ardent desire to put an
emphatic end to Ray's repressive reign and a quest for justice and
democracy. But apart from promising non-intervention of the police in
democratic struggles, a promise which was soon to be violated, Basu
never bothered to bring the perpetrators of massacres and countless
cases of custodial killing, torture and rape to justice, instead
granting them impunity and even rewards!
Two years into power, Basu's government bared its fangs against the
hapless refugees who were trying to settle down at Morichjhanpi, one
of the northern-most forested islands of the Sundarbans. Some 4000
families reportedly perished in the forcible evacuation drive
unleashed by the government, succumbing to starvation and exhaustion,
as well as indiscriminate killing and rape. History will always
remember Morichjhanpi as one of the cruelest instances of
state-sponsored crime against humanity, even though it never had the
kind of impact that Nandigram generated three decades later.
Towards the end of the 1990s, Jyoti Basu’s popular rating had started
declining quite rapidly. His victory margin in the 1996 state assembly
elections had already dropped considerably. If at one stage the CPI
(M) had benefited from Basus's charismatic leadership, ironically in
November 2000 it was his act of stepping down which really saved the
CPI (M) in the 2001 elections. This masterstroke left the state
opposition rather clueless for quite some time, robbing it of the very
target that it had grown up against. But behind the CPI (M)'s
impressive electoral showing -– in May 2004 it led a 60-plus
contingent of left MPs in the national Lok Sabha and in May 2006 it
returned to power for the seventh successive term with an 80% majority
–- the policy crisis of the CPI (M) and the Left Front government had
been growing all along and it eventually exploded at Singur and
Nandigram.
>From his secluded residence at Indira Bhawan -– it is ironic that
Jyoti Basu lived in this Urban Development Department bungalow in Salt
Lake that Indira Gandhi had inaugurated and used for her stay during
the 1972 AICC session in Kolkata, and the department now proposes to
turn it into Basu Museum – Basu could do little but to silently
witness the growing collapse of the government he had built and led
for years and decades. In a desperate last-ditch attempt to arrest the
alarming electoral downslide, Basu finally appealed to Congress party
voters in the state to vote for the CPI (M) for the sake of "peace and
stability" in the state, just as the CPI (M) had supported the
Congress party at every hour of national crisis. But the electoral
tide in the state had already turned inexorably against the CPI (M)
and predictably enough, Basu's appeal fell on deaf ears. The CPI (M)
failed to win any of the 10 seats for which by-elections were held in
August 2009.
Time had already overtaken the political trajectory of Jyoti Basu.
Yet, for a long time to come Basu will surely be remembered by history
as the chief architect of the most enduring social-democratic rule in
a Third World parliamentary set-up.
[Dipankar Bhattacharya is general secretary of the Communist Party on
India (Marxist-Leninist) Liberation. This article first appeared in
the February 2010 edition of Liberation, the monthly journal of the
CPI (ML) Liberation.]
--
You cannot build anything on the foundations of caste. You cannot
build up a nation, you cannot build up a morality. Anything that you
will build on the foundations of caste will crack and will never be a
whole.
-AMBEDKAR
http://venukm.blogspot.com
http://www.shelfari.com/kmvenuannur
http://kmvenuannur.livejournal.com
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