Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee: An influential Marxist voice who rose through the ranks
Bhattacharjee made fast progress through the party ranks, given his appetite for work, his grasp of political theory and his loyalty to people and principles
Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee passed away in Kolkata on August 8 at the age of 80. Though he had been unwell and mostly inactive for about a decade, he remained an influential voice in his party — the Communist Party of India (Marxist) or CPI(M), both in Bengal and in Delhi.
Bhattacharjee reached the pinnacle of the party by endeavour, and his creative adherence to the principles of his party as he saw them. But before we try to assess his political work, it would be wise to look back on his political career.
Like many of his colleagues in the undivided Communist Party of India (CPI), which split in 1964 to form the CPI and CPI(M), who rose to positions of eminence within the party, Bhattacharjee started out as a student activist and then became a youth activist before joining the CPI(M) in 1966, just after the party split. His trajectory was mimicked by countless others, proving many years down the line to be a cause of serious weakness for the party. But we shall return to that point later.
Bhattacharjee made fast progress through the party ranks, given his appetite for work, his grasp of the political theory that characterised and his loyalty both to people and principles. Becoming close to then-state general secretary Promode Dasgupta, an uncompromising strategist and a close to the omnipotent presence in the Bengal wing of the party, Bhattacharya made good progress. He became a member of the state committee of the party in 1972 and the state secretariat, a higher body, in 1982; by Left standards the rise was meteoric.
It didn’t take long for Bhattacharjee to be elevated to the central bodies of the party. In 1982, he became a permanent invitee to the central committee of the party and in 1985 he became a member of the central committee of the party and in 2000 a member of the Politburo. He resigned from all his positions in 2015 on account of poor health, though, as a loyal soldier, he continued to go to Alimuddin Street, the office of the Bengal CPI(M) for a few hours a day as long as he could.
He first contested for the Kashipur assembly seat in 1977 and won but lost five years later. He switched to the South Kolkata constituency of Jadavpur, in 1987, from where he won five times, before losing to Manish Deb, a Trinamool Congress (TMC) candidate in 2011, when the Left Front government was swept out of power. It wasn’t just Bhattacharjee, a host of leading lights, lost as the Left Front managed to scrape together only 40 seats in the 294-member House, less even than a debilitated Congress party. Since then, it has been downhill for the Left Front.
Bhattacharjee's path in governance and rise to chief ministership
Bhattacharjee entered the government as soon as the Left Front came to power in 1977, with the portfolio of Information & Culture (I&C). But after losing his seat he was out in the cold for a spell. He made it back in 1987, again as I&C minister, with additional charges.
Even though Bhattacharjee always had the aura of the Number Two, his position in the Council of Ministers was cemented in 1996, when he took over the Home portfolio and the final confirmation of his position of presumptive chief minister came in 1999, when he became deputy chief minister. Chief Minister Jyoti Basu was already ailing and before the elections of 2001, Bhattacharya became chief minister in November 2000, remaining in the hot seat for over a decade.
It is said about Bhattacharjee -- along with men like Benoy Chowdhury, the land reforms minister of the Left Front government who quietly walked away into the sunset when his job was done and when he sensed the changes in the party -- that he was incorruptible. Bhattacharjee had abruptly resigned from his position in Basu’s cabinet in 1993, saying he did not want to be in a ministry of thieves. But he was persuaded to return. Bhattacharjee will remain in the history of an age marked by corruption and dishonesty as an honest man in public life.
As chief minister
Nevertheless, Bhattacharjee’s stint as chief minister of Bengal was not an unmixed blessing. In fact, as a chief minister, he was more of a failure than a success. His failure to push through the projects at Singur and Nandigram are the glaring examples but underlying them were deeper problems of style and substance. By the time Bhattacharjee became chief minister at the turn of the last century, to some extent at least the party had already been hollowed out, though spectacular electoral victories delivered by an invincible machine tended to hide this fact from everyone’s eyes.
The death in 2006 of Anil Biswas, state secretary of the Bengal CPI(M), who had a huge talent for keeping the organisational side ticking was a huge blow. His successors, forget repairing the damage, and couldn’t even keep the organisational side of things going.
One reason for the bad state of CPI(M) was its constant reliance on the urban middle and lower-middle classes to provide the cadres and the sinews of the party. The ticket to success in the party became membership of the Students Federation of India or Democratic Youth Federation of India – in other words, urban people who had no natural affinity either with the urban poor or the rural people.
Only a negligible number of people from the peasant and worker wings made it to the high table. Even now, there does not seem to be any serious attempt to resurrect the kisan sabhas or the Centre of Indian Trade Unions.
Thus, when Bhattacharjee became chief minister from November 2000 to May 2011, he was presiding over a system that had been eroded from within. Thus, the bold moves he undertook in the arena of economic liberalisation not only lacked the support of the people at large, it also lacked enough support within the party for it to push these new ideas.
In the middle of the 1990s, the Left government took on the job of acquiring close to 4,000 hectares of land to build the New Town. A decade on, Bhattacharjee’s government was dislodged because he wanted to acquire 1,000 acres of land in Singur – that’s around 400 hectares.
It was an ignominious end for Bhattacharjee. The man who stormed out of a cabinet meeting because he couldn’t work with thieves had to return and become chief minister; and, as chief minister, the man who wanted to industrialise his state, found himself without the human resources and organisational strength to make his plans materialise, but perhaps, history will remember him more kindly than his peers have done.
Suhit K Sen is an author and political commentator based in Kolkata. The views expressed are personal
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