Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee was the chief minister under whom the Left lost West Bengal after 34 long years. How is the loss of power treating him? What is he doing now?
But the former chief minister is not exactly out of job. “He is spending all his time at Alimuddin dissecting reports on election results that are now coming in from different districts. His analysis will be part of our internal documentation and literature,” says a party insider.
On the surface, the alteration in the former chief minister’s daily life may seem minor, but they symbolise his new-found status as an ordinary citizen. As chief minister, a normal day for Bhattacharjee would start with a visit to Alimuddin en route to Writers’ Building, the red colonial structure that houses the state secretariat, in the morning; at 1.30 pm, he would head home for lunch with his security cavalcade and be back at Writers’ by 4.30 pm. Evenings would be spent either at Nandan, the state-owned cultural complex, or Alimuddin Street. There are just two stops missing now on his daily itinerary —Writers’ and Nandan.
Skipping Nandan must be hard. His party colleagues don’t know because Bhattacharjee is not one to share personal feelings. After all, Nandan was Bhattacharjee’s place to unwind. Not the whole complex, just a 300 square feet room on the second floor which had stacks of DVDs and video cassettes, which the movie buff would enjoy over copious amounts of black coffee. “Satyajit Ray and Ingmar Bergman were among his favourite film directors. But then he is a cinema lover. From anti-fascist to classical to contemporary, he would watch anything cerebral,” says an official of the state’s information and cultural affairs department .
The former chief minister has always had a reputation as a cultural intellectual, with friends among leading filmmakers, artists and theatrepersons in the city whom he’d catch up with at Nandan for an adda. Most of them have switched allegiance to the Trinamool Congress after the state elections. However, some like writer Sunil Gangopadhyay and film-director Mrinal Sen still stand by him. “He has extensively studied various subjects and issues,” says Sen. “We have had a lot of discussion on films, though we have often differed in our judgement. He likes watching good films, and has a special liking for Latin American films.”
Once home, the voracious reader would devote at least two hours to reading before calling it a night. Every Bengali knows his Rabindranath Tagore and Jibanananda Das. But Bhattacharjee’s tastes are wider: he enjoys Gabriel García Márquez, Franz Kafka, Orhan Pamuk, etc. A nephew of the revolutionary poet Sukanta Bhattacharya, and a student of the city’s premier Presidency College, Bhattacharjee has even published a collection of poetry titled Chena Phooler Gondho (1994). Perhaps it is this pedigree that ensured his status in the party, unlike many others who rose from the district level.
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In private, of course, industrialists in the city still recall Bhattacharjee as a leader who genuinely wanted to industrialise Bengal and achieved to an extent what his predecessors had not. “He ought to be more tactful. After all, politics is an art of the impossible,” says an industrialist who is known to be close to Left leaders. Bhattacharjee wore his heart on his sleeve. “Politicians don’t do that,” points out another. Indeed.
Like Gregor Samsa, the protagonist of Kafka’s novella The Metamorphosis, which Bhattacharjee dramatised in the year 2000, the former chief minister is a loner, and something of an “outsider” within his party. He had a modern approach, but the party lagged behind him. In 2008, Bhattacharjee had blamed the CPI(M) for the negative image of the state at an Assocham meeting. “I am against bandhs. Unfortunately, I belong to a party which calls bandhs,” he had said, drawing flak from all quarters — allies, the opposition and his party.
“He was a general who was miles ahead of his soldiers,” says a close political aide. But it’s not the general’s job to do the detailing and the soldiers were not equipped to, though Machiavelli believed that a general should have perfect knowledge of the localities where he is waging a war.
In Singur, which has been a political battlefield for the past five years, Bhattacharjee lost miserably. The day in 2006, when the state government and Tata Motors officials went to inspect the land at Singur, the Left Front’s leader of the farmers was found sleeping peacefully at home. Farmers, who were caught unawares, agitated. The episode prompted a more seasoned politician and Bhattacharjee’s predecessor to comment: it’s unimaginable that the farmers’ leader was napping while their land was being inspected for acquisition.
“The chief minister thought that everyone would just follow him automatically, but that did not happen,” explains a close aide. But Bhattacharjee was the poster boy without too many followers in the party. Unsurprisingly, thus, he had no one to execute his dream of putting West Bengal at the forefront of the industrialisation drive that was creating waves across the country. The result: the dream turned into a nightmare and Bhattacharjee went from being India Inc’s “best” chief minister to a tragic hero, presiding over the unseating of the 34-year Left rule in Bengal. The original agent of change was short-changed in the “Paribartan Chai” (We want change) campaign led by his rivals.
But www.buddhabhattacharjee.net says Bhattacharjee will be back soon. Will he? More importantly, will he even want to? There may not be an immediate answer to that larger question. For now, Bhattacharjee is slated to participate in a sit-in dharna on July 12 against the petrol price hike.