Jyoti Basu was a rare politician: Although he made his career in the confines of the politics of West Bengal, he influenced the development and growth of the Indian Communist movement like no other leader.
Basu was sworn in as chief minister of West Bengal on June 21, 1977, and he served the state in that capacity till November 6, 2000, when he retired, citing health reasons. He was the one Communist leader who single-handedly changed the focus of the Indian Communists from the futile course of armed peasant struggle to the peaceful path of parliamentary democracy, thus bringing the Indian Left into mainstream politics.
At the same time, Basu was the chief architect in formulating the issue of Centre-state relations which eventually curbed the centripetal trends nurtured by the Congress party and gave Indian politics a more federal character. It was at the insistence of the chief minister of West Bengal in the early 1980s that a number of non-Congress state chief ministers were mobilised against the ‘intolerant’ attitude of the then Congress government at the Centre.
Basu gathered major and minor state leaders on the platform of ‘respect for non-Congress ruled states and conclave politics was born. This eventually compelled then prime minister Indira Gandhi to yield to their pressure and the Sarkaria Commission was formed to look into the Centre-state relations.
While the rest of the country is learning lessons about coalition politics today, Basu’s contribution in this direction is not given enough credit. In West Bengal, starting from 1977 to this day, the Communists and the Congress never got more than 50 per cent of the vote in any state elections. In the 1987 Assembly elections, the CPI(M) and the other Left parties together secured 45 per cent of the votes. In the 1996 Assembly polls, the undivided Congress got 41 per cent of the vote. In most of the elections, there was only a tiny gap between the votes obtained by the Communists and the Congress in the state.
But the Congress did not have partners of any worth, while the Communists could bring various Left parties under one umbrella — the Left Front. The successful handling of the minor partners by the CPI(M) led by Basu was the key to their uninterrupted rule in Bengal.
More From This Section
Basu acted boldly and this was not always endorsed by his party immediately. He sought investment in his state from capitalists of all hues, even multinationals, while his party railed elsewhere in the country against ‘capitalists’ who were ‘running dogs of imperialism’.
On this, he offered his explanation in 1984: “We work in a capitalist system, so we can’t be indifferent to capital.” In May 1985, Basu’s government signed an agreement with the RPG Group for a joint venture to start the Haldia Petrochemicals which evoked criticisms from a section of the party. Later, the CPI(M) party congress endorsed that line. Similarly, on September 23, 1994, Basu unilaterally announced his government’s new industrial policy. The party put its stamp on it a year later.
However, his failure to privatise some sick state undertakings like the Great Eastern Hotel suggested it was an idea ahead of its time. The party orthodoxy’s triumphed majorly in 1996 when the CPI(M) shot down a proposal from the Opposition, which went on to form the government, to make him the prime minister. This was later described by Basu as a “historic blunder”. His contention was that the move could have given the party a unique opportunity to spread its influence beyond the borders of West Bengal, Kerala and Tripura, the three states to which the CPI(M) has remained confined all these years.
But was the central party’s veto alone responsible for limiting the influence of the Left movement? West Bengal made a commitment but failed to keep its promise. On June 21, 1977, after the swearing-in ceremony, Basu addressed a jubilant crowd in front of the Writers’ Buildings in Kolkata and pledged a government with a difference, which would be responsive to the aspirations of the poor. The initial days of the Left Front rule in the state raised that hope, with its land reform push and the panchayat system. But that momentum was lost within the first 10 years and the Left Front government went the way of other states run by non-Left parties.
As a result, the Left lost its influence. Of the 638 Assembly seats in the five neighbouring states, the CPI(M) has only two seats now, while in 1978, the party had at least 12 MLAs in the 126-member Assam assembly, and the CPI and CPI(M) had 23 and 4 MLAs, respectively, in undivided Bihar. Lamenting this downward trend, in an interview in 2005, Basu observed that this was one of his greatest regrets — that the party’s influence could not go beyond three states.
What might the CPI(M) have become if Jyoti Basu had not persuaded it to invest in parliamentary democracy as a path to political power? We may never know but in the 1960s and 70s, his contemporaries were more inclined to follow either the Russian or the Chinese path to communism. For many of them, participating in parliamentary democracy was a matter of temporary ploy, tactics only.
Basu was the first to utilise the scope offered by Indian democracy. In his 60 years of political career, he pursued the parliamentary line, which sometimes earned him the tag of a ‘rightwing revisionist’ in the pur/itan circles of the party. For others in the party, he was a voice of moderation. In 1989, when the Chinese government brutally suppressed the student unrest at the Tiananmen Square in Beijing, the CPI(M) politburo came out strongly in support of the Chinese Communist party.
But within days, Basu made it clear at a public meeting that he thought the politburo’s reaction was unnecessarily harsh on the hapless students. Later, when the Soviet Union imploded and the disintegration of the East European Socialist Bloc was met with jubilant cries of the ‘End of History’ in the West, from the pantheon of shocked Indian Communists it was Basu who admitted first that Communists had failed to internalise the tremendous progress of science and technology that gave a fresh lease of life to moribund capitalism; and that it was the absence of the human factor that weakened the socialist world.
In Bengal, he represented the Bengali middle class ‘Bhadralok’ of the bygone days — the foreign educated elite, yet immersed in Bengali ethos, clad in spotless white dhoti and kurta, yet never uncomfortable in the company of Westerners and never afraid of taking on the power that be in the Centre.
In post-partition Bengal, when decadence was all pervasive, Basu became an iconic image in Bengali consciousness.
Today, the CPI(M) has amended the party constitution to make it possible to participate in a non-Left government in the Centre, which was denied to Basu in1996. Basu helped guide the party to the world of parliamentary democracy. If it hadn’t been for him, the CPI(M) might have meandered and died, a footnote in the history of India’s progressive movements.