Hegde played on the national stage combining integrity, competence and ambition. It was only half in jest that Maneka Gandhi once gushed - this was long before her own Bharatiya Janata Party debut - that everyone would benefit if India had an executive presidency with Hegde as president. I mentioned it to him and he said he already knew. Our last meeting was in Bangalore on August 29, 1986. I have a reason for remembering the date. Hegde had invited me home for breakfast. There were just the two of us, and I recall a sumptuous repast of idli, dosas, puris, upma, sambhar, rasam, vegetables and various kinds of chutney. Then, when I was bursting, my host asked how I wanted my eggs. If I hadn't hastily declined, that breakfast would have turned into the kind of mammoth dinners Nurul Hasan served in Kolkata's Raj Bhavan as governor.
The telephone shrilled all through breakfast. I assumed at first they were the usual calls all politicians get, then noticed they were exceedingly brief, with Hegde generally only thanking the caller. It wasn't until the flowers started arriving that the penny dropped. It was the Karnataka chief minister's birthday, the 60th in fact.
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Their main falling out was over the governor's allegation that the Marxists and their coalition partners deliberately imported illegal migrants from Bangladesh to inflate their vote bank. At my invitation, after leaving West Bengal, Rajeshwar wrote a couple of articles on the subject in the paper I then edited. They were well-researched and well-documented and supported by statistical information. Basu was furious.
Nripen Chakraborty, who was born in East Bengal in 1905 and died in 2004 after being deeply committed to revolutionary politics for six decades, was a very different animal. My nonagenarian friend Jolly Mohan Kaul, for whom Communism was the god that failed, says Communists like Chakraborty "were men of a special mould." Chakraborty joined the CPI in 1934. The leadership sent him to Tripura in 1950 and that became his life's mission. After the 1964 split, he joined the CPI(M) and was elected to the central committee in 1972 and politburo in 1984 without ever seeking the attention showered on a Prakash or Brinda Karat. If Tripura's current chief minister, Manik Sarkar, is the "cleanest and the poorest chief minister in the country" that is a tribute to the high standard of incorruptibility Chakraborty set.
Like many politicians, Chakraborty tried his hand at journalism. He was a sub-editor on the Anandabazar Patrika in 1939-41, co-editor of the CPI organ in Bengali Swadhinata, and later a regular columnist in the daily Desher Katha, the CPI(M) mouthpiece in Tripura. Local readers were familiar with the pen-name Arup Roy, he used till 1995 when the CPI(M) expelled him for anti-party activities. They were interpreted to mean criticism of Basu's son's business ventures. The politburo readmitted him in 2004 but he was ill and unconscious, and died the next day.
Chakraborty's fate recalls Jolly's comment, probably in his memoirs, In Search of a Better World, that when he joined the party, its constituency was the poor. "Now, it seems that they have changed that and are chasing after GDP. The two things are contradictory." Since the frugal Chakraborty probably shared that view, he would have seriously disagreed with Manmohan Singh. That didn't prevent the former prime minister from acknowledging his greatness.