)
When I walk into her second-floor office in A K Gopalan Bhavan, headquarters to the Communist Party of India (Marxist), Brinda Karat is busy putting the final touches to a press release.
It's a small room but full of mementos that give it a cosy feel. A bow and quiverful of arrows hang on the door (a recent gift, I discover, from comrades in Jhabua, Madhya Pradesh), black and white photographs of Communist leaders line the walls and knick-knacks are scattered on the worktable. The CPI (M)'s first woman Politburo member clearly spends long hours working in this room, writes Kavita Chowdhury.
In fact, Karat is so pressed for time that this Lunch with BS is taking place in her office. As we wait for the lunch to arrive from the mess downstairs, we chat about her recent visit to Bengal and the Panchayat polls.
The Left was credited with giving Bengal a robust system of Panchayati Raj during its long 34-year rule in the state, but current Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee had been sparring with the state Election Commission over polling dates. "There have been seven rounds of clockwork Panchayat polls in West Bengal since the Emergency," Karat reminds me proudly, but that "decentralisation and people's empowerment is now in complete shambles" because the Trinamool Congress has "scant respect for the Panchayat system".
These polls (to be held between July 11 and 25) will be the first major electoral test for the Left after it was decimated by a popular wave for the Trinamool Congress in 2011. The official position of the CPI(M), the largest of the Left coalition that ruled Bengal, is that the defeat is a setback but not a permanent one - it's the same line on its dwindling position in the Lok Sabha. All the same, Karat does not make any commitments on the party's prospects in the upcoming local polls "The main task is to rebuild its links with the people," she demurs, listing instances of Banerjee's "muzzling of democratic rights".
Meanwhile, two wholesome thalis arrive comprising rice, rotis, green dal, vegetable curry, egg curry, pickle and dahi. We clear books and papers from the worktable and get started on the food.
We chat a bit about her less-publicised role as a woman activist - she's been one of the votaries of the controversial issue of reserving seats for women in the Lok Sabha. As she says, "I don't see women's issue as a non-political issue. In fact, they're one and the same thing." In her view, "by marginalising women's issues mainstream politics is doing an injustice to democratic processes".
This is an unexceptionable position, of course, but I am more interested in how someone from her privileged background (12 years in Loreto House, Calcutta under Irish nuns, then Welham's, Dehradun, and then Miranda House, Delhi) became a trade union activist?
Her upbringing in Calcutta she acknowledges was "not very conventional" with a "thet Punjabi father [Sooraj Lal Dass] and a very Bengali mother [Oshrukona Mitra]". "No one in my family had been involved in politics," says Karat. But it was her stint in the Air India office in London for nearly four years in 1967, the height of the students' movement in Europe, that attracted her to Marxist ideology, as it did to many of her generation.
"I was a 19-year-old then, and those were the times when London was full of intense protest marches - there were protests against the Vietnam war; there were also protests against racism, on women's liberation, anti-capitalist protests. It was the anti-capitalist stream that attracted me." Working eight hours a day at the Air India office on Bond Street, one of the world's toniest addresses, and then participating in protest marches after work "like so many other young people", Karat confesses to being deeply influenced by all her reading of Marx and Marxist ideology at that time.
Wholly "self-taught and self-read" on Marxism she was also "inspired" by the "exciting things that were happening in Bengal," under Jyoti Basu and Ajoy Mukherjee in 1967. The Communists, she says, were experimenting very skillfully with "mass movement" and "parliamentary democracy".
She was referring to the United Front government that governed Bengal at the time under the chief ministership of Mukherjee, who formed the Bangla Congress, a breakaway from the Congress and co-governed with the CPI (M). Inspired by Basu, she quit her job and came back to India.
I tuck into the boiled egg curry and rice but Karat eats sparingly, preferring roti to rice. "How easy was it to join the Communist party once you were back in Calcutta?," I ask. Karat says no one in her family and immediate circle - rooted in the liberal, partly westernised Brahmo Samaj - was remotely connected with politics, so it was difficult trying to even contact anyone in the party.
Her elder sister Jooni was "extremely supportive" and after several failed attempts (which included trying to contact an old tutor with Marxist leanings), her Welham's school friend Subhashini Ali chipped in (Ali went on to become a prominent trade union leader in Kanpur.) "Bimanda" (aka Biman Bose, now a fellow Politburo member) was the first party leader she met.
Karat's travails were far from over, though. The CPI (M) being a highly structured party was not convinced and advised her to "go back to study" and acquaint herself with politics before she took the plunge. "Really upset", she enrolled as a Master of Arts student in history in Calcutta University. It was here that she emerged as a student activist, being a member of the Bengal Province Students' Federation, the forerunner of the Students' Federation of India.
Remembering the day she finally got her party membership in 1971, Karat says with a broad smile, "It was the happiest day for me." In her four decades in the party, she adds, she's "never had a moment's regret."
Her political life was, of course, closely linked with her personal life since she is married to the current party General Secretary Prakash Karat. I thought they'd met in London, but Karat says he studied at Edinburgh University. "I met him much later in India through party work," she says, but is unwilling to reveal more, so I ask about her brief foray into films in 2005.
This was not a Bollywood potboiler but serious (and well-received) film called Amu, made by her niece Shonali Bose (her sister Jooni's daughter), on the 1984 anti-Sikh riots. She laughs and remembers thinking, "party wholetimers don't go waltzing off to do films!"
Since her niece didn't have a big budget to pay too many professional actors and asked her aunt to fill in. Caught in a dilemma, Karat approached Comrade Harkishan Singh Surjeet, who then "was most amazed" at her hesitation and encouraged her to go ahead.
Getting back to the current political situation, she categorically denies that the CPI (M) is involved in talks for a Third Front in the run-up to the 2014 elections. The agenda for the Left parties, according to Karat, is to ensure a "pluralistic democratic system". In an oblique reference to crony capitalism, which she calls the "corporate view of India's Parliament", she says "corporations would like it to be a two-party system," but the Left is pushing for "an alternative platform of policies."
By now, I have partaken of a goodly meal and as I get ready to leave, I ask her about the Left's persistent opposition to foreign direct investment in every sphere - insurance, banking, retail. Her reply is to point to the Wall Street collapse: "When you give over your financial institutions, to the private sector, you get what you got." India was shielded, by and large, due to its public sector banks and that was a "basic lesson" for us to "protect regulation in our public sector units and not sell them off," she rationalises.
That's a classic view of an old-style Marxist, and so rarely heard after the fall of the Soviet Union that I am sceptical and ask whether the Left movement was attracting young people as it did before. She replies, "Why would you assume that the youth want to sell our sovereignty? We have a high percentage of youth in our party. But there's always room for more."
