IT happened when S.S. Ray was chief minister of Bengal. The Marxists were on the run. Some partymen were returning from a meeting in Midnapore to Calcutta when they were spotted by Youth Congress supporters. The CPI(M) workers ran into a compartment of a waiting train but the armed youths followed them, spouting foul language. A hefty Sikh in civilian clothes, obviously an army man, got up and asked the intruders to shut up as he would not "allow a noble all-India leader to be slandered in his presence". While recounting this anecdote, West Bengal Minister for Sports and Youth Welfare Subhas Chakraborty says: "Till then, even we had not realised how popular Jyoti Basu was."
He still is. And as a hung Parliament scenario looms large, the patriarch of Bengal politics may suddenly find himself catapulted onto the centrestage of national politics. In coming weeks, the National Front-Left Front combine is expected to play a decisive role in the formation of the next government. No wonder then that on a whistle stop campaign tour of the districts, Basu is often skirting local issues and, instead, harping on the need to vote the Marxists because, he says, it is imperative to usher in a non-Congress, non-BJP government at the Centre: "The Congress is divided and corrupt, the BJP is openly communal...it is time for a change at the Centre. Secular parties under the banner of the National Front-Left Front combine are in a position to provide the country with an alternative."
Time and again, he has been approached by Opposition leaders to shift to the national arena, but he has stuck to his Bengal patch. And at 82, the crusty Left veteran is poised for yet another encore as chief minister for a record fifth time—one of the few communist leaders in the world to have earned such a distinction. In his 19 years in power and before that as a party worker, he has spearheaded major movements on foodgrains and land reforms, organised trade unions and, lately, even shown the most pro-liberalisation face of the party. But most important, he has held together the party, intra-party wranglings and 'lumpen' elements in the cadre force notwithstanding.
But despite his long innings, Basu is not revered universally in Bengal today. Opposition to him—even to the point of hostility—runs deep among politicians and observers. For them, he is fortune's favourite whom providence has rewarded beyond measure. For someone who never saw the inside of a jail during British rule or made the kind of sacrifices that embellish the freedom struggle lore, Basu, say his critics, has reaped far more than he had ever sown. Such observations are not without a kernel of truth, but also not strictly relevant in the context of the story of Basu's rise to the stature of a colossus straddling the state for two decades.
Bursting on to the political firmament in 1946, Basu symbolised the voice of dissent, being only one of three communist opposition members in the state assembly. His first electoral victory was over the redoubtable Humayun Kabir. Passionate rhetoric, quick grasp of political issues and an unflinching commitment to the cause of the underdog made him a hero of the younger generations and a leading parliamentarian of West Bengal.
But all this did not happen inevitably. A communist leader by choice, Basu's upper-class credentials and education at Calcutta's prestigious St Xavier's College, followed by Lincoln's Inn, England—his contemporaries in England were V. K. Krishna Menon, Bhupesh Gupta, Nikhil Chakravartty, Feroze Gandhi and Indira Gandhi—did not impress his radical colleagues, some of whom were ideologically superior. On the flip side, it was this very same upper-class upbringing, which he sought constantly to play down, that shaped his future as Bengal's man of destiny. In the early '50s, he symbolised the values so dear to the heart of the Bengali bhadralok—a distinguished lineage, an exposure to western values and culture, and more importantly, an irreverent, to-hell-with-you attitude towards Delhi. One such exchange: "You only present your problems but suggest no solutions." Basu replied: "We will offer solutions when we sit on your side of the table." End of meeting.
But the transition from a run-of-the-mill legal practitioner to a state-of-the-art Marxist leader wielding tremendous power in the party, took decades in the making. And the road to the secretariat, Writers' Buildings, was not exactly paved with roses. Twice, in 1967 and 1969, he served as deputy to the austere Bangla Congress leader
Ajoy Mukherjee who headed two CPI(M)-dominated anti-Congress coalitions. Twice, the Centre dismissed these ministries. Then followed a long spell in the cold for Basu and the CPI(M) following the controversial 1972 assembly elections when the party bagged only 14 seats in a house of 280. Basu suffered an unexpected defeat in the hands of a CPI candidate in his bastion—Baranagar. Basu, always the astute politician, adopted Satgachhia and has represented it in all subsequent elections.
In the post-Emergency elections, Basu romped home with considerable help from the Janata Party and became chief minister at the ripe old age of 63. He hasn't looked back since, leading the Left Front to victory in 1982, 1987, 1992, and is all set to win again. Basu's contemporaries did not always react favourably to his growing eminence, the key to this being his prodigious mass appeal. When Bengal's idol, filmstar Uttam Kumar, once led a delegation to meet Basu, CPI veteran Somnath Lahiri commented: "Well, one star has come to meet another."
Within the party, too, he has often had a difficult time with the state party secretary Promode Das Gupta, the Bengal strongman who has made the CPI(M) what it is today. Das Gupta once threatened to arrest Union Home Minister S.B. Chavan if he came to Calcutta. Basu's work was cut out in Delhi in trying to explain Das Gupta's blunt remark. Then again, when Indira Gandhi was prime minister, she is said to have told Basu: "I do not doubt your credentials or sincerity, but I am less sure about some of your colleagues in your party", obviously referring to Das Gupta.
"Our party believes in revolution. While we participate in parliamentary politics, it is our intention to expose the basic hollowness of the system which cannot usher in fundamental social changes," Basu has emphasised time and again in his articles in the party mouthpiece, Ganashakti, and in his speeches. His critics, the Naxalites for instance, see his kind of politics as leading straight to the "sunlit plateau of social democracy"—to use a phrase coined by the late S.A. Dange—that had little to do with armed revolution. To his credit, Basu has been honest. Once, an ideologically confused cadre felt that the CPI(M) was going 'soft'. He agonised over his dilemma and met many ideologues, but to no avail. Basu took matters in hand and in his three-minute 'meeting' with the disillusioned youth he told him: "If you really believe that now is the time for a revolution, better join one of the Naxalite factions. If not, it is for you to decide whether you will stay with us. Either way, it is your decision." The young man, who is still with the CPI(M), says: "He did reduce my problem in his blunt and forthright manner. It made a lot of sense to me."
This unique ability, coupled with a remarkable courage—in 1969, he shooed off an angry mob of armed policemen, who had attacked the state assembly after a revolt, as ministers and others scurried for shelter—has enabled Basu to cover a larger political distance in his career than more ideology-bound colleagues.
On the last leg of his political career, Basu is often rude to the press, occasionally lashes out at political opponents, and has frequent outbursts of temper. But these failings apart, history will not be able to rank him lower than Promode Das Gupta, often called "the best communist organiser in South Asia".
