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BY his own admission, he was “a Communist compromising with capitalism”. His comrades in the CPI(M) – especially the conservative and rigid apparatchiks of A K G Bhavan in Delhi – and allies in the West Bengal Left Front believed he was deviating from the party ideology. But Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee was a realist who wanted to rebrand the Left and marry Marxist theory with market reality.
His keenness to put his pragmatic ideas into practice – he once called the crippling shutdowns enforced in his state by Leftist trade unions as immoral – put him on a collision course with his comrades in Delhi and on Alimuddin Street, the CPI(M)’s headquarters in Delhi. But it earned the poet-playwright and former chief minister admirers outside, who likened him to China’s great Communist moderniser, Deng Xiaoping.
Bhattacharjee, who took over as CM from the legendary Jyoti Basu in 2000, was more than a politician. He dabbled with literature and, as a devoted fan of the great Colombian writer Gabriel Garcia Marquez, translated two of his works, ‘The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor’ and ‘Clandestine in Chile’. But he also hoped to be a reformist who rewrote Communism’s Red Book.
When he went down the industrialisation path after returning as an elected CM for the first time in 2001, this pitted the CM against the self-proclaimed Marxist puritans in Delhi.
The first faceoff came in 2004-05 when Bhattacharjee spoke about the need to curb militant trade unionism, and proposed that the IT sector that he was pushing for in Bengal be exempted from trade union activities, including strikes. The trade unions, especially the CPI(M)’s labour union CITU, took umbrage, with the matter reaching the Politburo. The latter concluded that there was no question of the labour laws not being applicable in the IT sector, and said employees should have the right to set up unions and to do collective bargaining.
Behind the scenes though, the central leadership agreed to tacitly support Bhattacharjee’s push for private investment to create employment opportunities and improve infrastructure.
But that was just the beginning.
The talk in Bengal in the run-up to the 2006 Assembly elections – Bhattacharjee’s second as CM – was about the inflow of private capital, be it Indonesia-based Salem Group’s investment plans in Bengal, Japanese major Mitsubishi’s upcoming second unit in Haldia, the proposed chemical hub in Haldia, or Tata Motors’s expansion plans with Bengal in focus.
The Left Front went on to register a landslide victory in the elections, winning 235 of 294 seats — a result which Bhattacharjee perhaps read as a mandate in favour of his industrialisation plans. On the eve of his swearing-in, he told a television channel: “I am a Communist, compromising with capitalism… I know what I am doing in West Bengal. What is the alternative? If we have to develop, we need capital.”
But Bhattacharjee’s industrialisation push soon ran into rough weather, with protests against land acquisition for both the Singur and Nandigram projects snowballing, providing leaders in Delhi the opening to move in against him. The opposition to Bhattacharjee in Left quarters further grew when Trinamool Congress chief Mamata Banerjee, the face of the protests, got the support of Left-leaning luminaries such as Medha Patekar, Mahasweta Devi, Aparna Sen and even, in some instances, Amartya Sen.
The CPI(M) leadership was also uncomfortable with Bhattacharjee’s call for review and modernisation of the madrasa education system, apprehensive about its impact on the party’s minority vote.
Bhattacharjee, in turn, made his displeasure at then general secretary Prakash Karat’s tough opposition to the Indo-US nuclear deal public. A dominant section of the CPI(M)’s Bengal leadership, in fact, felt Karat’s decision to withdraw support to the UPA government over the nuclear deal was not well-timed.
The drubbing suffered by the Left in the 2009 Lok Sabha elections, in which a triumphant UPA returned to power, exacerbated the chasm between Alimuddin Street and A K G Bhawan.
Bhattacharjee offered to resign as CM taking responsibility for the CPI(M)’s poor Lok Sabha show in Bengal. While Karat got him to change his mind, Bhattacharjee distanced himself from the central leadership. The Assembly poll loss in 2011 further cut him off from the party.
The Left too went into a downward spiral. From its best performance in 2004, when it won 59 seats and emerged as a major political force and the architect of the UPA-I government, the Left slumped to 24 in 2009, then to 44 in 2004 and 16 in 2009.
Bhattacharjee’s distance from the “Kerala lobby”, seen as led by Karat, grew even more after this. He along with other state leaders and Sitaram Yechury came to be seen as the counter “Bengal lobby”.
— With inputs from Atri Mitra
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