Bye, man who stole our years

The man I grew up hating is dead. It is impossible for me to look at Jyoti Basu except through the glasses of my adolescent and early years in Calcutta. From massive cutouts, from street-corner rallies, from behind the dark windows of his car at the middle of his anaconda convoy, from the misty black drape of power cuts over sleepy colonies in winter, Basu silently watched over us.

He watched over our football, films, frustrations, campus music and fierce, outlawed lovemaking in dark parks and on Victoria Memorial grounds.

For us, the children of Communism, there was no escape from the poker-faced patriarch.

We'd hear the man of few words and many pronouns lash out from Brigade Parade Ground against undisclosed enemies: "They [CIA, later communal forces] are helping the imperialist forces... and she [Indira Gandhi, later Mamata Banerjee] is helping them."

It was a language we the bourgeois, middle-class, English-speaking youth did not understand, and I doubt if the young proletariat it was meant for understood as well, because there was no sign that they got the inspiration or the chance to clean a single cobweb in the sleepy offices of revolution.

All the while unemployment rose, power cuts lengthened, and an unbearably grim, aged, arrogant, humourless party under Jyoti Basu proliferated by empowering bullies in colleges, cultural institutions, factories, offices, villages, everywhere. Scientific rigging was invented and perfected.

The leader had his three scotch whiskies every night and went to sleep, accepted with delight the occasional gift of tiny shoes for his extraordinarily small feet (his son Chandan had told me once), doted on his granddaughters and ruled with a frightening genius in realpolitik.

While covering my first elections in 1996, I had reported from Basu's fort, the famous Satgachhia constituency, that if the opposition could mobilise the anger in the parts where people walk three km to get water while in the privileged 'red' part the roads shine and crops smile, then Jyoti Basu may lose. My editor told me: "Get your politics right, kid. Basu will never choose a losing seat."

Basu never lost from Satgachhia, or almost anywhere. His only electoral defeat was in 1972 to CPI man Shibpada Bhattacharya, who said with remarkable courage after all these years yesterday: "I was always confident of my victory but was also a bit nervous as I was up against a man who was considered invincible."

There was little rebellion against Basu, till he rebelled in an interview calling the Left's decision to not join the Union government a "historic blunder". Every time the party ignored his shrewd advice, which often went against ideology (he wanted the Left to refrain from voting against the Congress-led government on the nuclear deal, for instance), it paid a price.

But Basu's biggest strengths have backfired on his far more able successor, Buddhadev Bhattacharya, and could well prove Left's undoing next polls.

First, Basu presided over the creation of a savage, excitable hinterland which fetched him the rural votes.

Second, he made the border with Bangladesh fluid (you pay Rs 60 as bribe to cross it in a lungi and Rs 200 if you're wearing shirt and trousers) and freely gave Bangladeshi immigrants ration cards to get the Muslim votes.

Third, he created a puppet intelligentsia which sang, 'They don't let us sing, Paul Robeson,' on stage at drab cultural events. Today, they come to the streets for Mamata.

All three monsters of its own creation have come together against the Left after Nandigram and Singur, leading to its stunning defeats in the last few elections.

Buddhadev could have led a changing, more vibrant state much longer with his openness and a language that gives you a chance to love Communism at least till you are 25. But Basu got too long a time... time enough to leave a heavy legacy.

1977-2000: Tenure of India's longest-serving chief minister. Bengal's lost years. Rest in peace.

Abhijit Majumder is Executive Editor, MiD DAY
Email: abhijit.majumder@mid-day.com
Twitter: https://twitter.com/abhijitmajumder