THE RED STAR

JYOTI BASU (1914—2010) Tallest Left stalwart and West Bengal chief minister for 23 years

There was nothing outstanding about Jyoti Basu, he had neither Jawaharlal Nehru’s eloquence nor the moral authority of Jayaprakash Narayan. By the standards of communist stalwarts of the day, S.A. Dange or E.M.S. Namboodiripad, the longest serving chief minister (1977-2000) in India was no intellectual giant. He spoke with the drabness of an apparatchik, and wrote a memoir in Bengali, Jotodur Mone Pore (As Far As I Remember), with the legal twist in the title that absolves him of accountability for being economical with the truth. Nor was he a model of financial saintliness.

But Basu’s role in shaping modern India is better seen in counterfactual terms, as what could have happened if he had played a determined reformer back in the 1980s by becoming a champion of development through industrialisation, like Deng Xiaoping in China. That would have put an early end to the growth of the CPI(M)’s popularity in the villages, pushing the party’s inner core to replace Basu with someone a lot more retrograde in thinking, like the late party state chief Anil Biswas. But, if Basu had exited from power early, the urban bhadralok would never have agreed on the fragile peace it did with the CPI(M). With the party’s hold getting wobbly, the poor would possibly have shifted their allegiance to Naxalites, as they did in some parts of the state from the late ’60s to the early ’70s. Bengal, despite its lost opportunities, today looks promising, with improving income, better infrastructure and a distinct image makeover of Kolkata, the state’s heart. If Naxalism had returned to Bengal in the ’80s, it would by now have become another Chhattisgarh.

History has not been kind to Basu. Many regard the period under him as Bengal’s “lost decades”. But his absence would have left a painful void that future generations would have felt. The taciturn communist perhaps realised his utility as prime minister in 1996, as he said it was his party’s “historic blunder” to have declined it. That was perhaps the only confession he made without securing the party’s nod.