Chandan Mitra says Jyoti Basu's mystique overpowered his myriad failures

India has always defied Shakespeare's famous observation in Julius Caesar: "The good that men do are oft interred with their bones." Here, cultural norms dictate silence about a dead person's faults, no matter how glaring, while his achievements are showered with fulsome praise, even if concocted and mythical. It was not surprising therefore to be subjected to a barrage of purple prose extolling the virtues of Red baron Jyoti Basu - ranging from his contribution to the Communist movement, to success in hanging on as Chief Minister of West Bengal for 23 uninterrupted years and, finally, his allegedly Spartan lifestyle. Much of what was said by way of tribute to the 95-year-old Communist patriarch consisted of large doses of hyperbole and retrospective imagination.

Jyoti Basu was an astute politician who skillfully crafted an image of being an upright but aloof, unsmiling man, intimidating rather than loving, stern and determined. In reality, he made no spectacular contribution to ideology or governance. His critics rightly point to his deliberate hands-off policy with regard to the party-backed trade union movement which brought industry and commerce to its knees during the '80s and '90s, drove talent and capital out of Bengal in multitudes and virtually laid to waste what was one of India's foremost States before CPI(M)'s untrammeled (and ongoing) reign of 33 years began in 1977.

As he looked on with benign indulgence, his party created a frightening stranglehold on Government officials through the dreaded Coordination Committee. Against all laws, the Committee became almost a closed shop which forced everybody except all-India service officials to join. So much so that even today, salaries at the West Bengal Government headquarters at Writers' Building are disbursed in cash: The Coordination Committee stonewalled incumbent Chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee's move to pay the staff by bank transfer. The reason is not far to seek. On pay day, Committee apparatchiks move from table to table in the head office of babudom to immediately collect its monthly "levy". None dare refuse. This organisation systematically spawned a non-work ethic whereby files that should get routed in one day take at least one week. Recently, it threatened an indefinite strike against the proposal to introduce a biometric system to enforce timely office attendance. The Government bowed again to its blackmail.

Finally, Spartan is an adjective that ill-adorns Basu's bhadralok persona: He had suits tailored in the global capital of men's fashion, Bond Street in London, and to his credit was not hypocritical about his fondness for Scotch. A cultured offspring of a distinguished family from erstwhile East Bengal, he studied law at Inner Temple but barely practiced, preferring instead to internalise tenets of Marxism-Leninism at the feet of 1930s Marxist ideologue Rajani Palme Dutt whose seminal work India Today is still regarded as the Indian Communists' Bible. Impatient with theoretical propositions, Jyoti Basu was a devoted pragmatist, but unlike, say, Deng Xiaoping, could never lead his party and remained only its acceptable middle-class face.

Last update : 24-01-2010 20:13

Keywords : Tormented Legacy, Chandan Mitra

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