Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee trains Nandigram guns at former governor

KOLKATA: They were never failing in courtesy when in office.

Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee

and Gopalkrishna Gandhi didn't confront even during the stormy days of Singur and Nandigram. In fact, Bhattacharjee as chief minister had welcomed governor Gopalkrishna Gandhi's initiative to resolve the Singur logjam even after Gandhi's “cold horror“ statement after Nandigram firing in March 2007. It broke 10 years later in 2017. Now, Bhattacharjee writes where his heart lies. He gives a piece of his mind on Gandhi's role in his recently published book -`Phire Dekha II' -spanning over the last10 years of his government.

“Who did he (Gopalkrishna Gandhi) want to satisfy?“ Bhattacharjee asks leaving it for anybody's guess who could be behind Gandhi's going public against his own government. “People in this state will remember Gopalkrishna Gandhi as long as the state bleeds for want of industry,“ Bhattacharjee says. The former CM pours out his feelings again. “I was astonished with the governor's public statement. He was aware of the fact that people and policemen were being killed there. The government sent police to restore law and order. Who did he want to satisfy?“ Buddhadeb says.

But who is Bhattacharjee hinting at? The guessing game goes on because the Nandigram incident has blemished the CPM's pionee ring role in land-related movements. The usual plea that the governor had acted on the Centre's instructions doesn't hold because the Left were the UPA I government's lifeline, and Manmohan Singh was all support for Bhattacharjee's industry initiative. Second, the Trinamool-Jamiat-Maoist combine that Bhattacharjee refers to in the book doesn't also sound convincing. A section of CPM insiders in Bengal would like to read it as one against “the enemy within“. These sycophants refuse to take names but would refer to the “best of relations“ Gandhi has with some leading Marxists including Prakash Karat.

Gandhi didn't hide his admira tion for Karat. In his 2015 article -Beginning Once Again -Gandhi writes: “Listening to Prakash giving me a succinct account of the Marxist movements in Kerala for the re-distribution of land to help the landless and agricultural labour was more than an education; it was a revelation...I heard him as a student would a teacher...“

Taking the cue, Gandhi goes on: “My condemnation, as governor of

West Bengal

, of the violence that took place in Nandigram under the watch of the Left Front government led to many in the CPM feeling I had let the Left Front government and the CPM down. This was natural.Without Prakash Karat's endorsement, the chief minister, Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee, would not have requested the prime minister, Manmohan Singh, to appoint me to that office. As I heard CPM stalwarts in the state berate me over Nandigram, I wondered if they were doing what they were doing with the knowledge of general secretary Karat.“

Bhattacharjee isn't in a mood to take the blame entirely on his government. Even after the CPM CC communique in 2011 stated that the Left Front government had to pay heavily for the mistakes in Singur and Nandigram, Bhattacharjee recounts the events prompting the reader to conclude that it was more of a conspiracy against the government than the government's own lapses.