Perestroika man who didn’t get a third chance

KOLKATA: He didn’t own a house or a car and had a frugal Rs 5,000 in his bank account when he fought his last assembly election from Jadavpur in 2011.

Good life for him meant black coffee, cricket, good films and Tagore. All these traits are not very usual for many of his party colleagues who rose from the ranks.

CPM state secretary Promode Dasgupta hand-picked this Presidency College alumnus and poet Sukanta Bhattacharya’s nephew — Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee — to lead the party’s youth front.

Bhattacharjee didn’t hesitate to take on the Left trade unions over the “bandh culture”. As a CM, he even attended office during a bandh called by Left trade unions, including the CITU. “Personally, if you ask me, I think it (strike) is not helping us, our country. But unfortunately, as I belong to one party and (when) they call a strike, I keep mum. But I have finally decided that next time I will open my mouth,” Bhattacharjee had said in 2008.

All his life, Bhattacharjee tried marrying the Communist ideals of human emancipation with real life politics that moved like parallel lines with the gap widening in course of time. He preferred glasnost and perestroika to the iron curtains in former communist regimes.

In the process, he ended up as a misunderstood Marxist even among his ilk. Few would believe that this man had once given CPM a fresh lease of life in 2006, and took the party tally to 235 out of 294 in the 2006 pollsBhattacharjee could make people believe that his govt would break barriers, charting out a development course quite different from the Jyoti Basu govt.

He didn’t mind inviting Tata Group chairman Ratan Tata to the oath taking ceremony in 2006 even though it didn’t go well with the traditional communist convention. The mission tripped in Singur and Nandigram. The bhadraloks who once stood by him while he was chasing the dream started complaining about his lack of tact, his foolhardy approach in land acquisition.

And to copybook communists, Bhattacharjee often crossed the Marxist ‘lakshman rekha’ despite all his good intentions. Sabyasachi Sen, industry secretary during 2003 to early 2010, said: “I respect him very much and I am deeply shocked at his demise.” It would be going against history if one puts the entire blame for the CPM reversal on Bhattacharjee.

In its long stint for 30 years, the CPM had gathered by then all the garbage that comes with power — arrogance, nepotism, corruption, using organisation muscle to establish hegemony at all walks of life. Buddhababu was aware of these and was at times vocal against them.

All these could be a reason why he took legal land acquisition route to keep local land sharks at bay. The process was smooth in parts of West Midnapore.

But while taking the sarkari route, he antagonised those who ran his party machinery. The poor and marginal farmers, a major chunk being Muslims, also felt alienated in the so called industrialisation programme.

It’s a tragedy that Bhattacharjee lost sight of this fact in the pursuit of industry that finally devoured the once powerful CPM machinery