Basu for Bengal

Jyoti Basu and the Left Front of West Bengal were entitled to tributes as they completed two decades in office. It is a remarkable performa...

Jyoti Basu and the Left Front of West Bengal were entitled to tributes as they completed two decades in office. It is a remarkable performance with few parallels. However, the comrade and his coalition can hardly be said to have made history. The achievement has a better claim for a place in the Guinness Book of Records. It is a feat all right, but not of far more significance than such accomplishments as cultivation of the longest toenail or consumption of the largest number of eggs. If a Marxist-led government has endured through the worldwide collapse of communism, it is basically because its label has meant so little. It is not a case of socialism in a single State; what the authors of the 20-year wonder have successfully pleaded is a case against the slogan as impractical in a system that they once sought to wreck from inside. It is a bhadralok8217; regime that has replaced any idea of a bloody revolution or even a parliamentary struggle towards proletarian power. It is also regionalism with a Communist flavour. If the Chief Minister had a devotee like D.K. Borooah, the tribute of the day might well have been: Basu is Bengal and Bengal is Basu

.The stability being celebrated has not brought the classless society a day closer. The more basic point is that the Basu record has not meant any advance of a banally bourgeois kind, either. It has taken 20 years in power for the Left Front rulers to summon the will to rid Calcutta of the shame of handpulled rickshaws and its pavements of encroaching hawkers. And only slightly less time to acknowledge serious lapses on the economic front. The octogenarian leader has been unceremoniously admonished by party bureaucrats for bemoaning the 8220;historical blunder8221; of the CPIM in not joining the United Front Government. The opposition to his advocacy of unrestricted investments in the State from within the party ranks, however, ceased quite a while ago. The decline of the once leading industry of West Bengal, where sick units beyond salvage dominate the economic debate for decades, has compelled recognition even among uncompromising ideologues. The capacity of the Left Front to remedy matters has, however, been severely limited by its continued reliance on populism that militates against productivity.

It has been the Marxists8217; refrain for years that their urban failings are more than made up for by their rural achievements. Repeatedly held up as an example with Basu harping on it again as an important reason for the popular backing for his rule 8212; is the provision of land pattas for the poor farmers. Evidence, however, is seldom made available about the extent to which this has helped the advance of the State8217;s agriculture. The success or, more correctly, the stability of the Basu raj cannot be seen as an end in itself, if the Marxists are to be true to their text. The phenomenon should have furthered the cause of revolution by making it a model for the masses elsewhere to emulate. They can do worse than to wonder why this has not happened. Is it because the life of a political entity, as of an individual, is not judged by its length alone?