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Journalism of Courage
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.
