Neo Buddhist

Needless to explain, the ‘‘Buddhists’’ in the CPI(M) now represent Bhattacharjee’s forceful advocacy for foreign direct investments, for private capital in development, for closure of perpetually loss-making PSUs and their disinvestments, for accountability of workers in industrial establishments and so on. In essence, his mantra of ‘‘reform or perish’’ that had indeed been changing things from a state of despondency to hope in Bengal. There is suddenly a flurry of activity starting from flyovers and roads in infrastructure sector to information technology, software parks, shopping centres, food processing industry, new townships and industry.

PARTY insiders say that Bhattacharjee has been consciously positioning himself and his party for the 2006 assembly polls—the second for him as the chief minister. If the first in 2001 was won with the slogan of ‘‘a better Left, an improved Left’’ then the battle for 2006 is going to be a referendum on his agenda for development and change. With the rural vote bank remaining largely intact, his new target is the urban and semi-urban population—a constituency that so far had largely been exploited by the principal political adversary, Mamata Banerjee’s Trinamool Congress.

Those watching Bhattacharjee closely are at times simply awed by the quick change in his personality profile particularly after he became the chief minister in November 2000. Earlier, many would consider him an ivory tower Marxist, somewhat aloof, even arrogant.

His resignation from Jyoti Basu’s cabinet in August 1993 was an early controversy. He vehemently denies that he had described Basu’s cabinet as a ‘‘cabinet of thieves’’ before resigning. ‘‘The reasons for resignation were personal which I can not disclose,’’ he is quoted as saying.

This was also the year when he scripted his first Bengali drama— Dushomoy (Bad times). Detractors describe his exit from Jyoti Basu cabinet as the ‘‘bad times’’ that prompted him to write the play. But Bhattacharjee holds that the theme was based on the Babri demolition and dealt with the trauma of two families.

In fact, Bhattacharjee has been a chief minister with a difference. A person with an acute literary bias, Kafka was his addiction in his younger days. As he matured, Gabriel Garcia Marquez has held him in thrall. In fact, he is said to be busy translating Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude. His other addictions in life are coffee, tea and cigarettes—he smokes as many as 30 to 40 a day. Yet, another area of his new found interest is wildlife, something he has acquired from his daughter Suchetana, member of a NGO.

Inducted into the communist party on May Day in 1966, Bhattacharjee became the founder secretary of the Democratic Youth Federation, the youth wing of the CPI(M). His first victory in an assembly poll was in 1977 from Cossipore in North Kolkata. He lost in 1982, following which he shifted to the Jadavpur constituency in South Kolkata.

One of Bengal’s acclaimed writers, Sunil Ganguly, once described Bhattacharjee as a ‘‘socialist with a human face.’’ The man who first used that expression, Alexander Dubcek, was reduced to a gardener by the Czech Communist Party. Bhattacharya has no such worries.