Party after Mr Biswas

Anil Biswas was, as is the way with the CPM8217;s officeholders of choice, an organisation man. As general secretary of the party8217;s Bengal unit, by all accounts, he fulfilled his duties in exemplary fashion. To the satisfaction of the puritanically ideological within the party8217;s fold, he led by Stalinist example. But Biswas8217;s great skill, and the reason why his death this week comes as such a severe setback to the CPM, lay in the manner in which he would leverage the credibility that accrued on account of his remarkable rapport with the rank and file and his command of the language of 8216;8216;class struggle8217;8217;. For the Left, party and power have always carried adversarial nuances. Biswas, in West Bengal, negated much of that friction by internalising both the ideological moorings of party and the pragmatic compulsions of government. His absence, therefore, could tell most in the Left Front government, by all indications set to return to power after next month8217;s elections.

Biswas assumed charge of the CPM8217;s Bengal unit at a crucial juncture, in 1998. By then the Jyoti Basu reign was in its last years. Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee, a colleague closer in the hierarchy, was being readied for succession. Most importantly, a decade of economic reform and of far-reaching disintegrations in the communist universe was drawing to a close. The party 8212; or at the very least, its government 8212; knew that it had to engage with economic reform. The first stages of reform, social scientists believe, create the greatest frailty in any system. Biswas8217;s contribution was to carry the party closer to reform, and to the government. He gave wide cover to Buddhadeb8217;s reform agenda by, for instance, telling party workers, 8216;8216;Participation in development programmes is part of the class struggle.8217;8217;

His death in the first instance creates the challenge of keeping that connect between the party and government8217;s agenda. But it must, even more, serve as a cause for rethink to the national leadership in these days when the CPM8217;s first instinct is often to cleave to old, but exhausted, certitudes of ideology.