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Journalism of Courage
THE FACE of “reformist” Left, the Chief Minister who hoped to haul West Bengal into the industrialisation age with “the world’s cheapest car”, the writer-politician who failed to take own party along, and the leader who ultimately fell to one almost completely unlike him, Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee passed away on Thursday at his residence in Kolkata after a long illness. He was 80.
It was an end that was as far away from the beginning as it gets. For, it was in a burst of glory that Bhattacharjee hit the national limelight in 2000, picked as the successor to the legendary Jyoti Basu, who was at the time India’s longest-serving CM.
The ruling CPI(M)-led Left Front won the 2001 Assembly seats that followed (winning 199 out of 294 Assembly seats), and increased its tally further under Bhattacharjee in the 2006 elections (to 235).
During his tenure, Bhattacharjee launched an industrialisation drive, including huge investments in IT and ITES (information technology enabled services) sectors, a plan to build the country’s largest integrated steel plant in Salboni, a chemical hub in Nayachar, an SEZ in Nandigram and the Nano plant in Singur.
The latter two, however, would prove Bhattacharjee’s undoing, as the acquisition of land in Singur, Hooghly district, for Tata Motors to build Nano in 2006, and for the SEZ in Nandigram in 2007, ran into huge protests from farmers.
These eventually took the shape of an anti-government movement led primarily by Trinamool Congress chief Mamata Banerjee. The fiery, scrappy politician who had been fighting the CPI(M) singlehandedly in the state seized her moment to strike at the Left, by then in power for 34 years in Bengal and facing huge anti-incumbency.
The death of 14 protesters in police firing on March 14, 2007, followed by the decision of the Tatas a year later to move the Nano plant to Gujarat, proved the death knells for the Bhattarcharjee government. In the circumstances, the SEZ in Nandigram also failed to take off.
In the 2011 Assembly elections, the TMC ended the Left reign, and Mamata became the CM. Bhattacharjee lost from his own seat, Jadavpur, to the TMC’s Manish Gupta.
An easy scapegoat for the Left’s defeat – though the CPI(M) has struggled to make a comeback even 13 years later – Bhattacharjee spoke about why he pushed for industrialisation in a TV interview to ABP Ananda in 2013.
“Paschim banglay jodi koi karkhana na hoy, chele meyera ajj jara college e porche, engineering college porche… tader bhobisyat ta ki? Sudhu CPM Trinamool er byapar noi. (If there are no industries in Bengal, those girls and boys who are studying in colleges now, studying in engineering colleges… what will happen to their future? This is not an issue of the CPM or Trinamool).”
Bhattacharjee also spoke about the Nandigram deaths, and while pointing out that police had few options, regretted what had happened. “What a responsible government needed to do was done there. Any government would do that. The rule of the law had collapsed. But it would have been better if there was no firing. Not everything happening in the field is under the absolute control of people at the top.”
The former CM said he was in the Assembly when the firing happened, and heard only later that 14 people had died. “Khoob kharab laaglo (I felt very bad).”
Bhattacharjee started out as a primary member of the CPI(M) in 1966 and took an active part in the party’s food movement against the famine-like conditions under a Congress government. He later became state secretary of the Democratic Youth Federation, the CPI(M)’s youth wing, which merged into the Democratic Youth Federation of India. He was elected to the state committee in 1972, and became a part of the state secretariat in 1982.
Bhattacharjee was seen as a disciple of one of the CPI(M)’s earliest stalwarts, Pramod Dasgupta, along with Biman Bose, Subhash Chakraborty, Shyamal Chakraborty and Anil Biswas.
After winning his first Assembly election from the Cossipore-Belgachia seat, Bhattacharjee served as the Information and Public Relations Minister from 1977 to 1982.
After losing from the Cossipore seat in 1982, Bhattarcharjee moved to the Jadavpur Assembly constituency and won it from 1987 to 2011. In 1987, he was inducted as the Information and Culture Minister in the Jyoti Basu Cabinet. He resigned in 1993 over differences with Basu, but joined back after a few months.
In 1996, he became the Home Minister, and in 1999, with Basu ailing, he was named the Deputy CM.
Bhattacharjee took over as the CM for the first time on November 2, 2000, after Basu stepped down. In 2002, he was elected to the Politburo of the party.
Even as Bhattacharjee occupied the top position in the state, his wife Meera and daughter Suchetana lived in a two-room apartment in Ballygunge in Kolkata, the residence they continue to live in.
His incorruptible image was one of Bhattacharjee’s biggest assets. To weed out corruption in school recruitments, he made it a rule that all such hiring would be done through a school service commission (SSC) exam. During his tenure, more than 10 SSC examinations were held without a single allegation being raised.
In comparison, the Calcutta High Court recently cancelled the recruitment of 23,753 teachers and non-teaching staff by the SSC, ordering them to return their salaries with interest, finding that the 2016 exam held by it had been compromised.
Behind this political persona, there was another facet to Bhattacharjee, that of a man steeped deeply in culture and literature. He had a special relationship with ‘Nandan’, the state government-run culture and cinema hub. Since 1995, Nandan has hosted the Kolkata Film Festival.
Even after he became the CM, Bhattacharjee could be found most evenings at Nandan interacting with Bengali literary personalities, in a room kept for him.
He authored about eight books, including translations of the works of Colombian writer Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Russian poet Vladimir Mayakovski.
After the Left lost power and he was no longer even an MLA, Bhattacharjee started taking a back seat in CPI(M) politics. While he was active in the state for some time, he skipped national meetings of the party. In recent years, due to ill-health, he was largely confined to his apartment.
In April 2012, Bhattacharjee could not attend the 20th Party Congress held in Kozhikode, Kerala, due to ill-health. He also requested to be relieved from the Politburo on health grounds, but the party would not let him leave till 2015, when he gave up posts in both the Politburo and the Central Committee.
By 2018, an ailing Bhattacharjee also opted out of the State Committee and Secretariat. His public appearances became rare.
In 2019, the CPI(M), which had been reduced to 30 seats in the Assembly and looked desperately for a revival in the Lok Sabha polls, got Bhattacharjee to come for a mega rally at the Brigade Parade Ground. However, the veteran could not make it out of his car.
His final burst of glory was symbolic of the man seen as the leader West Bengal did not appreciate enough. In January 2022, the Narendra Modi government announced the Padma Bhushan for Bhattacharjee. In a media statement, the former CM said he could not accept it.
“I do not know anything about the Padma Bhushan award. No one has said anything about it. If I have been given the Padma Bhushan award, I refuse to accept it.”
This year, just before the third phase of the Lok Sabha elections, the CPI(M) resorted to an AI avatar of Bhattacharjee, where he appealed to the people of West Bengal to vote for the Left and secular forces.
The CPI(M) dubbed the message: “E bhabeo phire asha jai (One can make a comeback this way too).”
