- by Reetasri Bhattacharjee
If there has been one truly great leader post independence then it has been Jyoti Basu. But he is no more today. His death may not have come as a surprise to many with old age finally succumbing to destiny, but the fact that with him, his legacy also came to an end is a great loss for India. He was not a product of communism in India, he was Communism personified in this country. He brought the ideals of Karl Marx to a democratic setup and made it a stronghold in certain pockets of the country. If it hasn’t been for him, today we would not have known the reckoning spirit of the CPI(M) nor the importance of the Left Front in the country’s decision making.
No leader can and will ever be able to boast of holding on to the Chief Minister’s post for 23 long years unbeaten like Jyoti Basu can. He held to the supreme power of West Bengal and changed the face of the state. He brought revolutionary changes for the rural poor and worked relentlessly for the cause of the farmers. His dedication for this improvised is exemplary when we think that he came from a very well to do and educated family. He wasn’t a communist because he faced the challenges of being poor; he was a communist because he truely believed in its ideals. In the eighties, with Operation Bagha, he brought land reforms in West Bengal to recognize the rights of sharecroppers, laying the foundations for a remarkable performance in agriculture. Not only had this, during his tenure, West Bengal never seen any communal clashes, as has been often seen in other states. He structured the state to be a political aware one, where people fought on matters of hungry and poverty and not on religion and language. He scored the highest point in his career when he followed his party diktats and refused the chair of the Prime Minster in 1996. In his own words, it had been a “historic blunder” refusing the authority of prime ministry. The instability that we see in the political scenario today may not have been there had he been there.
No leader can be without faults and so cannot be Jyoti Babu. On the one hand he worked relentlessly for the poor in the rural areas, on the other hand, he spelled doom for the urban educated class. His policies stopped industries from coming to the state, his anti-English language stance left the youth incapable of competing with the rest of the country. This period also saw the largest brain-drain with the educated youth moving to other states and countries. Bengal became a place for the rural poor and not for the urban educated. This meant that, while for some he was their messiah, for some others he was a devil in disguise.
He may be many things for many people, but the one thing that people cannot forget about him is that he himself is a upheaval of Communism in India.
