Daily Times

Dr Dasgupta recorded a pensive snippet.

DG: “You were underground when Kamaldi gave birth to her first baby.”

Basu: “Yes (He paused as his first wife died along with the newborn girl child. I felt somewhat uneasy). The daughter didn’t survive too. I was arrested again on the day she died. Kamal sent the news through her younger brother, Mukul. But I couldn’t get the time to read the news in an envelope in my pocket. As the police came, as per the UG norms I had to tear up the envelope. Without reading I tore it into pieces, without knowing that our daughter died.”

“A tough man Jyoti Basu is, too reluctant to express his vulnerable feelings. But his voice, after four decades, was faint. Maybe, if I took my ear near his chest, I would hear a deep sigh,” quipped Dasgupta.

Basu’s rise to fame and power was an accident. He was, in sterling qualities, Somnath Lahiri, the lone communist member in the Constituent Assembly for less than 18 months, who left his imprint as a rare-breed interventionist and an ace speaker inside and outside the parliamentary arena, and Bankim Mukherjee, rare-breed labour and peasant leader, apart from his golden oratory. The two — during the disastrously sectarian time during the Ranadive period (1948-50) — belonged to rival factions. Basu came up to keep the rival factions in a truce.

Let me end with a personal experience. When the Bharatiya Janata Party-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) Party was about to form the government at the Centre, CPI-M tactically expressed a preference for the Indian National Congress to the NDA on grounds of traditional commitment to secularism. I was then a special correspondent of the Observer of Business and Politics. I rang up Basu at his residence. He defended the tactical shift and described the BJP as ‘fascistic’. I asked, “Are you thinking of a patriotic front?” He refused to reply but while putting down the receiver, I heard a soliloquy. “Mathar chul pekechhe, buddhi pakeni. Samne amar party congress. Ami ei sawb question-er uttor debo!” (His hair is gray, but the cerebral matter is not adequately mature. He expects me to answer such questions when my party congress is drawing nigh!). I never wrote this, but shared it with close friends.

Basu’s strength lay in strong common sense, “the most uncommon commodity”, coined the late Lalmohan Ghosh, assistant postmaster general, Bengal circle at the fag end of British rule. Strides made by the patriarch, one after another, proved the colonial era APMG’s sagacity. This sense at times helped him reach theoretical heights, thanks to his own variant of glasnost, although he was ambivalent, embracing pragmatism and embourgeoisment. On August 5, 1998, speaking on “India in the 21st Century” at the Nehru Centre in London, he said, “In the 20th century we witnessed ebbs and flows in human progress. But in this century no democratic order emerged that has accorded the highest regard to the human value-system and socio-economic justice and was fully committed to the abolition of poverty from society” (Translated from the Bengali version, published in the Autumn Special of Ganashakti, CPI-M’s Bengali morninger, in 1998). He bluntly admitted that even the Soviet Union, China and the Leninist regimes in East Europe failed to abolish poverty, let alone establishment of a social order that was humane and value-based. Unwittingly, Basu endorsed the views of Maximillien Rubel, arguably one of the greatest Marxist scholars after David Borisovich Riazanov, that the socialism of Lenin and his followers from Stalin to Mao, was a brazen revision of Marx’s vision of socialism (synonymous with communism in Marx, unlike in Lenin), which was fundamentally libertarian. Rubel’s inferences were shared by Anton Pannenkoe, Charles Bettelheim, Paul Mattick and even Paresh Chattopaphyay. Don’t assume Basu read the works of these all-time best Marx scholars.

Basu reminds one of Marx’s favourite quote from Terence, a Latin playwright of the pre-Christian era in the Roman republic: “Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto” (I am a human being, I consider nothing that is human alien to me). But Basu, whom his party characterised as a ‘legend’ (along with Harkishan Singh Surjeet), was Hegelian in a sarcastic way. The famous German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel wrote, everything is in “constant change excepting change itself”. Nothing persists in the same condition forever.

For Basu, consistency was never a virtue while pragmatism was frequently his escape route. Derek Brown in an obit piece in The Guardian inferred, his “devout Socialism was tempered by pragmatism and an unerring political instinct.” He unhesitatingly embraced embourgeoisment at several instances. During the Emergency, he submitted a memorandum to his predecessor Siddhartha Sankar Ray, the Chief Minister of West Bengal between 1972-77, demanding non-renewal of the distribution licence to the Calcutta Electric Supply Corporation Ltd (CESC), but himself extended the favour in the very first year of his chief ministership.

A hardliner during the inner-party struggle in the undivided Communist Party of India (CPI) between 1956 and 1962, Basu was a follower of the Democratic Front line, which culminated in the formation of the CPI-M as against those toeing the National Front line, who chose to remain with the parent party. He made a volte face in the 1990s by wooing foreign capital, against the Communist Party of India (Marxist), CPI-M’s professed ideological position and stupefying EMS Namboodiripad, M Basavapunnaih and Surjeet, let alone Prakash Karat and even the CITU (CPI-M’s trade union front) chief, M K Pandhe.

In 1994, Basu tabled a new industrial policy statement in the West Bengal Legislative Assembly, in line with India’s New Economic Policy of 1991, which in turn was attuned to the International Monetary Fund (IMF)-imposed Structural Adjustment Programme (SAP), after minimal or no consultation within his party and the Left Front. This came at a time when the CPI-M and the CPI were doggedly opposing the IMF prescription of imposing neo-liberalism on the welfare-tinged mixed economy of India.

In the second week of November in the same year, in his 30th Jawaharlal Nehru Memorial Lecture, “India and the Challenges of the 21st Century”, Basu repeated what he said in London: “I, as a Marxist, would like to add that capitalism is not the ultimate system of human civilisation. In the 21st century, we look forward to the emergence of a Socialist, non-exploitative and humane society, the first stage of a Communist society. The Socialist society which we envisage will not only ensure changes in the economic and social spheres but also create a new man and establish a higher civilisation where love, sympathy and altruism for fellow human beings reign supreme.”

But Basu’s practice varied from his precepts. Abolition of a state that tends to curb liberty and freedom and historically a campaigner against torture was never his motto. Inconsistency was his shield. Nonagenarian Jolly Mohan Kaul, a member of the National Council of (undivided) CPI between1958-62 and the state secretariat member of the party’s West Bengal unit, once conferred during an informal chat: “The model of Jyoti Basu was not that of Marx, Lenin, Ho Chi Minh or Castro, but that of the Congress Chief Minister in West Bengal Dr Bidhan Chandra Roy.”

(Concluded)

The writer is a Kolkata-based veteran journalist