The Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPI-M), the largest official Marxist party in this subcontinent, has marked this year as the birth centenary year of Jyoti Basu, one of the founding politbureau (PB) members of the party formed in October 1964 out of a split in the Communist Party of India. Born on July 8, 2014 into a wealthy family at Barodi village, near Dhaka, the CPI-M honoured him along with Harkishan Singh Surjeet, former general secretary of the party and founding PB member as a ‘living legend’. The decision to set up a separate party was taken in a convention at Tenali (in the State of Andhra Pradesh) on his 51st birthday.
Jyoti Basu has no parallel in the arena of official communism. Basu’s uninterrupted tenure as a ‘Communist Chief Minister’ in an Indian state, under the bourgeois system, for over 23 years is an unbroken record as yet. Baptised into Marxism by the legendary Rajni Palme Dutt during his student years in Britain, he was among the first three CPI members of the Bengal provincial Assembly in 1946. He was the only politician who refused the prime ministership in 1996 among leaders of all the constituent parties that formed the UF government. True, his party refused to join the cabinet, but refusal to become the prime minister is almost unheard of in any country.
Unlike almost all the communist leaders of India of yesteryears — I mean both CPI-M and CPI — Basu was not apparently accessible easily, almost never found gossiping and talking in a light vein, especially with the rank and file. He was allergic to populism and never befriended comrades down the line through time-wasting jokes and the like, which was why he was addressed as Jyoti Babu generally by all, from top leaders to middle cadres, and not as Jyotida. As far as I know, in the 1950s, only Ajoy Ghosh, the most theoretically equipped CPI general secretary, and an outstanding parliamentarian and orator Hiren Mukerjee (CPI MP between 1952-1977) used to call him Jyoti. Uma Sehanabis, wife of historian and stalwart of the Indian People’s Theatre Association Chinmohan Sehanabis, used to call Basu Jyotida. Basu too was affectionate towards her from the late 1940s inside the CPI.
However, very little is known about Basu’s soft and humane side beneath his externally heartless features, albeit implicitly. A random pick from Basu’s deeply human episodes uncovers the libertarian Basu, the like of which are not many among Leninists, or official Marxists.
The late Sisir Chatterjee, a frontline CPI activist in the mid-1940s and 1950s among employees of the Calcutta Corporation — now Kolkata Municipal Corporation — recalled an episode during the regime of the second United Front (1969-70) in West Bengal. Both CPI-M and CPI were constituents of it. Basu, its deputy chief minister, was returning home after a normally hectic day. His car abruptly screeched to a halt near a middle-aged pedestrian in tattered clothes. One of Basu’s assistants went to him to say that the deputy chief minister was calling him. The man turned up to the unexpected caller. He was stupefied as was a CPI whole-timer, despite the fact that relations between the CPI and CPI-M were almost antagonistic. Basu began rebuking him but in an affectionate tone, “Parimal, get inside right away. Eh! Why don’t you care for your health?” The man was cool as a younger brother is to the older one. An intrepid comrade, he was Parimal Gupta who played a decisive role in the victory of Basu in the election to the Bengal Federal Assembly in 1946 from the Syedpur Railway constituency. Gupta, Chatterjee disclosed, “carried a box containing postal ballots, cast in favour of Jyoti Basu. In those days, the responsibility of handing over postal ballots to the returning officer was with the candidates. A group of toughs with swords and lathis (sticks), working for the Congress nominee Professor Humayun Kabir, later federal minister of education in the Jawaharlal Nehru cabinet, chased Gupta. Determined Parimal began running. There was a slow moving luggage train in the way. He crossed over through the gap between two compartments in motion and swiftly went over to the other side. By the time the goons reached the spot, the train picked up speed. But for Parimal’s quick wit and uncommon courage, Jyotibabu would not have won in that neck-to-neck electoral battle. Jyotibabu took Parimal home where Basu’s wife, Kamal, welcomed him without an inch of formality. He was treated with a bite and sip that a party whole-timer could not afford. A kurta (long shirt) and pajama was presented. The Basus gave him some pocket money too, rejecting Gupta’s reluctance to accept. Actually, Basu’s better-half persuaded him not to refuse.”
Chatterjee had no softness at all and he too like Gupta remained aloof from the CPI after the split, unlike Basu. “Jyotibabu was not narrow-minded unlike many biggies of the two main CPs of India,” he stated very frankly.
Basu on that day shelved his anathema towards the CPI and turned to his hidden affectionate attachment to a sterling comrade of the 1940s. Gupta in his 20s used to work among railway employees and workers, enrolled as members of the Bengal and Assam Railway Workers Union, affiliated to the AITUC. Basu was its general secretary. The day Gupta died prematurely, Basu chose to remain alone and quiet at the CM’s secretariat and did not meet any visitor after the sad news reached him. Basu’s tea boy said, “I saw Sahib’s handkerchief wet for the first time.”
A whole-timer of CPI (Marxist-Leninist) Liberation, a Naxalite party, narrated what he saw during the tenure of the UF government. The CPI had its state party plenum (February 1-15,1970) at Garulia, now in the North 24 Parganas district. Then a CPI-M cadre, the Naxalite veteran said, “Jyoti Basu was walking up briskly towards the podium of a mass rally but suddenly paused, turned sideways and touched the feet of an old lady, a slum-dweller, belonging to the ‘wretched of the earth’ stratum. She was overwhelmed and tears rolled down her cheeks. I was overwhelmed.”
Basu had a sharp sense of humour. Jyotibabur Sange (Along with Jyoti Basu), a two-volume biography based on a series of conversations noted down by the late Biplab Dasgupta, CPI-M MP and formerly departmental head at the Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex, cites quite a few such instances. In the early 1970s Basu was a guest at Dasgupta’s residence in London and this made Basu’s reminiscences vivid and detailed. During Basu’s imprisonment under the Defence of India Act in 1963 after the Sino-Indian war on October 20,1962, Charu Majumdar, the chief ideologue of the Naxalbari movement and the founder general secretary of the CPI-ML, was among Basu’s co-prisoners. Basu recollected meeting him and senior comrades, Niranjan Sengupta, freedom fighter and minister of the first and second UF governments and Promode Dasgupta, also one of the first PB members of the CPI-M. Basu said from his memory, “Charu Majumdar suddenly said that he would feel pride if we declare our party a constituent of the Communist Party of China and chairman of Communist Party of China as our chairman. I shot back, ‘Look, after these words from you, there is no point in discussing politics with you hereinafter. But as we are in jail, we will discuss movies, the weather, but not politics’.”
(To be continued)
The writer is a Kolkata-based veteran journalist