Threshold of fear has been crossed

Uday Basu,
The Statesman, 18 October

The development of the past few months leave no one in doubt that the CPI-M in West Bengal has become a prisoner of indecision, while its tallest comrade, Mr Jyoti Basu has been reduced to a pitiable third umpire whose decisions are overruled time and again. He is being projected as a trouble-shooter, but in effect used as a safety valve to take the steam out of raging controversies only to be thrown into limbo once the pressure-cooker situation eases off somewhat.

Mr Basu was cast in this new role at the fag end of his political career ever since the policy of industrialisation through farmland acquisition turned into the three-decade-old Marxist regime’s Achilles’ heel. He did achieve some measure of success in this game the CPI-M has devised for him, but the tremendous risks it is fraught with are laid bare in the Rizwan-ur-Rahman case.

It all started after the bloody backlash at Nadigram exposed the Machiavellian scheme of the Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee government to try and browbeat poor farmers into accepting the diktat from Writers’ Buildings, approved by Alimuddin Street, that they must hand over their fertile land for a mega chemical hub project.

Initially, the whole project was shrouded in mystery, while the state government went through the motions of negotiations and memorandum of understanding signed with the Salim group of Indonesia. Plans were chalked out for the Salim group to lay roads and build bridges for putting the infrastructure for the project in place. No one had any inkling of the diabolical scheme of displacing thousands of poor farmers through acquiring 25,000 acres of land.

But, when the surreptitious plan to acquire the land became public knowledge after the Haldia Development Authority, headed by the CPI-M’s local satrap, the powerful Mr Lakshman Seth, put up a notice, Nandigram erupted.

The entire CPI-M leadership had no idea about how to deal with the people’s upsurge. A party, which grew from strength to strength by upholding the right of poor and marginal farmers and share-croppers to own land through protracted struggle for over five decades, took only a few months to dispossess these farmers from their land acquired through blood and sweat.

There was no leader worth his salt at Alimuddin Street to rein in the chief minister from such a death-wish as he grew too big for his shoes after the Left Front’s landslide victory in the Assembly poll. Mr Bhattacharjee seemed to have begun to cast himself in the role Mr Jyoti Basu had played since the death of Promode Dasgupta, the all-powerful ideologue and tactician of Alimuddin Street. Mr Basu virtually became the last word for the party and none in the hierarchy had the cheek to challenge his decision.

The victory in the 2006 Assembly poll, to which Mr Bhattacharjee’s clean image and the grand illusion about his mettle that wasn’t much tested till then, did have some contribution, got into his head. The death of Anil Biswas, CPI-M state secretary who had proved himself to be a worthy successor of Promode Dasgupta mainly because of his superior managerial skill and cool, scheming brain, only a few months before the poll made the situation tailor-made for Mr Bhattacharjee to behave imperiously over any other party colleague.

And he proved that he bit off more than he could chew. Trinamul Congress chief Miss Mamata Banerjee synchronised so well her fast for an indefinite period to resist the Tata Motors’ small car factory at Singur that Mr Bhattacharjee ran out of ideas to tackle the biggest challenge to his leadership.

When things spun completely out of control for the chief minister, Alimuddin Street fielded Mr Jyoti Basu to defuse the crisis. Mr Basu went about his job with elan promising the moon to Miss Banerjee, showing his complete agreement with her objections to the Singur project, had touching words for her health made precarious by the 27-day fast and assured her that he would ask the state government to give the Tatas an alternative land for the project.

There was immense relief for Mr Bhattacharjee and his government when Miss Banerjee broke her fast. The next few weeks saw a pretended search by the government for an alternative land. Eventually it announced that no such land was available and that the Tatas would set up shop as planned before.

By then the agitation launched by Miss Banerjee had lost much of its sting, while neither the government nor Alimuddin Street felt it necessary to honour Mr Basu’s commitment to Miss Banerjee.

Thereafter, the CPI-M’s all-India leadership rushed to Mr Basu to play the role of a third umpire when the UPA-government was all set to collapse in the wake of the stand-off between the Left and the UPA over the Indo-US civilian nuclear deal. The Prime Minister clenched his jaws and decided not to give in to the CPI-M led by its general secretary, Mr Prakash Karat.

The ruling coterie in the CPI-M became so jittery about its inability to find a way out that it shifted the venue of the party Politburo and Central Committee meetings from Delhi to Kolkata to suit the convenience of the nonagenarian Mr Basu. It was at the prompting of Mr Basu that the CPI-M made a tactical retreat and Mr Karat said for the first time in public that he believed the Left-UPA coordination committee could achieve something.

Even then the issue became so intractable for the CPI-M central leadership that the end seemed to be near after the 5 and 9 October coordination committee meetings.

Again, Mr Basu had to step in and help Mr Karat and Co. buy time by asking them to listen to what the external affairs minister, Mr Pranab Mukerherjee, had to say following his visits to the USA and try to find a compromise formula.

In the end no attempt was made to heed Mr Basu’s advice and the Marxist rhetorical outbursts continued till Mrs Sonia Gandhi and Mr Manmohan Singh on their own volition announced a temporary truce declaring there’s no threat to the government which, they asserted, would complete its term.

The CPI-M deployed Mr Basu for the third time as the third umpire in the Rizwan case. After the chief minister and Alimuddin Street shielded the police higher-ups despite their patently partisan and diabolical role in the mysterious death, there was an unprecedented public outrage.

As things started going out of control for the CPI-M leadership and the chief minister, Mr Basu described the behaviour of the police officers, including the Commissioner of Police, as “unacceptable and unheard of “ and announced the removal of two of them. He made it clear that the CP, who had declared it to be a case of suicide even before the postmortem report was ready, would have to go.

But, once Mr Basu did his bit in winning the confidence of the grief-stricken family members who openly said they would rather meet Mr Basu and not Mr Bhattacharjee, his advice was overruled and the chief minister changed his mind scrapping his earlier decision to remove two of the officers.

The truth is the Marxists have become so much rotten to the core after enjoying power and pelf for three decades that it’s beyond the Basus and Biswases to clean the Augean stables. The present crop of CPI-M leadership is unable to read the writing on the wall that the people, especially in the rural areas, have crossed the threshold of fear of Marxist muscle power and it’s now an open-ended situation.

(The author is a Special Representative of The Statesman, Kolkata)