Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee, West Bengal’s chief minister from 2000 to 2011 passed away on August 8. It was an exit of an iconic leader who had retreated from the ceaseless commotion of politics. For almost a decade and a half, after he lost the elections in 2011, Bhattacharjee lived in near total self-imposed exile; his failing health was part of the reason, his sensibility was the other part.
His exit from life is the extinction of a genre that was never quite real, but which he uniquely represented. There were contradictions of his multiple selves: he was a Bengali, a bhadralok, an ardent Marxist, a practising politician, a political dreamer, an intellectual, a poet, a playwright, an author, a film buff, retiring and yet fully engaged in public life; he was self deprecating, proud, almost arrogant, honest and upright.
In the past 15 years, Bhattacharjee has seen the decline and then the virtual decimation of his beloved party in electoral contests. That the Communist Party of India (Marxist) did not represent a single constituency in the West Bengal state assembly must have saddened him, even though as last and farewell gesture, he did make an appeal to voters in the 2024 Lok Sabha elections to support the party in order to defeat the Bharatiya Janata Party. The appeal was an AI version for those who had followed his career, unlike his oddly staccato way of speaking, but nevertheless powerful delivery.
Asked how it felt that he was stepping into the formidable and legendary Jyoti Basu’s shoes, Bhattacharjee side stepped the question with a quintessentially complicated answer; in between a scoff and a laugh, he said, “The shoes are too big for me.” This was in 2000, when Basu retired and Bhattacharjee, groomed as the heir, became chief minister for the remaining months of the fourth term of the CPI(M)-led Left Front and then went on to win a spectacular fifth and sixth term election victory.
Armed with a mandate to transform West Bengal in 2001, Bhattacharjee was in a hurry. It was a race to use the resources of the state, especially its educated youth, to leap frog into the new millennium and make West Bengal a leader in Information Technology and Enabled Services industries, a digital hub, an industrial destination, a cultural destination. On the day he won the next election in 2006, at his press conference in Alimuddin Street, CPI(M)’s state party head quarters, he released a letter from Ratan Tata confirming the proposal to set up the mini car – Nano – factory in the state. The factory was his triumph in reinventing West Bengal as an investment destination; it was also the cause of his downfall and the near total decimation of his party, his dreams, his destiny.
Impatient to get ahead, fulfil his promise to the state and its educated youth, Bhattacharjee could not anticipate the complex resistance his plans had triggered, rooted in the micro and macro politics of land acquisition and the intimidating prospect of fast-paced paradigmatic change that he believed was essential for West Bengal to reoccupy the crest, as India’s leading industrial centre.
He lost control over the subsequent course of events. Even though he knew that rot had hollowed out the party as vested interests had embedded themselves at all levels of the hierarchical structure, and the masses felt alienated by the domineering, often intimidating behaviour of local party bosses, Bhattacharjee lacked the resolve to bypass the party.
His vision of a new industrial revolution in West Bengal and his message “do it now!” was entirely correct. Fifteen years after he was defeated, his successor, Mamata Banerjee is groping around for a plan to revive the state’s economy by bringing in new investments in new industries. Having created the hurdles, by blocking conversion of land use from agriculture to industry and refusing to intervene as a government in land acquisition, the Trinamool Congress is at a standstill.
The problem of unemployment and poor quality jobs in West Bengal has seen an exodus of talent, including skilled and unskilled labour to different parts of the country. It was Bhattacharjee’s promise to young people that he would bring jobs to their doorstep that made him an icon and won him a massive victory in the 2006 state assembly election. And then came the ‘save the land’ movement that put paid to his promise and his plans.
Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee was upheld as the best chief minister in the country by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh; but that did not protect him from the simmering discontent of the invisible majority, worried how the changes the chief minister was making would affect them and the security nets that cushioned them which were a maze of crisscrossing networks of personal and political interests that bestowed privileges on some and pauperised others. The moment Bhattacharjee decided that Singur on the national highway in the fertile district of Hooghly would be the new industrial epicentre, every vested interest from the gram panchayats to the opposition put up a resistance.
Nano car shells at the abandoned Tata Motors’ factory at Singur in Hooghly district. Photo: PTI/File
From his retirement, Jyoti Basu had warned Bhattacharjee that he was making a mistake; that he needed to walk back and engage with the local political leaders and managers and bring them on board before trouble erupted. In his impatience, Bhattacharjee underestimated the push back; it revealed his incomprehension of how political interests within the CPI(M) and in West Bengal and vested interests among the class of investors whom he had been wooing would converge to thwart his ambitions and defeat him.
Fired by his dreams, Bhattacharjee could not read the political pulse of the cross cutting sections of interest and their uncertainties. He did not see the rising popularity of Mamata Banerjee as a political threat that needed to be handled with political craft rather than blunt dismissive words. His undoing was that he had not mastered the art of political management of the grass roots.
Unable to see the ground realities including an unravelling party organisation that could not keep pace with the changes he wanted, Bhattacharjee failed to convince public opinion, including the very large cohort of public intellectuals that he had assiduously cultivated to broad base the appeal of the CPI(M).
He knew there were vested interests within the CPI(M) that opposed his ideas. He knew that there was corruption and disenchantment with it among the people; he knew that his political agenda of decentralisation and democratisation of control and power within the CPI(M) was an unwelcome change. He knew that the political landscape in West Bengal had changed and was reshaping itself with Banerjee emerging as a powerful challenger. He knew that there was a fast-growing Maoist influence that contested the CPI(M)’s position as a pro-poor party and he knew that many of his friends within the intelligentsia were uneasy that he championed “corporate” capitalism.
Bhattacharjee found that after he lost the 2011 elections, those who had once applauded him turned on him. It must have hurt him deeply. He went into a shell, neither admitting that his politics and policies were wrong nor denying that there had been mistakes. He remained firm in asserting that what he had dreamt and planned and tried to implement was the best course for West Bengal.
What went wrong for Bhattacharjee was that he was not a hard headed, practical political leader, who took tough decisions when caught between a rock and a hard place and outfaced the opposition. When he could have gone down fighting, he went down by not doing so. He could have fought Banerjee for her opposition to the Singur-Tata Motors project by ejecting her sit-in on the national highway in 2008; instead he allowed the dharna to go on.
The undoing of Bhattacharjee started with Singur, it snowballed after the violence and resistance to the Nandigram Special Economic Zone project, the deaths and police action and the widespread conviction that the CPI(M) was using its cadres to crush the popular movement. There were other projects and other confrontations. As the opposition grew and Bhattacharjee’s popularity shrank, the CPI(M) became weaker and lost control over the network of its organisation and the support base.
Through the turbulence and the disintegration, what did not change was the popular perception of Bhattacharjee as an honest and upright politician. His modest lifestyle and impeccable integrity commanded respect.
Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee became a minister in the first Jyoti Basu cabinet in 1977. He was young leader, who had emerged through the turmoil and disorder of the last years of the Congress and the birth of the Naxalite movement, the years of state-sponsored violence and repression, first as a student leader and then as a leader of the Democratic Youth Federation.
The day in 1977 when the CPI(M)-led Left Front sat to decide who would be in the first cabinet, Bhattacharjee returned to his North Kolkata home for a late lunch. As he sat down to eat, his mother asked him if he was being made a minister. He snapped at her for what he believed was mere speculation. And then came the announcement; he had been named and would be information and cultural affairs minister. That was the essence of Bhattacharjee – a modest man who shouldered formidable responsibility.
There were moments during his rise to chief minister that were dramatic. He quit the Jyoti Basu government in 1993, angry over the links between crime, money and the party and his boss’s tolerance of what was going on. Contrary to the CPI(M)’s conventions of sending dissenters into permanent cold storage, Bhattacharjee bounced back and was reinstated after a two month exile, most of which he spent sitting it out in Nandan, a multiscreen film complex that he had lovingly constructed, promoted and popularised. During his exile, Bhattacharjee wrote Dushamay, a play, described as a powerful denunciation of the times.
That Bhattacharjee got away with as much as he did was a signal that he was the CPI(M)’s anointed heir, who would eventually replace Basu. There were other “young” leaders from his age cohort who were able politicians and part of the government, like Subhash Chakraborty, who was immensely popular and a great organiser, Biman Bose, the chairman of the Left Front, Anil Biswas who was secretary of the CPI(M) till his untimely death, and Nirupam Sen, who could have been groomed. But the CPI(M) chose Bhattacharjee because he represented something more. He was so entirely an urbane Bengali.
Shikha Mukherjee is a Kolkata-based commentator.
