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STATES,
WEST BENGAL
Battle
For Bengal
As political
violence engulfs the state, Jyoti Basu finds Mamata Banerjee's offensive
and the threat of Central intervention serious enough to reconsider his
decision to bow out as chief minister after 23 years
By
Sumit Mitra
Tough
guys don't dance. If Jyoti Basu, on whom the epithet "invincible"
fits more closely than Mohammad Ali, is not exactly dancing, he is shuffling
his feet. His partymen say that their "helmsman" in West Bengal,
at 86, needs rest urgently. He first agrees, and refuses to take appointments
beyond September 15. But now he says he reserves judgement on when he
should go, telling India Today (see interview)
that the timing of his exit depends on him and not on the CPI(M). Reading
the signal, the party's politburo is holding a meeting shortly where the
expected agenda is to let him be in the chief minister's chair, through
his 24th Durga Puja as chief minister next month, or, if he so desires,
till May next year when the assembly elections are due. So the news of
his retirement is, well, still premature.
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| The
wonkiness of Basu is more due to the state of the health of Bengal
than his own. |
The wonkiness
so uncharacteristic of Basu is more due to the state of health of West
Bengal than his own. With hordes of CPI(M) supporters swooping down on
the strongholds of the party's arch rival, the Trinamool Congress, and
"liberating" Trinamool villages by terror backed with police
support, the situation in the Bengal countrysides has suddenly taken a
turn as ominous as in the Naxalite years three decades ago. A dozen people,
or so, have been killed since the CPI(M) began its onslaught in the last
week of August. Over a 100 are missing. More than 200 people have been
hospitalised in Calcutta, Kharagpur and Midnapore with bullet wounds or
riddled with shrapnel. Trinamool Medical Cell Convenor Nirmal Maji, a
doctor, says "new cases are arriving in Calcutta from the villages
every day".
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The
Party Isn't Over Yet
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The
politburo of the CPI(M) decided last year that Jyoti Basu should
quit as West Bengal chief minister, to be succeeded by state Home
Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharya, who, in anticipation, got elevated
to deputy chief minister. That would have been a normal change of
guard, besides being a statement that the party need not be equated
with an individual, even of Basu's stature. Last July, when Basu
visited Israel and attended his granddaughter's wedding in London
(and talked about foreign investment in West Bengal in the wedding
speech) there was an unmistakable ring of the venerable patriarch
finally hanging up his boots.
The
calculation was upset by a decision of the party's state unit to
take the Trinamool Congress head-on before the May 2001 assembly
elections, if necessary by flushing out its supporters from their
strongholds with the deployment of the party cadre, and with generous
help from an obliging police. With a shrill demand from Mamata Banerjee
for President's rule in the state, the party decided to go slow
on Basu's retirement. Its fabled election machinery would have steered
it through a normal election but the presence of its battle-tested
strategist in the driving seat was necessary in more turbulent times.
Though Basu will not contest the May 2001 elections, it now seems
likely that he will complete a full 24 years in power. An impressive
record, marred by the convulsions of eroding political control.
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Railway Minister
Mamata Banerjee, who founded the Trinamool two years ago and has since
then taken the battle from Calcutta into the heart of rural Bengal, is
clamouring for Central intervention by promulgation of President's Rule
under Article 356 of the Constitution. Once bitten by Bihar on the issue,
the Centre is twice shy. Banerjee is not exactly holding out a threat
of quitting the Cabinet but last Sunday, when Prime Minister Atal Bihari
Vajpayee called her over the phone in Calcutta, she broke into tears.
"I told him (Vajpayee) that it's Bengal that has sent me to the Rail
Bhavan. What business do I have there if Bengal burns under Basu's tyranny?"
A worried Centre sent NDA Convenor and Defence Minister George Fernandes
to Bengal last week to assess the situation. Home Minister L.K. Advani
has asked for a report from the state Government on the law and order
situation and is examining two reports sent by Governor Viren Shah. Besides,
Advani has asked Attorney-General Soli Sorabjee and Union Law Minister
Arun Jaitley to examine all possibilities of Central intervention, including
declaration of five worst affected districts as "disturbed areas".
Banerjee
doesn't have the polish of Basu, who travelled to the West over 40 times
and missed prime ministership twice, once by the breadth of an ideological
hair. Nevertheless, she has made up for not being classy with the grit
to question a party of 2.5 lakh members, which has an octopus-like grip
over every branch of the state, including the police. With the advent
of the Trinamool in 1998, and its alliance with the BJP, the battle for
Bengal began to move into the heart of the 230 rural constituencies (out
of 294). In the 1999 general elections, the Trinamool-BJP combine polled
more votes than the Left in the assembly segments held by Deputy Chief
Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharya, Basu's heir-apparent, and state Finance
Minister Asim Dasgupta and reduced the margin at Satgachia, to a minuscule
0.32 per cent. The Trinamool-BJP subsequently captured the Calcutta Municipal
Corporation and there was an exodus of voters from the Congress to the
Trinamool. Disproving pundits about Muslims' fear of the BJP, Trinamool,
its ally, could enlist the support of the south Bengal Muslim peasantry.
This fact is evident from its casualty list of over 300 since the 1999
polls, more than 200 of whom belong to the minority community.
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The
Government should encash at least a part of its stake in LIC and GIC before
its too late, suggests INDIA TODAY associate Editor V. Shankar Aiyar
in 
