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STATES:
WEST BENGAL
After
Basu, Work
Reviving
a listless economy and keeping the die-hard reds at bay—the new Chief
Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharya will require extraordinary grit to junk
the legacy of Basu raj
By
Swapan Dasgupta
When
communists fall back on unbridled flattery, there is an inevitable hint
of a monumental cover-up. So it was in last Monday's chaotic Left Front-organised
felicitation of Jyoti Basu for his record-setting tenure in office. As
the 20,000 faithful in the Netaji Indoor Stadium honoured the former chief
minister with 8,540 roses-one for each day in office-the mood was euphoric.
"What Jyoti Basu has thought today, the whole of India will think
tomorrow," declaimed the RSP's Debabrata Bandopadhyaya. "We
will not deviate from the path chalked out in the past 24 years,"
assured the new Chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharya. CPI(M) Politburo
member Sitaram Yechuri quoted Shakespeare and invoked the Christian wedding
vow, and Basu recited a poem in English by someone whose name he couldn't
recall. "Buddhadeb knows literature. He'll explain it to you in Bengali,"
was his imperious parting shot.
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| "
We will not deviate from the path chalked out in the past 24 years."
Buddhadeb Bhattacharya |
The mood
was celebratory. If there was sadness at the passing of an age, the comrades
on the dais didn't show it. From the time Bhattacharya was sworn in at
a Raj Bhavan whose splendour stood out against the sheer tackiness of
the function, the mood in the Left Front was one of release. The old man
was gone and it was time for a new beginning. Finally.
The break
with the past was only too apparent the next day when the new chief minister
spelt out his priorities. For the past six years, West Bengal had a chief
minister who reigned but didn't govern, who wielded power but didn't exercise
it. Now, with assembly elections just seven months away and a concerted
challenge from Mamata Banerjee, it was time to get down to serious business.
In the context of Bengali Marxism, it means coming to terms with reality.
"This
is the age of intense competition," said Bhattacharya, uttering a
truism. Then followed a voyage of belated self-discovery. He admitted
the lack of work culture in the Coordination Committee-dominated state
bureaucracy, conceded that West Bengal had fallen behind in industrial
development, stressed the importance of information technology and the
services sector in job creation and accepted the wisdom of avoiding needless
confrontation with the Centre. Horror of horrors, he even acknowledged
the absurdity of the government running a hotel and publishing a newspaper.
"I am a small man," he said, "I'm not Jyoti Basu."
Perhaps it needed a "small man" to tacitly admit that the 23-year
record was replete with wrong turns and misplaced priorities.
"There
is a negative image of West Bengal outside," says industrialist Amiya
Gooptu, the spirit behind Bengal Initiative, a pressure group for the
state's revival. "The work ethic is poor, there is not enough infrastructure
and no order. The Government has had more than enough time to remedy this
but it hasn't. The only reason I can see is that it doesn't care."
Now Bhattacharya says the complaints are right and he cares.
No wonder
industry has shed its initial misgivings of a man whose reputation is
that of a doctrinaire Marxist with a fondness for subtitled films and
lesser-known Latin American poets. In his first week in office, Bhattacharya
has struck a reassuring note by publicly confessing the shortcomings of
the Basu Raj and promising to make amends. He may be-unlike his predecessor-still
socially ill at ease with the investing classes but he is saying what
they want to hear. And promising to deliver with some help from a "collective
leadership".
Perhaps
Bhattacharya is plain lucky. Basu was blessed with a strong instinct for
pragmatism. Dogma and doctrine were never his strong points. But he functioned
in a party whose priorities were shaped by experiences and slogans of
a bygone age. The Left Front leadership, says historian Rajat Ray of Calcutta's
Presidency College, "didn't have a vision to build West Bengal. They
only had resentment." That perverse sentiment hasn't disappeared
entirely but it has been partially offset by the CPI(M)'s revised Thiruvananthapuram
gospel that grudgingly concedes the inevitability of capitalist development.
Consequently, in painting himself as a reformer and modernist, Bhattacharya
isn't being disloyal to either his progressive heritage or the party.
He is simply shifting tack from one "correct" line to another.
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