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STATES:
WEST BENGAL
Left
Over Boss
With
Jyoti Basu unwilling to fade away, the state is virtually being ruled
by two chief ministers
By
Labonita Ghosh
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| Basu's
obsession with the trappings of power (left) is preventing his successor
Bhattacharya (below) from getting down to the business of governance |
In
November, when Jyoti Basu stepped down from the chief ministership of
West Bengal after 23 long years, state Sports Minister Subhash Chakravarty,
his acolyte and important faction leader in the CPI(M), compared his ageing
comrade's "sacrifice" to that of Mahatma Gandhi. Chakravarty
is Basu's seasoned drum-beater, having once likened his mentor to Lord
Krishna. So his farewell compliment to the former chief minister caused
no more than a few chortles. However, Basu's insistence on maintaining
his lavish style after retirement has made even his admirers wonder if
he had indeed meant to sacrifice anything.
The citizens
of Calcutta get a daily taste of Basu's elevated presence as his 10-car
convoy tears down the roads, with lights flashing and the sirens hooting
full blast. His successor, Buddhadev Bhattacharya, on the other hand,
takes a single pilot, with strict instructions to the drivers not to hoot
unless absolutely necessary. While Bhattacharya has refused to move out
of his spartan 720 sq ft flat on South Calcutta's middle-class Palm Avenue,
Basu is staying put in Indira Bhavan, the high-walled official residence
in an exclusive corner of posh Salt Lake. "I have been asked to stay
here because of security reasons," he says in justification in his
regular interface with the media, flashing his Z-plus category security.
The fortress-like
Indira Bhavan is almost a parallel centre of power, with a six-member
staff which draws its salary from the state Government. In addition, there
is a personal assistant and a telephone operator; the cars (including
an air-conditioned car used by his wife, Kamal Basu); not to speak of
the unlimited STD and ISD facility on his residential telephone.
Interestingly,
in the last few weeks of Basu's tenure, the state Government's Home (Constitution
and Elections) Department (then under Basu) amended its rules to foot
the bill of maintaining former chief ministers (and the speaker of the
Assembly) from the state's budgetary resources. Apparently, Bhattacharya,
who was the deputy chief minister till Basu's retirement, was in the dark
about the change in rules. Later on, when newspersons pointed it out to
him, he said, "We have to look into it." But he wore a puzzled
expression.
There is
in fact a lot for Bhattacharya and most of his ministerial colleagues
to feel puzzled about over Basu's recent antics. One of these is the 87-year-old's
obsessive following of his 56-year-old successor's trail. Last month,
Basu arrived in Delhi a few days after Bhattacharya's first visit to the
Centre after becoming the chief minister. While the latter had cordial
meetings with the prime minister and the home minister, Basu painted the
capital red, literally, by sitting in dharna in the Parliament complex,
pushing for the elusive "Third Front", and playing his old number
about the BJP leadership being "uncivilised and barbaric" time
and again. From Delhi, Bhattacharya flew to Bagdogra in north Bengal to
address rallies in areas affected by terrorist attacks. And, hey presto,
Basu reached there too.
In his frequent
statewide peregrinations, the former chief minister is using the state
Government's helicopter free of charge by a simple ruse. There is always
a minister to accompany him, thus justifying the cost of Rs 45,000 for
a flying hour. In Behrampore, his flight companion was Finance Minister
Asim Dasgupta. At a public meeting there, Dasgupta referred to Basu as
the "chief minister". While that could well be a slip of the
tongue, what was certainly too serious to be a mistake was Basu accepting
the guard of honour by local policemen. This is despite a clear provision
in the rule book that sitting cabinet members alone are entitled to a
guard of honour.
In the year
before Basu's retirement-when work time had shrunk to an hour in office
in the morning for four days a week-it was the practice for his secretary
to carry a large leather case full of files to Indira Bhavan in the afternoon.
Now he visits the party office on Alimuddin Street regularly. "Instead
of the mandatory Friday meetings, Basu, as both politburo and state secretariat
member, is here almost four times a week," a party executive says.
And he is increasingly playing the super-arbiter in intra-party conflicts.
In one such minor altercation between Bhattacharya and Chakravarty over
the state Government partly funding a Hrithik Roshan show-the new chief
minister felt that the Government should stay away from popular entertainment
programmes-Chakravarty had the last laugh with Basu's certificate: "On
cultural issues, Subhash is right."
Basu's abiding
presence in the state's political landscape is welcome to his bete noire,
Trinamool Congress supremo Mamata Banerjee. For her, the disappearance
of Basu would have been like the end of Moby Dick for Captain Ahab. "Bengal
is being run by two chief ministers," she gleefully says. While Trinamool
leaders have drawn up a list of Basu's "extra-constitutional privileges",
the Congress, not to be outsmarted, took its list to Governor Viren Shah.
This week, Congress and Trinamool MLAs will jointly hold a mock assembly
(within the Vidhan Sabha complex itself) where they will discuss, among
other things, the "unlawful" privileges extended to Basu. The
state Congress is even planning to file a public-interest petition on
the matter.
The former
chief minister may have his own motives for leveraging on his iconic stature
in the CPI(M)-perhaps he thinks that the NDA coalition at the Centre will
crumble and then he can try for prime ministership again. While that's
too speculative, Basu, by casting a long shadow on the Left Front Government,
has put his successor in a dialectical muddle. Bhattacharya is a no-nonsense
man who plays with a straight bat and is trying to restore some of the
elementary values of governance that were lost in the Basu era. These
include the cabinet system of decision-making, work culture of government
employees and a sense of responsibility in labour actions. For the first
time in many years, attendance time of the staff is being recorded at
Writers' Buildings. And issues are being discussed threadbare at cabinet
meetings.
During Basu's
tenure, the Government had been reduced to a rubber stamp. Files were
seldom sent to the Cabinet for approval. Most of the decisions were forced
on the Government by a coterie of Alimuddin Street apparatchiki. And now,
by riding high from his Salt Lake fortress and keeping alive the myth
of his being the real "power centre", Basu is undercutting a
belated but honest attempt to clear a mess of his creation.
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