Communist parties are not known to give their rebels a long rope. At least not until the critic wields enough clout as happened with the "capitalist roaders" in post-Mao China. It is no exception with West Bengal, the state where the CPI(M)-led Left Front has been in power for the past quarter century. Marxist Chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharya was finally overpowered by the party and its partners after airing his unorthodox views on the security threats posed by mushrooming madarsas. Bhattacharya did not appear at the media briefing after the Left Front (LF) meeting in Kolkata on February 6. Instead, lf Chairman Biman Bose, who is a member of the CPI(M)'s all-powerful Politburo, spoke on the chief minister's behalf, claiming that at the meeting he had denied having spoken against the activities of even "a few" madarsas.

But then what about the headlines in newspapers attributing to Bhattacharya what he reportedly sought to deny at the lf meeting? On January 19, he said at the CPI(M)'s district conference at Siliguri that the madarsas from which "the ISI and its agents" were operating "did not carry the approval of the state Madarsa Board" and would be "closed down". On January 23, in a chat programme on India Today Group Online (ITGO), he dwelt at length on the link between "some of the unauthorised madarsas" and the ISI. On January 24, he claimed before television cameras that some madarsas were indulging in "anti-national propaganda" and the state had "direct evidence" of it. If printed words and television cameras were lying, so was Ganashakti, the Bengali party daily, which too had reported Bhattacharya made the statements. According to Bose, at the lf meeting Bhattacharya had even denied his statements appearing in Ganashakti.

In short, the official version of the meeting painted Bhattacharya as a leader not in firm command of his party and its allies, and a maverick who got tied up in knots when faced with opposition to his moves in his own camp. It is certainly not the sort of image Bhattacharya would like to carry while there is an upswing in his popularity: he emerged as the fourth most popular chief minister in the India Today opinion poll last week.

Nor is this the first time that the party had to pull him up since he became chief minister in 2000. Last year, he was prevented by the party at the last moment from enacting a law against organised crime, POCA as it was christened, on the ground that it would deflate the Left attack, within and outside Parliament, on POTO, the Central ordinance against terrorist activities. Then too, a similar charade had followed. The party had given its errant comrade a snub behind closed doors and the commissars had claimed that he had said something but didn't mean it and the media had misreported his words. The volte face was fired by the strong backlash Bhattacharya's statements evoked from the Muslim community that accounts for a substantial chunk of lf voters.

The state police, worried about the proliferating private madarsas funded by vague sources in West Asia, were pinning its hopes on the chief minister's bold remarks. On the news of his being cut to size, a senior police officer remarked, "It is POCA revisited." A double entendre as the word POKA (insect, in Bengali) is also the title of Bhattacharya's recent play, an adaptation of Kafka's Metamorphosis, about a man turning into a cockroach. But Bhattacharya's artistic work is perhaps not autobiographical. He has a talent for ducking bouncers. In the early 1990s, he resigned from Jyoti Basu's cabinet on the ground of corruption in administration, but returned soon and never spoke about the reason for his short-lived revolt.

This time round, his remarks on the madarsas after the January 22 attack on Kolkata's American Center had led to joyful expectation in the BJP camp, which has been screaming about a Pakistan-sponsored plan to open up a new militancy front in eastern India. So impressed was Union Home Minister L.K. Advani by the Bengali Marxist leader's readiness to go against the party line that the Union Home Ministry persuaded investigative agencies into putting up one of their best performances in busting the gang responsible for the American Center attack. Taking the cue from Advani, many other BJP leaders started taking a close look at Bhattacharya, checking out if he indeed meant to be different or was a mere practitioner of realpolitik.

It is surprising that Bhattacharya made his move without gauging the consternation it would cause in the Left Front. While he named ISI as being responsible for the January 22 incident, the Politburo issued a terse statement in the party organ People's Democracy calling the attackers no more than an "armed" group and scrupulously avoided naming Pakistan or any of its agencies. A few weeks earlier, CPI(M) General Secretary H.S. Surjeet had written an article highly laudatory of Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf for his January 12 speech. Bhattacharya was obviously not gathering much support in the party ranks for his minority policy, which puts the danger of Islamic fundamentalism at least on a par with that of Hindu fanaticism. In the draft resolution of the CPI(M)'s 17th congress, due in Hyderabad in March, there is no mention of the threat of terrorism from Pakistan, except as a short clause in a paragraph that dwells on Hindu fanaticism. As of now, it seems that the party has ignored Bhattacharya's point of view.

The minority policy apart, Bhattacharya's unsure grip on his party has raised serious questions about his attempts at economic reforms, including a bid to pull up the state's notoriously sagging work culture. So far his Government has made some noise about making government doctors and schoolteachers more accountable, but even these token measures have met with stiff resistance from the party.

The state's investment climate was also warming up as Bhattacharya was seen to be a chief minister who trusted the market and a pragmatic leader who would find common ground with BJP and the Centre. The war of terrorism contains a small hope for peace between the Centre and the state. But it seems that the CPI(M) leadership is out to hack any olive branch that their man in Writers' Buildings may hold out to Delhi as long as the BJP is in power.