Initially he wanted to be the Deng Xiaoping (who was instrumental in China’s economic reconstruction following the Great Leap Forward in the early 60s) of Bengal but Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee ended up as the Mikhail Gorbachev of the Marxist party. Buddhadeb’s similarity to Gorbachev was evident when he like the former ideologue of
the Communist party of erstwhile USSR (“I detest lies...,” Gorbachev would often say) yearned for the truth that led him to introduce the policy of “glasnost” (literally liberalism) deviating from the orthodox party ideology. His style of functioning at the helm of affairs, deviating from the party line, had often earned him harsh criticism from the party hardliner and made him “a recluse in the party.”
A “dreamer” as he had been as a chief minister, he has now met his “nemesis” for not being pragmatic like his predecessor Jyoti Basu. After the debacle of the CPI(M) at the hands of Mamata Banerjee, a question has cropped up: Will out of power Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee reinvent himself? After the exit of Left Front government and Mr Bhattacharjee’s personal defeat in Jadavpur what role has the party in mind for him?
In fact, a decade in office is an occasion for celebration but not for him. For most people, he has already played his innings. The 34-year rule of the party under him has ended.
But this was quite unlikely a possibility when the Front had increased its tally of seats in the legislature from 199 to 235 in the last Assembly election. Mr Bhattacharjee is still relatively young by Communist standards must have looked forward to a reign stretching well beyond 2011. One of the reasons why such expectation has been dashed, can be traced to the Left Front’s excellent showing in 2006, for it persuaded him to revive the state’s industrial sector.
Nothing wrong with that, except for the fact that he went about it in the wrong way. Not only did he woo the private sector, the bete noire of the commissars, with open arms, the first time that any Communist chief minister had done so but he also resorted to high-handed tactics to acquire land for the new industries.
The virtual decimation of the Opposition in 2006 evidently encouraged him to do so but he had failed to take into account the tenacity of the tillers where land is involved, and the opportunity their anger gave to Mamata Banerjee to organise resistance to the acquisition.
Since then, it has been all downhill for Mr Bhattacharjee and for the Marxists party.
It has received such crippling electoral blows in the last few years that they seem totally devoid of confidence, as Prakash Karat’s comment about the Left’s beleaguered condition in West Bengal shows. The reason is not only the recent events in Singur and Nandigram but all the mis-adventures which the Left Front took in the last three decades — the destruction of the work culture, the conversion of the police into an appendage of the party, the erosion of the autonomy of educational institutions, the depredations of the cadres, and so on.
It was an awareness of this degeneration which made Mr Bhattacharjee resign in 1993 at a time when a senior CPI(M) leader Benoy Chaudhury described the government as one of, by and for contractors. Mr Bhattacharjee may now wonder whether he made a mistake by returning to the party two years later.
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Cong gets more seats than CPM
Age Correspondent
Kolkata
May 14: The Congress for the first time since 1977 has more MLAs than the CPI(M). The Mamata tsunami decimated the Left Front, whose tally plummeted from 235 to a miserable 62. To add salt to the CPI(M)’s wounds, the Congress has got two more MLAs than the CPI(M). The CPI(M), which had won 176 seats in 2006, has been reduced to just 40 while the Congress has won 42 seats. Union finance minister Pranab Mukherjee acknowledged that the party’s improved performance was due to the alliance with the Trinamul.