New Delhi, January 18: Just that unbroken stint of 23 years as chief minister of West Bengal, winning the people’s endorsement five times in would have made Jyoti Basu one of the greatest leaders of independent India.
It adds to his stature that he would have become the tenth prime minister of India but for his party’s historic blunder of turning down the request of the motley coalition that got the chance to form the government after the fractured mandate in 1996 to allow Basu to lead the government.
However, Jyoti Basu’s real significance in Indian politics is that he embodied in his austere, some would say, imperious persona, both the success and failure of India’s communist movement.
The communists shook up the wholly unequal distribution of power in traditional West Bengal, organising workers and peasants, and giving them agency. Basu’s electoral successes built upon his career as a trade union leader. As chief minister, Jyoti Basu presided over a government that implemented land reforms in Bengal, which gave sharecroppers permanency of tenure, laid the ground for investment in irrigation and crop husbandry that led to a sudden spurt in that state’s agricultural production and productivity.
The communist movement and the Left Front government kept communal forces at bay in West Bengal. Jyoti Basu thus came to represent political commitment to secularism. The Sachar Commission’s finding that Muslims of West Bengal have not broken out of backwardness has, however, taken some sheen off this achievement.
The other significant advance that Basu presided over was political decentralisation. His government devolved political and economic power to local governments in towns and villages. It also drove national attention to the concentration of fiscal powers at the Centre and the injustice inherent in such concentration.
Organising society’s disempowered groups to give them agency and prevent hostility against any group, based on any group identity, redistribute the primary asset of rural production, land, and institutionalise decentralisation of political power — these are fundamental tasks of modernisation that any traditional, hierarchical society needs to undertake, to secure the capacity to undertake modern economic activity.
However, having made these advances, the very same communist movement that drove democratisation, put the brakes on further change. The communist belief that capitalism has become moribund and its ashes need to be suitably immersed in the Bay of Bengal rendered the Left Front government’s attempts at industrialisation an exercise in schizophrenia — the unions and the party stood firmly committed to capitalism’s demise even as the government sought to encourage capitalists to bring some of their isms to life on what had become West Bengal’s industrial wasteland.
Schizophrenia of this nature produces compromise and corruption, not industrial advance. Disaffection spread within the party and the people. Jyoti Basu demitted office in 2000, handing over the baton to Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee, who had rebelled against the deterioration of politics by penning a play titled Dusshomay, meaning bad times.
—Agencies