Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee (1944-2024): Soft Marxist

If GOOD INTENTIONS are our undoing, Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee’s late career was a testament to that fact. If people can change, the former West Bengal chief minister lived out that human possibility. If Marxists could reconcile with the market, the evidence had to step no farther than his door. Bhattacharjee, who died in Kolkata on August 8 at 80, had been ill for a long time and had not been seen in public for years. But future studies of the before-and-after of communist parliamentary politics in India will have him as the point of departure. There was a Left Front government in Bengal for 23 years before he became chief minister in November 2000. It changed tracks on his watch. And then, when it was 34 years old, it was no more. Between 2011 and 2018, the Left had been reduced to one state from three. Largely because of him. So the story continues to be told.

Bhattacharjee was one of PDG’s Boys. That made him a hardliner. He joined the Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPM) in 1966, two years after the communist split that saw the birth of the new party. Incidentally, 1964 was also the year Khrushchev was deposed. But before the Soviet Union settled into stagnation and the long rule of its geriatric leadership till Gorbachev, there was much turmoil in the world of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism. The Cultural Revolution had also begun in 1966. To be communist back then still meant street-fighting. But Bhattacharjee, leader then of the Democratic Youth Federation (later DYFI), had Pramode Dasgupta (the PDG mentioned earlier) for guide and was temperamentally better suited for verbal battles.

Buddha (his everyday name in the Bengal street) began as Marxist as Indian Marxists came, still dreaming of a day parliamentary politics would make way for the rule of the proletariat. As home minister of Bengal in the 1990s, he earned a reputation for toughness although political uses of the police served to show that the state was secondary to the party. This strand of thought and action would come back to haunt him in 2007 when, during the Nandigram violence, he would end up using the phrase “our people” and be chastised in countless editorials for not being the chief minister of all the people of Bengal.

And yet, he meant well the moment he became chief minister. Because he dared to think and come to the conclusion that things could not go on the way they were. Agrarian Bengal needed industry— in fact, a full-scale reindustrialisation after his party and his predecessor’s government had done much to chase industry away. It needed investment. All of it to create jobs as much as to fill the government’s coffers running dry. He succeeded with the IT and ITES (IT Enabled Services) sectors. Sundry plants came up here and there. The services sector took off too and about the same time as it did in the rest of the country. Department stores and shopping malls were no longer anathema to communists and communistically inclined voters in Bengal.

But for all that, there remained a basic flaw. One fundamental had not changed. Capitalism, communist-style, was still top-down. When the aborted Nano factory at Singur and the SEZ in Nandigram became Buddha’s undoing, it was not only because of a mass agitation in one place and a mismanaged government response in another which led to a bloodbath. Buddha was right that Bengal needed to change fast. But in getting the economics right, he got the politics wrong. He was blindsided.

Many residents and former residents of Bengal who were not fellow travellers or votaries of the Left will miss him, and with more than a little sadness. For one, he was a different kind of politician who leaves behind not only a few translations of Márquez and Mayakovsky and an association with the film hub Nandan, the one thing that Satyajit Ray had said half in jest still worked in Bengal, but also a legacy of aspiration. That, perhaps, was the essence of Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee’s Bengal: after decades, it had again begun to live in hope, to want more and to do better.

There is no irony in the fact that the late PC Joshi was ideologically rehabilitated by Indian communists at about the same time Bhattacharjee won his 235- seat mandate in the 2006 Assembly elections—that was the heyday of market-friendly Marxism because Pramode Dasgupta’s ghost had set his protégé free.

Buddhadeb BhattacharjeedeathIn MemoriamNandigram violencepoliticsSingurSoft MarxistWest Bengal