The Economist

Jyoti Basu
Jan 21st 2010 From The Economist print edition
Jyoti Basu, almost India’s first Communist prime minister, died on January 17th, aged 95

INDIAN politics since independence has not been short of milk-and-water socialism, such as that on offer in the Congress party. But it has lacked charismatic figures on the left. The exception—in a diminutive, elegant, determined shape—was Jyoti Basu. For 20 years, with a few breaks, Mr Basu was the leader of West Bengal’s opposition; for 23 years he was the state’s chief minister. He was also a communist, and a charming one.

His memoirs, written at the end of his life, proclaimed a fervent and orthodox Marxism-Leninism. His career was often different. Though he longed for the masses of India to “emerge victorious” in a society without caste, class or exploitation, Mr Basu was above all a pragmatist. If private firms could bring jobs to West Bengal, he sought them out. He was unabashedly friendly to capitalist cadres such as The Economist, presenting the editor in 2000 with a small silver carriage adorned with bright pink, very un-Marxist, feathers.

Kolkata (once Calcutta) was his showpiece, the only big Indian city in which, from 1977 to 2000, red flags flew, and hammers and sickles graced the walls. It remains dirty, sprawling and chaotic, though bustling with IT jobs and with many more glass towers. After his death, opinion diverged over whether Mr Basu had brought in more investment or scared it off, ruined West Bengal or made it a beacon for the country. Businessmen who had tangled with the state’s militant unions had little good to say of him. Opponents queried his unprecedented re-elections, attributing them to a cult of thuggishness in his party. But landless farmers, beneficiaries of his million-acre land-distribution programme, worshipped him; villagers empowered through his improved version of local councils, the panchayati raj, voted for him eagerly; and commuters in Kolkata could thank him for cheap trams.

His straddling act was tricky at times. When West Bengal in 2006, under his successor, won the hotly contested contract to build the Tata Nano, he was delighted at the thought of the investment, jobs and growth. But he found himself at odds with his chief supporters—poor farmers, empowered by himself, whose land would be seized for the new car plant—and could not persuade them to accept compensation. Tata eventually left for Gujarat.

This thoughtful, flexible politician hardly resembled the young hothead who first stood for election, in 1946. Mr Basu was then deep in organising the railway workers, planning strikes and organising safe-houses for communist comrades. He preferred direct action to the ballot (“such a bourgeois set-up”) and the laboured etiquette of Question Hour, but soon saw the point of representative democracy. From the 1950s onwards he refined his manifesto of land reform, decentralisation, a minimum wage, free trade unions, fixed food prices. It was a time of hunger and unrest, with thousands of farmers and labourers besieging the assembly in Calcutta with cries of “Give us starch!” The ruling Congress party kept the crowds at a distance, or got the police to disperse them with tear gas and rifle fire. But Mr Basu went out to Esplanade East, talked to the people and brought their grievances inside.

Lenin in marigolds

His upbringing had been comfortably middle-class: a Calcutta doctor’s son, St Xavier’s, Presidency College, studies for the bar in London. His family blamed that stint, during the anti-fascist ferment of the 1930s, for turning him communist, and certainly he went back to India a determined Red. Several times he was arrested, once while simply taking a cup of tea in the Kamalalaya Stores. From 1948-51, when the party was banned, he went underground for a while, shifting from house to house, all the time keeping up his “pro-people” agitation. In 1964, when the Communist Party split over India’s war with China (his side, the Communist Party of India (Marxist), having favoured talks, rather than fighting), he saw the divide as one of “real” communism against the revisionists. He was accused of being anti-national, and had his offices raided—offices where pictures of Lenin and Stalin were decked with marigolds, like gods.

Despite all this, however, his pragmatism increased. As chief minister of West Bengal, he realised that economic liberalisation and the rise of China were making old orthodoxies redundant. “We want capital,” he said once. “Socialism is not possible now.” Such remarks astonished his colleagues in the party. Nor did they relish his harping on what he called their “historic blunder”: the moment in 1996 when, at the head of a “third front” alliance of left-wing, regional and caste-based parties, he almost became India’s prime minister, only to be stymied by his own politburo’s ideological squeamishness.

That might have allowed Mr Basu and the left a vital role in national politics. He still had much to do. He wanted to see the people’s political consciousness awakened, and India’s colossal inequalities of wealth and caste fading inexorably away. But in fact he had left West Bengal an economic backwater, largely shunned by foreign investors and a byword for obstreperous unionism. Marxist-Leninist revolution remained his dream; but, as he knew better than anyone, capitalism and private enterprise remained a surer bet.
Copyright © 2010 The Economist Newspaper and The Economist Group. All rights reserved.

Peoples World,USA

Jyoti Basu, great son of India, dies at 95

by: R.K. Sharma
January 17 2010
Veteran Communist leader Jyoti Basu died Jan. 17 at age 95. This grand man of Indian politics and socialist movement had tremendous popularity and respect among the Indian people, as was evident by huge public outpourings of concern in recent days as his health steadily deteriorated.
According to The New York Times, "Anxious crowds gathered outside his Calcutta hospital, local newspapers carried front-page updates on his condition and a litany of leading Indian politicians, including Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, made calls to him."
He died of multiple organ failure, according to media reports.
Basu was the longest ruling Communist chief minister (a position similar to a U.S. governor) for 23 years, from 1977 to 2000. His state of West Bengal today is populated by 90 million people. He led the four left and communist parties of India to victory for 32 years through popular elections.
Basu was known as a highly-skilled parliamentarian and builder of coalitions, especially coalitions that would uphold a basic tenet of Indian society, like secularism. So impressive was his secularism that religion-based parties, like the extreme rightwing Hindu BJP, failed to procure a single seat in the West Bengal's legislature.
Basu's signature policies as chief minister were massive land reform and democracy for the rural poor. Immediately after the Communist-led coalition won in West Bengal, eviction of sharecroppers was stopped. Shares of crop were guaranteed by a seemingly easy move now, but difficult then, recording the sharecroppers name.
Large amounts of land were distributed to struggling farmers, reshaping West Bengal and Indian politics for decades.
Democracy was introduced at the grassroots by holding panchayat elections, a form of local self-government, giving poor farmers and villagers a voice in areas where large landowners usually ruled.
Basu was so respected that in 1996, when a majority of non-Congress, non-BJP parties won the majority of the national elections (Lok Sabha), Basu was offered the prime minister post. However, Basu's party, the Communist Party of India (Marxist), nixed his accepting the prime minister spot. The reason, the party said, was the CPI (M) did not hold the majority of Lok Sabha seats. Basu called the decision a "historic blunder." Yet, he remained a stalwart leader of the CPI (M).
The CPI (M) leadership sent out messages of "its profound grief at the passing away" of Basu, calling him a "senior most leader of the Party and one of the tallest leaders of the Communist movement in India."
The CPI (M) continued the tribute saying "Basu belonged to the leadership of the CPI (M) which steered the Party through the difficult days of semi-fascist terror in West Bengal in the early seventies. One has to recall how as chief minister he dealt with the situation after the assassination of Indira Gandhi in 1984 when violence against Sikhs broke out in various parts of the country, but nothing was allowed to happen in West Bengal." In the early seventies, then-Prime Minister Indira Gandhi had declared emergency rule, suspending numerous democratic rights and imprisoning many political opponents.
Prakash Karat, CPI (M) general secretary, said, "Basu was a great leader of the CPI(M), the Left movement and India. With his passing away an era has passed. Although he died at the age of 95, he leaves us bereft, because there will be none like JB again. An ardent communist, he was one of the few political leaders of independent India who actually deepened democracy, strengthened secularism and got the working people to the center stage of Indian politics."
Others from across Indian politics offered their condolences and paid glowing tributes to Basu. India's Prime Minister Manmohan Singh described Basu as "a great son of India."
President of India Pratibha Patil, a woman leader Basu had worked with and helped get elected, paid tribute to the stalwart. The president said Basu earned the unique distinction of being the longest serving chief minister of any state from the late seventies to 2000, and displayed his abilities as a leader of the people, an able administrator and an eminent statesman.
Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee called him "a towering personality" and credited him as the "architect" of the first UPA government. "I have lost a great well wisher," he said.
Vice President of India Hamid Ansari said, "Basu has made a significant contribution to the public life and especially to the development of West Bengal."
The deep love and respect for Basu among the working masses of India led to a condolence resolution from an unlikely source. The right-wing BJP, against which Basu fought all his life, passed a resolution of condolences, calling Basu, "One of the tallest contemporary leaders of Indian politics."
Poetic statements from Sonia Gandhi, chair person of the ruling party, Indian National Congress, and Home Minister P. Chidambram added to the country's salute.
Referring to his pneumonia lasting 17 days, Gandhi said, " Jyoti Basu did not go gentle into the good night. He fought bravely till his last breath, just as he did throughout his life," and added that "he had a rich, fulfilled and glorious life."
"Basu strode like a colossus on the Indian political scene for several decades. He was a great patriot, a great democrat, a great Parliamentarian and a great source of inspiration," Chidambram said.
Educated in a Catholic school, St. Xaviers, during the British colonial rule, Basu came from a well-off family, who had some connections to freedom fighters involved in the struggle for India's independence. He was sent to the UK to further his education. And it was here Basu met Communists and Marxists like R. Palme Dutt.
He returned to India in 1940 and joined the CPI.
Although a lawyer, Basu became a full-time CPI organizer, and went to work among India's dock and railway workers. He fought and won the release of political prisoners during Britain's colonial rule. And in 1948, he was repeatedly arrested after the Communist Party was banned shortly after Independence.
One example of Basu's personal courage came during a 13-month-long United Front West Bengal government, which was voted to power in 1969. Basu became the deputy to the chief minister and also put in charge of the state's law enforcement agencies. A large group of armed policemen stormed the government offices to protest the death of a colleague, and Basu faced the armed group alone, and defused the situation.
While referred to as a "nonconventional" Communist or "non-orthodox" Marxist, Basu epitomized being a "true Communist and Marxist," many noted. The CPI (M) said Basu was a Marxist who neither wavered in his convictions nor was dogmatic in his approach, becoming a source of inspiration for the Left movement in the country.
It was well known that the CPI (M)'s decision to see the Congress Party as a secular partner in the fight against Indian communalism was largely led by Basu's nonsectarian outlook.
As thousands of red flags are flying half mast through the length and breadth of Indian communist parties' offices, there are tributes received by parties and from political figures of all hues from all over the world.
The Communist Party of India, from which many CPI (M) leaders split in 1964, never dithered in providing its own support to him. CPI General Secretary A. B. Bardhan expressed his heart felt sadness on Basu's demise. Calling him the tallest of leaders, Bardhan recalled the motivation of the veteran's life, "Basu fought for the poor and the downtrodden. He was an icon of working class movement and a model for good governance. He was an able administrator and good human being. His rule of more than quarter century has changed the face of rural Bengal and paved the path for agriculture and industrial development. "
No other Indian top leaders ever donated their body to a medical college, but Basu set an example, by donating his body and its parts to further the cause of medicine and scientific research.

Photo: Jyoti Basu speaks to a CPI (M) mass rally of 150,000 in Hyderabad, India, in 2002. Teresa Albano/PW

The Times, from London

Jyoti Basu:

Former chief minister of West Bengal
(Jayanta Shaw/Reuters) January 22, 2010
Jyoti Basu was a stumbling specialist of the half-finished sentence, a sometimes terrible public speaker who in his heyday attracted audiences of a million and more. He was awkward socially and fiercely private, a man given to slipping quietly away from the poverty of West Bengal for a month to imbibe London culture and occasionally a small brandy at the India Club.

He was never one of the poor millions who adored him. He was not really even a proper communist. But he was a revolutionary, and it is a measure of his impact on the lives of millions of landless West Bengal peasants that thousands thronged outside the Calcutta hospital where he lay dying to pay homage. He had seized land from the rich and turned many of the masses into subsistence farmers, and for this he was the unrivalled hero of leftist politics.

Not that his revolution ended poverty in West Bengal and its capital, Calcutta. Indeed, it arguably entrenched it. Business talent and big money fled, and Calcutta became an international icon for a particularly virulent kind of poverty that persists today amid familiar left-wing infighting.

Basu, invariably dressed in crisp white cotton, was rarely photographed wearing a smile. He came across as stern and distant, and the line between public and private life was strictly observed. His first wife died within 16 months of their marriage, and the second produced a son.

Basu’s politics and powerbase remained rooted in West Bengal, but he did have one chance at leaping out of this provincially feverish world in the mid-1990s to become India’s Prime Minister as head of a coalition government. The coalition might, had it succeeded, have stalled the rise of the right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party, a party despised by most Muslims and blamed for much communal tension. But his party blocked him, effectively arguing that he would have to compromise Marxist ideals to accommodate so many shades of political opinion. He was furious and disappointed, and later described it as a blunder. He returned quietly to state politics while using his heightened prestige to become kingmaker of the rulers of Delhi. He influence was decisive in forming an alliance in 2004 between left-wingers and the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance.

Perhaps the greatest achievement of Basu’s tenure was his intolerance and abhorrence of communalism. Calcutta and West Bengal rarely followed the rest of the country into outbreaks of religious rioting. Had Basu been a different person he could have set Bengal ablaze for short-term political gain, as other politicians routinely did elsewhere. Not that he was a benevolent ruler; the state apparatus of West Bengal had its ruthless and dictatorial side and its nightmarish bureaucracy.

His instinctive communal tolerance stemmed from a liberal upbringing in what is now Bangladesh as the son of a prosperous doctor, who sent him to the best schools and later at Presidency College, Calcutta, from which he graduated with honours in English. In 1935 he sailed to London to study law at Middle Temple.

His father was horrified when his son declared that he intended to pursue politics when he returned home, and, to boot, that he was now a communist. He had been inspired, in part, by the communist philosopher and writer Rajani Palme Dutt, and had dabbled in the Communist Party of Great Britain. After returning to Calcutta in 1940 he enrolled as a barrister at the Calcutta High Court but never practised.

Instead he joined the trade union movement and organised railway workers in Bengal and Assam. He became secretary of Friends of the Soviet Union and the Anti-Fascist Writers’ Association, and was in charge of maintaining contact with underground party workers. He was now, by any measure, a fully paid-up left-wing agitator.

His loathing of communalism was first manifest in 1946-47, when he played a crucial calming role as strikes and Hindu-

Muslim bloodletting threatened to engulf the state. He also ensured there was no anti-Sikh rioting in West Bengal after the assassination of Indira Gandhi, the Prime Minister, in 1984 by her Sikh bodyguards.

In 1964 the communist movement in India split between ideological camps that variously supported India or China over the Sino-Indian war of 1962. Basu sided with the pro-China camp and became a founder and leader of the new Communist Party (Marxist) in West Bengal. Of the nine founding members of the politburo, Basu was the last survivor.

The party gained ground quickly but was trounced in state elections in 1972, which the Congress Party probably rigged, but won decisively in 1977 — the start of Basu’s 23 unbroken years of power, the longest stint as chief minister in Indian political history. He immediately confronted feudalism, spread land and wealth among the peasantry, and was from that moment the invincible man of the poor.

The stifling state mechanisms that he established reinforced his power, ensuring that big business stayed away and which can still make entrepreneurs think twice about setting up in West Bengal. He made one blunder that he later admitted to: early in his chief ministership he banned the teaching of English in primary schools, sowing the seeds for greater isolation from the rest of India and hindering his later attempts to attract US investors.

Basu remained politically active until he retired in 2000 because of ill health, but as India’s leading elder statesman he never stopped receiving high-powered visitors at his home. His politics remained as they had always been, Marxist in name but Fabian in nature and, after the introduction of economic liberalism in India in the 1980s, latterly capitalist in fact.

Basu’s wife died in 2003. He is survived by his son.

Jyoti Basu, former chief minister of West Bengal, was born on July 8, 1914. He died on January 17, 2010, aged 95

The Washington Post

Of Note
Obituaries
Thursday, January 21, 2010
Jyoti Basu Indian Communist leader
Communist leader Jyoti Basu, 96, who in 1996 came close to becoming India's prime minister, died Jan. 17 in a Calcutta hospital of multiple organ failure, said Biman Bose, a leader of the Communist Party of India (Marxist), to which Mr. Basu belonged. He had been ailing for a few months and was hospitalized Jan. 1.
Mr. Basu became chief minister of West Bengal state in 1977 and served for 23 years, making him the longest-serving chief minister in India's political history.
In 1996, a group of parties asked Mr. Basu to lead a coalition government in New Delhi. The Communist Party declined because it did not want to be part of a government in which it would not have a majority. Mr. Basu later described that decision as a "historic blunder."
In his later years, Mr. Basu, a charismatic leader, assumed the role of an elder statesman whose advice and opinion were sought and respected across the political spectrum.

The small big man

The small big man
Karan Thapar, January 23, 2010

Jyoti Basu was not a tall man but you hardly noticed that when he walked into a room. There was, instead, a spring in his step that caught your eye. Even though he did not smile a lot, his manner was reassuring. He may not have been informal or familiar, but he wasn’t intimidating either. And if you won his respect you could feel the warmth of his response.

Our first meeting was in 1991. We had set up our camera and lights in the ante-room adjacent to his office in Writers’ Building. From the carpet to the sofa and flowers the room was suffused with red. Not crimson but burgundy. Like a deep rich wine. Basu walked in on the dot of time and the first thing he noticed was the colour.

“Is red your favourite?” he asked. I felt he was politely pointing out there was too much of it. “No,” I replied, eager to defend myself. “That’s how we found this room.”

“Ah”, he said softly. “They,” and he waved towards his staff, “obviously think it’s the appropriate colour for a communist!”

Five years later, when I next interviewed him, at his Indira Bhawan residence in Salt Lake, the room was very different. Panelled in wood it boasted of a cuckoo clock with a loud disturbing set of half-hourly chimes. This time Jyoti Basu arrived early, well before we had finished setting up.

“There’s no red in this room,” he chuckled. I was astonished he’d remembered. But I was soon to discover he had a memory like an old warehouse. As I threw carefully researched statistics at him to prove Bengal had seen little advance under his rule, he retorted with a fine collection of his own in staunch defence. He seemed to have the past at his fingertips. He clearly enjoyed the exchange.

However, the interview that I will never forget was the third and last. It happened in late August 1999 and was one of three for the BBC in the run-up to the elections. This time we talked about what ‘communism’ in Bengal actually amounted to. I told Jyoti Basu that it was social democracy. He strongly disagreed. Instead, he compared it to Lenin’s New Economic Policy.

“Mr Basu,” I interrupted, “That was a retreat from communism!” I thought he’d let the ball drop but he caught it at the first bounce when he responded, “It’s one step back so we can take two forward.”

Afterwards, he asked me to stay for coffee. “Where did you learn about communism and Lenin?” He seemed genuinely curious. “At school in England,” I said. “I learnt my communism there too,” and he laughed merrily. “The British have a lot to answer for!”

Jyoti Basu went on to speak about his grand-daughter. I could sense he was close to her. “She wants to be a journalist — or something — and I would like her to speak to you.” Even though he did not specifically say so, it felt like a compliment. He did not seem the sort of person who made such requests casually.

We never met again but years later, when I asked for another interview, he responded to my letter by ringing back. “I’m not well enough to be interviewed. But come and see me when you next come to Kolkata.” I wish I had. I meant to but each time I thought of it, I felt I would be intruding. Now, it’s too late.

TIME

Monday, Jan. 18, 2010
Icon's Death: What Now for India's Communists?
By JYOTI THOTTAM AND NILANJANA BHOWMICK / NEW DELHI

In a political career that spanned all of India's 61 years as an independent nation, Jyoti Basu, 95, was the face of India's Communist Party. He was epitome of a certain kind of leftist — urbane, westernized and a skilled power broker — and his death on Jan. 17 has prompted eulogizing from every corner of Indian public life.

Brush aside the flowery tributes, though, and what Basu leaves behind is a party in decline, unable to stand up for the increasingly urgent needs of India's poor. Basu's home state of West Bengal is one of two in India (the other is Kerala) where communists have been a major electoral force since the late 1960s. But while the left in Kerala has been in and out of office, Basu's Communist Party of India (Marxist) has been an unquestioned force in West Bengal for decades. Early in his political career, Basu harnessed the threat of massive strikes to take power — and keep it. A 1970 article in TIME about one particularly bloody wave of Marxist protests in West Bengal concluded: "No one doubts Basu's potential for mayhem." (See pictures of India's Nehru dynasty.)

That street-fighter turned into a powerful administrator. From 1977 to 2000, Basu served as West Bengal's chief minister — the longest-serving state leader in Indian history. He presided over sweeping land reforms, lifting millions of farmers out of poverty. "Transforming one-crop land to multicrop land and providing land to the landless was his greatest contribution," says Mohammed Salim, a colleague of Basu's in government. By the 1980s, West Bengal had gone from a famine-plagued state dependent on food subsidies to a surplus grain producer. "But that's where it all ended," says Rajat Roychowdhury, a political analyst based in Kolkata, West Bengal's capital. Resting on its agrarian reforms, the state became a byword for industrial decay, as its share of India's industrial output fell from 9.8% in 1980 to 5% in 1998. "Basu didn't do anything for industry."

Meanwhile, Basu himself developed a reputation for nepotism. He gave choice land and government contracts to his son's friends and business partners and, in March, his own biographer was named vice chancellor of Calcutta University. Basu never hid his bourgeois tastes — which included a fondness for Scotch and annual trips abroad for health checkups — but critics derided his increasingly lavish, state-sponsored birthday celebrations and Prime Minister–level security detail. The Marxist poet Samar Sen described Basu as "the most well-protected Marxist leader east of the Suez Canal."

The increasingly out-of-touch communists, sensing the state's slipping grip on power, tried to push through a belated industrial expansion by force. In 2007, at least a dozen villagers in Nandigram were killed by state police during protests against the seizure of their land for a chemical plant. In 2008, similar protests pushed Tata Motors to cancel plans to manufacture its $2,500 Nano in the village of Singur, a political debacle that contributed to the communists' severe losses in the 2009 national elections. Basu had retired in 2000, but his high-handed rule left permanent damage, says Tathagata Bhattacharya, a political observer based in New Delhi. "In effect, he made sure that left politics in a democratic framework did not have a future in India."

An armed Maoist insurgency has filled the vacuum, presenting themselves as the true voice of the dispossessed. They have infiltrated villages in pockets throughout the state, and have all but taken control of the village of Lalgarh, less than 125 miles (200 km) away from the state capital of Kolkata. Police and paramilitary forces have struggled for months to subdue the armed guerrillas, already suspected of killing five Communist Party members in 2010 alone. But opposition politician Mamta Banerjee has called the anti-Maoist offensive "a total failure." As mourners greet Basu's funeral procession today in Kolkata, and analysts debate his legacy, the mayhem continues.

Businessworld

Saturday 23 Jan 2010
Jyoti Basu: An Appraisal
There were two Jyoti Basus: one, a likeable bhadralok, and the other who put Bengal back by a few decades
By Omkar Goswami
Jyoti Basu deserves respect. As india’s longest ruling chief minister — 23 years from 1977 to 2000. As a polite man with a sense of humour; first elected in 1946; who then got elected in all but one state election between 1952 and 1996, a total of 11 times; was more hardworking than most of his colleagues and party members; who interacted with various political personalities, irrespective of their creed; who, despite his “historic blunder” comment, strictly followed the rules of party discipline and the principles of communism; and yet, loved good food, good whisky and a post-prandial cognac. It is difficult to be objective about this man.
And yet, I suspect that Basu would have demanded an objective assessment of his tenure. If the CPI(M) in West Bengal choose to make him a deity on the various walls of its cities and towns, his ghost will not be amused.
In 1967 and then 1969, the Bangla Congress came into power because of CPI(M)’s support. Ajoy Mukherjee was the weak chief minister; Jyoti Basu, the deputy-CM, called the shots. Then, Basu and the CPI(M) had a single-point agenda: to cripple the government while bolstering CPI(M). It did, in the 20 years from 1967 to 1987. But it also devastated West Bengal.
A vicious, no-holds-barred war between the CPI(M), the Naxalites and the Congress up to 1974 killed thousands of young people. Abusing Dharma Vira taught the CPI(M) MLAs the importance of insulting governors. The party destroyed industry, through violent and incessant strikes in Calcutta, Budge Budge, Sibpur, Naihati, Howrah, Durgapur and Asansol. Factories shut down and companies packed up. Infrastructure collapsed. Roads were euphemisms for huge potholes; buses were burnt at whim; the police became an organ of the party; power cuts were so ubiquitous that Tangail weavers designed ‘power cut saris’, which went from light to very dark. The CPI(M) began the trend of calling state-wide bandhs despite being the party of the government in power.
Another lasting damage was to education. From the second half of the 1960s, some of the better students had started leaving after their bachelor’s degree. By the mid-1970s, it had become a deluge, thanks to university exams being conducted at least a year later than usual. In the name of equality, the best colleges were destroyed. Presidency College, Bengal Engineering College, Lady Brabourne, Bethune and Jadavpur University were staffed by non-performing apparatchiks; while the best professors were ordered to teach in second-rung colleges. By the early 1990s, students who could were escaping the state after Class 12. Today, many escape after Class 10. This was the worst damage that CPI(M) wreaked upon Bengal.
The one positive change was the redistribution of agricultural land to landless peasants and sharecroppers. Unfortunately, the good effects haven’t lasted. According to the 2001 Census, rural West Bengal is not much better than rural Assam, Orissa or Bihar. In 2001, 44 per cent of rural households in India had electricity connections; in West Bengal, merely a fifth. For rural India, 41 per cent of households had pucca dwellings in 2001, versus less than a quarter in rural Bengal. Over three-quarters of rural households in West Bengal did not have drinking water within their homestead; and of these, 84 per cent didn’t have electricity. Thus, in 2001, 8.5 million households in the state went elsewhere to fetch water; of these, 7.2 million had no electricity. In 2001, only rural Orissa was worse.
Jyoti-babu was a different man after two terms in office. By the early 1990s, he had realised the need to get industry back. Somnath Chatterjee and he tried hard to secure memoranda of understandings — to a point where Chatterjee was called MoU-da. But it was too late, except for ventures like Haldia Petrochemicals, which also faced trouble with the government.By 2000, when Jyoti-babu had stepped down as chief minister, the damage was done. West Bengal had no industry worth the name; its higher education was in ruins; the cities were deteriorating; jobs were few; and the CPI(M)’s absolute power over all aspects of governance had started to corrupt. Agricultural productivity growth was not enough to get West Bengal to any meaningful place under the sun.Longest chief minister? Certainly. Clever and canny? Absolutely. Polite? Without doubt. More control than anyone in state politics? No question. Could he change West Bengal? Yes. For the better? You judge.If West Bengal gets a crazy Luddite to rule after the next election, who will the CPI(M) blame? Think.
The author is chairman of CERG Advisory.

Dawn Editorial

Jyoti Basu

19 Jan, 2010
Jyoti Basu, who passed away on Sunday, was an iconic figure in Indian politics. More a social democrat than a dogmatic ideologue, Mr Basu worked for and led the communist movement in India for more than six decades.

His forte lay in bringing together disparate voices so that left-leaning coalitions could be forged and a way forward agreed upon, irrespective of political differences.

He ruled West Bengal for 23 years from 1977 to 2000, a record unmatched by any other Indian chief minister. With him at the helm, Mr Basu’s Communist Party of India-Marxist was credited with restoring stability to West Bengal after the political tumult of the late 1960s and 1970s.

Perhaps more than anything else, he was revered as a cult figure for redistributing wealth through land reform. A rural support base gained further strength as peasants became landowners, and in the cities Mr Basu was backed by trade unions and West Bengal’s cultural intelligentsia.

He also had an opportunity to become India’s first Marxist prime minister following the inconclusive 1996 elections. However, his party chose to support the government instead of joining it, a move Mr Basu subsequently called a “historic blunder”.

Mr Basu had his critics who felt that he let the West Bengal economy stagnate by letting trade unions, who were opposed to foreign investment, dictate terms to the chief minister.

He had been in retirement for almost nine years when the CPI-M lost significant ground in last year’s elections. Ironically, the party that once gave land to the people suffered heavily for its plans to sell arable holdings to industrial concerns.

Some also believe that the CPI-M’s younger leaders who went from college to the party politburo in just a few years do not understand the peasantry.

But whatever the CPI-M’s future in West Bengal, Mr Basu’s legacy will remain intact.

The News International

Jyoti Basu's mixed legacy
By Praful Bidwai, January 23, 2010

In communist veteran Jyoti Basu's death, India has lost its most illustrious politician and the last leader who embodied a personal link between the many phases of Indian politics since the early 1940s.

Basu was not just a major Left leader in a country with the world's biggest Communist party outside China. He participated in numerous processes which shaped politics, including trade union and peasant movements, radicalisation of the intelligentsia, contestations between social-group identities, and crystallisation of the party system.

Unlike other distinguished communist leaders -- S A Dange, E M S Namboodiripad, P C Joshi, B T Ranadive, Gangadhar Adhikari, P Sundarayya and A K Gopalan -- Basu was neither a theoretician nor a mass leader. Nor was he an organisation man such as Harkishan Singh Surjeet, the last general secretary of the Communist Party (Marxist), or Pramode Dasgupta, who built and controlled the CPM party machine in West Bengal. Basu chose to concentrate on his greatest strengths -- electoral politics, administration and governance.

Basu was a party pragmatist with a managerial style. He worked on the public side of the CPM and built successful election-oriented social coalitions. He was chief minister of West Bengal -- a state with 80 million people -- continuously for 23 years. This is a world record. Basu could have stayed on as chief minister beyond 2000 if he wanted to.

Basu was a maverick in many ways. When the undivided Communist Party split in 1964, he was the only individual from a group of privileged European-educated young communists who went with the CPM. All others, including Adhikari, Indrajeet Gupta, Hiren Mukherjee and Nikhil Chakravartty, stayed with the CPI, as did most party intellectuals.

More significantly, Basu unquestioningly accepted the CPM's organisational hegemony. He was an unbending party loyalist, who believed in orthodox forms of discipline and "democratic centralism" -- based on concentric circles of authority within the party, and the norm that party members must unquestioningly follow a decision taken after internal debate.

In 1996, Basu famously became "the best prime minister India never had." The United Front unanimously offered the position to him. But the CPM central committee rejected the offer. The decision was driven by a narrow control-based consideration: with its 51 MPs, the Left wouldn't be able to dominate the Front. But the Left would have gained much advantage, including prestige and mainstream acceptance, with Basu as prime minister. This would probably have delayed or prevented the BJP's rise to national power in 1998. Ironically, those in the CPM who opposed Basu's candidature the most later backed Mayawati as prime minister!

Basu was a pragmatist par excellence. On any issue, he would choose the most practical and least radical of the options made available by the CPM. This would satisfy both privileged industrialists -- whom his party has been wooing for investment -- and poor people, among whom it had its roots. In land reform in West Bengal, the Left avoided a radical transfer of ownership to the tiller and the landless -- unlike in Kerala in the 1950s. Its Operation Barga registered tenants and gave them a 75-percent harvest share and tenure security.

In his first term as chief minister, Jyoti Basu said: "Let [the] capitalists understand us. We shall also try to understand their point of view." No wonder he developed a close rapport with several industrial magnates, including Dhirubhai Ambani, Ratan Tata and R P Goenka. He favoured multinational takeovers of some of Bengal's sick industrial units and wanted the West Bengal Electronics Development Corporation to form a joint venture with Philips.

Basu's upper-class, upper-caste Bhadralok identity endeared him greatly to Bengal's elite. But Basu's politics largely excluded Dalits, Adivasis and OBCs -- and even Muslims, who form one-fourth of the state's population -- from governance and political representation. In this respect, and in social development indicators, West Bengal lags behind many other states. The rate of decline in its rural poverty has halved since 1994.

Worse, according to the National Sample Survey, "the percentage of rural households not getting enough food every day in some months of the year" is highest in West Bengal (10.6 per cent), worse than in Orissa (4.8). West Bengal has more than 900,600 school dropouts in the 6-14 age group, higher than Bihar's nearly 700,000. Of India's 24 districts which have more than 50,000 out-of-school children, nine are in West Bengal.

The official Human Development Report (2004) admits that spending on and access to health services have stagnated. Some indicators -- immunisation, antenatal care, women's nutrition, and doctors and hospital beds per 100,000 people -- are below the national average. West Bengal has not opened a single new primary-health centre in a decade. West Bengal has the lowest rate of generating work under the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act -- 14 person-days per poor family. The national average is 43. (The promise was 100.)

India's worst recent food riots have occurred in West Bengal -- especially in poor districts like Purulia, Bankura and Birbhum -- when starving people raided the storehouses of dishonest ration-shop owners, all CPM members. Purulia is one of India's poorest districts -- with 78 percent of its population below the poverty line. More than two-fifths of West Bengal's poor don't have ration cards, which entitle them to subsidised food. Meanwhile, some of the gains of Operation Barga are eroding. Seventeen percent of registered tenants have lost their land and another 27 percent are in insecure possession.

Clearly, the Left Front has failed the poor in numerous ways during its 32 years in power. The rationale of the CPM's tenure in office has eroded. Basu bears a good share of responsibility for this.

Basu, then, is akin to Yasser Arafat, the tallest leader of the movement for an independent Palestinian state, who died in 2004. Arafat put Palestine on the world agenda -- a great historic contribution -- but signed the Oslo Peace Accords under Western pressure. These imposed a hideously unjust settlement on his people. Arafat's once-secular and -progressive Fatah has lost its credibility. The Islamicist Hamas won a plurality in a free and fair election. The CPM might similarly lose West Bengal to the Trinamool Congress.

Basu leaves a mixed legacy. The Left Front is still paying the price for its advocacy of "industrialisation at any cost." Chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee believes that industrialisation of any kind is progress. Actually, neoliberal corporate-led industrialisation lacks classical capitalism's employment and social-political potential and destroys livelihoods.

Poor people are increasingly alienated from the CPM. If it loses the 2011 West Bengal Assembly elections, Trinamool will unleash unspeakable violence to settle old scores and capture new areas. In Kerala, the Left faces an uphill battle. It was routed in the 2009 Lok Sabha elections. A nationally weakened Left could go into serious long-term decline. The Left has grown in India even while communism went into a tailspin globally after the collapse of the USSR. This was a great achievement. Its reversal would be an equally great pity. Luckily, Basu won't be there to see the unravelling and humiliation of the Left.

Finally, Jyoti Basu must be admired for standing by his atheist convictions and donating his body for medical research. Not many show such courage at a time when it's most needed -- amidst the explosion of blind faith, superstition and worship of so-called godmen and every conceivable irrationality in India.

Khaleej Times

Basu’s Middle Path

Experiments in Indian Politics
Jyoti Malhotra

20 January 2010
Russia’s recently-returned ambassador to India Vyacheslav Trubnikov tells a wonderful story about the Indian genius of political opponents maintaining private friendships, with starring roles played by Communist party patriarch Jyoti Basu, who died in Kolkata on Sunday and Atal Behari Vajpayee, Hindu nationalist leader and the right-wing hero of our times, now in the autumn of his own life, pretty much 
silenced by a stroke.
The story relates to the 1960s, when both Basu and Vajpayee were members of Parliament in Delhi and Trubnikov was a correspondent with TASS, the Soviet news agency. This is when the latter was witness to a particularly debilitating exchange of views between Basu and Vajpayee inside the House. Some time later after the debate was done, Trubnikov strolled outside the House to the cafeteria, where he found — to his utmost surprise! — Basu and Vajpayee having a cup of tea together. What happened, asked a somewhat agitated Trubnikov of the two gentlemen, wondering if he had fallen prey to an especially duplicitous vision, or, perhaps, he was just seeing things?
Not at all, reassured Vajpayee, seating Trubnikov down. You see, unlike in the Soviet Union, we don’t have a Gulag in India to which we can send dissenters. Here, we can agree to disagree, but we can’t do it too violently!
Basu, one of the greatest authors of the Indian way of life known as the Middle Path, died in his beloved Kolkata on Sunday, the subject of much adulation as well as criticism.
Vajpayee, a leader of the nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), who led his party to electoral victory twice, has been similarly accused of several ideological flip-flops in public life, but has also been feted for his ability to step out of the circle of his own beliefs and reach out to the opposition.
Jyoti Basu’s greatest achievements and defeats have been extensively chronicled in the Indian media, especially the morning after his demise, but perhaps his greatest attribute was his ability to draw people of widely conflicted beliefs together and broker 
a compromise.
Basu was the inheritor of the quintessential ‘Bengali bhadralok,’ a genteel, petty-bourgeois tradition which continues to revere both god and family values, and although Basu dispensed with the former — he willed that his body be given up to medical research, something neither Lenin, nor Deng Xiaoping, Stalin or Ho Chi Minh did — he was too well brought-up to reject 
the latter.
Bengal, the bedrock of the mother goddess cult, adopted Basu as one of its own. The Communist understood the power of religion and never denigrated it — a key difference from Communists the world over, whether in China or in the erstwhile Soviet Union.
Unlike Stalin, however, Basu was able to forge lasting coalitions with people of his own ilk, especially other Leftists. While Stalin hunted down his adversaries, including Trotsky, Basu persuaded the small Left Front parties to participate in a Left Front coalition that has not only been a formidable force in hometown Bengal for over 
30 years, but also shaped several governments in Delhi.
Unlike Deng Xiaoping, meanwhile, Basu was never able to rise above the Party line to nationalise Bengal’s Communist experiment, reinforced by its path-breaking agrarian reform. (He acknowledged later that it was a “historic blunder” that could have changed the course of Indian politics.) But when Deng cracked down on the 1989 students movements at Tiananmen square and large parts of Communist India applauded, Basu was horrified.
Basu’s place in Indian history is assured for several reasons, but perhaps his most important contribution was his ability to straddle the golden mean so that Left politics was always relevant to the people.
After the 1962 border conflict with China and the 1965 war with Pakistan, Basu felt India should initiate dialogue with both nations because it was the chauvinist elites, not the people responsible for the wars in the first place. This burning desire, to remain relevant to the ever-changing political landscape, allowed him to adapt constantly. Basu tried to persuade his unrepentant comrades in the Party not to oppose Manmohan Singh government’s decision to go ahead with the Indo-US nuclear deal, even if the US was the proverbial red rag to the Communist bull.
The Left parties rejected Basu’s advice. The consequent drubbing they received in the elections last year has meant that today, they are a pale shadow of their former selves, toothless and torn, unable to deal or bargain or strike a chord with mainstream India. That’s why Jyoti Basu’s passing is a milestone in India’s history His life was yet another manifestation of the middle path experiment that makes this country just a little bit different. Question is, whether the Left is willing to learn from it.

Financial Express Bangladesh

A relentless crusader

against communalism passes away

Md. Masum Billah

JYOTI Basu, an iconic leader, has died but his memory will never go into oblivion. His death is an irreparable loss for India and South Asia in general. His achievements will be judged by the extent to which he transformed his ideas into reality. He brought political stability to West Bengal, implemented land reforms and established a thoroughly non-communal ambience in the state. He also developed a viable and multifaceted industrial policy for the state. As chief minister of West Bengal he wooed private domestic and foreign investment for industrial development of the state. He toured extensively to allure more investments in West Bengal and he showed enviable success in his efforts. Today West Bengal witnesses industries of various sizes. He showed his pragmatic approach to political and economic issues to attract foreign investors in the face of strong criticism by his own party comrades. He was the main advocate for the initial participation of the Tatas in the Haldia Petrochemical Complex in West Bengal, which was among the first major industrial initiatives during the left rule in the state. Basu said, "We want capital, both foreign and domestic. After all, we are working in a capitalist system. Socialism is not possible here." His land reform policy has brought smiles to poor farmers of West Bengal. He distributed land to two million landless families. From a very young age, Basu started taking interest in politics. In 1936 he joined London Majlis and was elected Secretary of London Majlis in 1937. Basu returned to India on 1st January 1940 and formally joined the Communist Party in India. Basu became the secretary of Friends of Soviet Union and Anti-Fascist Writers' Association in Kolkata. As member of the Communist Party, his initial task was to maintain liaison with underground Party leaders. He was entrusted with the responsibilities of the trade union front of the Party from 1944. In that year, Bengal Assam Railroad Workers' Union was formed and Basu became its first secretary. Basu was elected to Bengal Provincial Assembly in 1946 from the Railway Workers constituency. Ratanal Brahman and Rupnarayn Rory were the other two Communists who were elected. From that day on, Basu became a popular and influential legislator. He showed how the Communists can use the legislative forums for strengthening struggles. Basu played a very active role in stormy days of 1946-47 when undivided Bengal witnessed the Tebhaga movement, workers' strikes and even communal riots. Everywhere the struggling people got Basu by their side. Joyti Basu was the secretary of the West Bengal Provincial Committee of the Communist Party from 1953 to January 1961. He was elected to the Central Committee of the Party in 1951. Though 28 Communist candidates were elected to the West Bengal assembly in 1952, the then speaker refused to accord Basu the status of the opposition leader. The recognition finally came in 1957 when Basu was re-elected from Baranagore constituency, the seat he retained till 1972 when he suffered the only electoral defeat in his political career. He emerged as an influential member of CPI(M) after the 1964 split in Communist Party of India over sharp ideological differences over the Sino-Indian war in 1962. He was a member of the Politburo from 1964 onwards. After the sweeping victory of the Left Front in 1977, Jyoti Basu became the Chief Minister of West Bengal. He was Chief Minister of West Bengal for an unprecedented five terms. In the 1980s he played a key role in convening a meeting of non-Congress chief ministers of the various Indian states in Kolkata to raise their voice against the 'step motherly attitude' of the Congress government at the centre This he did in close liaison with late NT Rama Rao of Andra Pradesh and late Ramkrishna Hedge of Krantaka. Basu's political astuteness showed up once again when he succeeded in his efforts in late 1985 to convince late Indian premier Rajiv Gandhi of the utility of forming a hill council to restore peace in strife-torn Darjeeling where the Gorkha National Liberation Front under subhas Ghising had waged a violent agitation for a separate state. The United Front Government was formed in India in 1996. The Front offered Basu to become the Prime Minister but his party CPI(M) chose not to join the government. He followed the party decision as behoves a loyal communist. Bangladesh Jatiya Sangsad paid a rich tribute to the great leader of the sub-continent Jyoti Basu by adopting an obituary reference unanimously, saying that he was a symbol of honesty, tolerance and ideology who will remain a source of inspiration for the posterity. Basu was a genuine friend of Bangladesh and he had helped the country in many ways for achieving independence and development. He played a very important role in signing the Ganges Water Agreement and Chittagong Hill Tracts Peace Treaty. 'India has lost a leader, Bangladesh has lost a well-wisher and I have lost a guardian,' commented Bangladesh Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina. The Leader of the Opposition Khaleda Zia said that this region has lost a great leader and Bangladesh a well-wisher. Dr. Manomohan Singh, the Indian Prime Minister, rightly said about Basu: 'He was a pragmatic visionary politician whose death marks the end of an era in the annals of Indian politics." The writer is Senior Manager: BRAC Education Programme, PACE. He can be reached at e-mail: mmbillah2000@yahoo.com

The New Nation, Bangladesh

Jyoti Basu’s legacy
Khaled

Former Chief Minister of West Bengal died on Saturday. Ideologically he was left communist but lost support of China after CPI (M) leaders Kanu Sanyal and Charu Mozumder led an abortive peasants' uprising at Naxalbari, West Bengal in 1967. Still he won the provincial assembly election in 1977 to become Chief Minister and held that office till 2000 A.D. In this regard, it is necessary to define who was left communist and who was right communist?Those, who among the communists, supported Chinese policy in international communist movement were called left communists and those who supported Soviet line of peaceful co-existence with the imperialists were branded as right communists. Again those who supported Naxanbari uprising were being called ultra-left communists. Thus, the Indian communists were divided into three lines-right communists, left communists and ultra-left communists. Jyoti Basu belonged to second group. The student's front of the communists was also divided into SF (Left) and SF (right).The wave of division did not spare former East Pakistan also as we found former East Pakistan Students Union (Menon Group) divided into two groups namely Bangla Chhatra Union and Biplobi Chhatra Union sometimes in late 1969. NAP (Bhasani) was split into three factions. The leaders of two factions killed any one whom they thought political rivals calling them 'class enemy'.But with the fall of Soviet Union and change of power in China from left to right, the communists of India and Bangladesh lost their identities and began to pursue the policy of sharing power with the Pro-American rightists.Jyoti Basu got a chance to become Prime Minister of India in 2004, which the Politburo of CPI (M) rejected. The former chief minister of West Bengal remarked: It is a historical mistake. It meant that he had desire to become PM of India sharing power with the rightwing Congress.Another thing is that Mr. Basu like other communists believed economic emancipation of people was possible if Marxian economy was implemented.. But he did not know that the basic principles of Marxian economy lie in Islami economy for which he and his followers are afraid of Islam as State power.

Jyoti Basu's agrarian legacy

Jyoti Basu's agrarian legacy

Harish Damodaran

Among the notable accomplishments of the ruling Left Front in West Bengal under Jyoti Basu's stewardship, the turnaround in the State's agricultural fortunes occupies a very high slot. For all its perceived failures in other spheres, this is an achievement even the regime's critics — both from the Left and the Right — might acknowledge, howsoever grudgingly.

West Bengal today is India's No. 1 producer of rice, vegetables, fish and even pineapple, litchi and cut-flowers (see Table). It was nothing like this when Jyoti Basu first became Chief Minister in June 1977. The State's rice output was then languishing at 6-7 million tonnes (mt). During the 1980s, it crossed 10 mt and, by the subsequent decade, had reached the present levels of 14.5-15 mt.

The 1990s also saw the rice story being extended to horticulture (particularly vegetables) and fisheries.

Between 1991-92 and 2007-08, while India's vegetable production more than doubled from 58.53 mt to 125.89 mt, West Bengal's jumped almost five times, from 4.68 mt to 22.46 mt. And the vegetable basket expanded beyond potatoes to brinjal, cabbage, cauliflower and okra (lady's finger).

The other segment that registered impressive growth was inland aquaculture, where the State's production, since the early 1990s, rose from less than 0.6 mt to 1.3 mt. How much credit for all this goes to the ruling dispensation?

One could argue, for instance, that the success in rice was largely courtesy the new high-yielding varieties (HVY) and private tube-well irrigation. The diffusion of both these technologies (hitherto confined to north-western India) reached their apogee in the 1980s.

The Left Front was lucky enough to be in power when it all ‘happened'.

Empowering the tiller

The step-up in the State's farm sector growth — from an average 0.7 per cent per annum in 1970-83 to 5.4 per cent over 1983-1995 — was, going by this logic, a matter of fortuitous coincidence. But then, technology does not operate in an institutional vacuum, independent of human agency. The analysis, moreover, ignores the role of incentives, which even neoclassical economic theory emphasises.

West Bengal's agricultural transformation was, at the same time, not the product of the usual ‘market' and ‘state' forces. There were no aggressive seed companies those days to push the HYVs. The State's farmers, unlike their counterparts in Punjab and Haryana, did not also benefit from significant Central investments in irrigation, rural electrification, roads, farm extension, input supply and mandi infrastructure.

The impetus to Bengal's Green Revolution came, really, from two major institutional reforms.

The first was Operation Barga, a programme that gave some 1.5 million sharecroppers or bargadars permanent use rights on the land tilled by them. Besides conferring them legal protection against eviction by landlords, the officially recorded bargadars were guaranteed three-fourths share of the crop value, alongside access to institutional credit. That was incentive enough for cultivators to invest more in their crop and in the land they tilled.

The second, complementary, initiative involved devolution of powers to village and block-level panchayats. It is these local bodies that did the job of identifying and registering individual bargadars, apart from arranging credit for sinking of tube-wells and purchase of fertilisers and HYV seeds. Further, there is evidence corroborating their role in the development of water markets. That included establishing norms and protocols for pricing and sale of water by tube-well owners to the poorer peasants.

Party as State

Needless to say, the panchayats were predominantly CPI(M)-controlled, to the point where the party machinery effectively became the ‘state'. But this was a state that seemingly delivered — at least on the agrarian front, even if the primary motive may have been to cultivate a captive rural vote bank.

Paddy yields, which ruled below two tonnes a hectare till the early 1980s, since climbed to 3.7-3.8 tonnes. Improved irrigation access led to the proportion of the State's arable area cropped more than once a year going up from 40 per cent to 80 per cent — way above the all-India average cropping intensity of 135 per cent and on par with Punjab's 190 per cent. The above process has, nevertheless, not been without limitations.

The last 10 years or so have witnessed a virtual plateauing of production as well as yields in rice, for one. West Bengal's rice revolution during Jyoti Basu's tenure was, in no small way, driven by its farmers raising a second, highly-productive boro winter crop, following the regular post-monsoon kharif paddy. That, in turn, was made feasible through irrigation by shallow tube-wells, mainly powered by diesel.

Recent studies, however, show a decline in boro cultivation in districts such as Birbhum and Murshidabad, with soaring diesel prices prompting farmers to switch over to vegetables and other high-value crops. The situation has not been helped by the State Government's under-investment in rural electrification, the effects of which were not felt when diesel was relatively cheap.

West Bengal has also not succeeded in making the transition to food-processing, to add value to the farmers' raw produce and further boost rural incomes. The State Government's naïve faith in the McKinseys and the Pepsis (rather than a Verghese Kurien) to do the trick is partially to blame here.

Preserving Jyoti Basu's agrarian legacy would require a substantial step-up in rural infrastructure investments, for which the Centre has an equal part to play, as it did during the early Green Revolution phase in Punjab and Haryana.

That, of course, calls for a shedding of partisan politics. Whether one likes it or not, the key to the country's future food security lies in Eastern India, because that's where all the water is.

The Hindu Business Line

World Socialist Web Site

Elder statesman of Indian Stalinism dies

By Kranti Kumara and Keith Jones

19 January 2010
Jyoti Basu, the reputed elder statesman of the Communist Party of India (Marxist)—India’s principal Stalinist parliamentary party—and for 23 years the Chief Minister of the east Indian state of West Bengal died Sunday. He was 95.
Although Basu retired as West Bengal’s Chief Minister in 2000, he remained a major figure in Indian politics up until the last months of his life.
Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, who is celebrated by big business as the architect of India’s post-1991 neo-liberal economic “reform” program and of a strategic partnership with US imperialism, led the entire Indian political elite in praising Basu. “I have personally had a very long association with Shri Basu,” declared Singh. “On many occasions in my career, I turned to him for his sagacious advice on all matters, whether they related to West Bengal or to issues of national importance.”
Congress Party President Sonia Gandhi, hailed Basu as a “warrior for social justice and equality … a true patriot who always put the national interest above all else.” His “superb judgment and depth of experience was valued greatly.”
Gandhi even compared Basu’s impact on her life to that of her mother-in-law, the former primer minister Indira Gandhi, and her husband, Rajiv Gandhi, also an assassinated former prime minister. “Together with Indiraji and Rajiviji, I have held [Basu] in the highest esteem.”
Gushing praise for the CPM stalwart also came from titans of industry and leaders of India’s major establishment parties, including the Hindu supremacist BJP.
Ratan Tata, the chairman of India’s most prominent multinational company, Tata Industries, proclaimed Basu “a great leader of the nation and West Bengal.”
R.P. Goenka, the retired chairman of the giant RPG group said, “India is poorer for the demise of Jyoti Basu.”
Confederation of Indian Industry President Venu Srinivasan described Basu as one India’s “tallest leaders”.
United Progressive Alliance Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee noted that Basu had played a critical role in the formation of the Congress Party-led UPA government in 2004, helping corral various regional and caste-based parties into joining with the CPM-led Left Front to bring a Congress Party-led government to office. At Basu’s urging, the CPM continued to prop up the UPA for four years even as it pursued right-wing socio-economic and foreign policies—policies that even the Stalinists conceded were little different from those pursued by the previous BJP-dominated government.
If truth be told, on four occasions in the past two decades—1989, 1991, 1996 and 2004—Basu and the CPM Politburo played an important, if not pivotal role, in the formation of India’s national governments.
In 1996 Basu almost became prime minister of a so-called United Front-Left government. His nomination was blocked when a majority of the CPM Politburo voted against participating in the government. Instead the CPM supported the United Front government from the “outside,” all the while helping formulate government policy and keeping the ramshackle United Front coalition together.
Several years later, Basu termed the 1996 Politburo vote an “historic blunder.”
Only at the party’s most recent triennial party congress, last spring, did the top leadership of the CPM bend to Basu’s entreaties that he be allowed to step down as a regular member of the Politburo, having served continuously on the CPM’s top leadership body for 45 years dating back to the party’s 1964 break-away from the CPI. Nevertheless he was prevailed upon to accept the position of “Special Invitee to the Politburo.”
Jyoti Kiran Basu was born July 8, 1914, just weeks before the outbreak of World War I, into a well-to-do, middle-class Calcutta family. His father was a doctor and his mother, the daughter of East Bengal landowners, was, as was traditional at the time, a housewife. Basu attended elite private English-language schools, ultimately obtaining a Bachelor of Arts (Honors) degree from the University of Calcutta’s Presidency College.
In 1935, Basu went to England so as to study law and become a barrister. Soon after his arrival, he became involved in the anti-British imperialist movement among Indian students and thereby came into the orbit of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB).
In his memoirs, Basu says little about his ostensible conversion from Indian nationalism to Marxism. But he does report a conversation he had after he had already begun his schooling by the Stalinist CPGB with Jawaharlal Nehru, the Congress leader and future prime minister of independent India, during one of the latter’s visits to Britain.
“I remember,” writes Basu, “telling Nehru ‘I believe in socialism.’ Nehru had replied, ‘Our first task is to earn freedom for India. Do you people agree with this?’ I replied in the affirmative and invited him to a reception function [organized by the Indian students].”
Basu was attracted to and politically trained by the CPGB in the middle and late 1930s. This was the height of the Popular Front, when the Soviet Stalinist bureaucracy, to enthusiastic applause from the CPGB leadership, was orchestrating the Moscow Trials, organizing the assassination of Leon Trotsky, and in the name of the Popular Front—a reputed anti-fascist alliance with the democratic imperialists—was strangling the European revolution, most graphically and tragically in Spain.
According to Basu, his principal teachers were CPGB General Secretary Harry Pollitt and such other notorious hand-raisers for Stalin as Rajani Palme Dutt and Clemens Dutt.
Central to the politics in which they instructed Basu were the Stalinist doctrine of “socialism in one country” and the Stalinist-Menshevik two-stage theory of revolution—the claim that in countries of belated capitalist development, such as India, the task of Marxists is to assist the national bourgeoisie in fulfilling the democratic or anti-imperialist revolution. Ignoring both the positive experience of the 1917 Russian Revolution and the crushing of the Chinese revolution by the bourgeois Kuomintang in 1927, the Stalinists insisted that the working class can not and should not challenge for leadership until the completion of the bourgeois-democratic revolution, the consolidation of capitalism, and the ultimate “maturation” of the conditions for socialism.
Basu returned to India at the beginning of 1941 and subsequently joined the Communist Party of India or CPI. Soon after his return, the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union and the CPI emerged as a staunch supporter of the British war effort, insisting that the struggle against British rule in India had to be postponed so as not disrupt Churchill’s and Roosevelt’s military alliance with the USSR. Because of its pro-war and pro-British position, the CPI, for the first time in its history, was allowed to carry out political activity in its own name. One of its first acts was to oppose the 1942 Quit India movement, a Congress Party initiated campaign of mass civil disobedience that quickly escaped the Congress leadership and became a quasi-insurrection against British rule. Tens of thousands of British troops had to be mobilized to suppress it.
With the end of the war, India was convulsed by worker and peasants struggles that were of an incipient revolutionary character. While the CPI came into the leadership of various workers and peasant struggles, it directed those under its influence to place pressure on the Congress Party and Muslim League to lead the national-democratic revolution. As a result, the national bourgeoisie was able to contain the mass upsurge, ultimately coming to a deal with British imperialism, under which it inherited the colonial state machine so as to secure the defence of its property and wealth, while the basic problems of the democratic revolution that condemned India’s toilers to subjugation—freedom from imperialist oppression, the liquidation of landlordism and casteism, and the voluntary unification of South Asia—were left to fester.
Toward the end of World War II, Basu became a railway union official and in 1946 he was elected to the one of the designated “labor” seats in the Bengal Legislative Assembly (a colonial artifice for which only about 10 percent of the male population had the right to vote.) In keeping with the CPI’s reactionary claim that the demand for Pakistan—that is, for the communal partition of the subcontinent—was progressive and represented the Muslim striving for “self determination,” Basu voted for the partition of the British province of Bengal in 1947, with half going to India and the other half to Pakistan, when the issue came before the legislature.
Basu was elected to the West Bengal state assembly in India’s first post-independence elections in 1951-52. He was named the head of the CPI’s delegation in the assembly and would remain head or de facto head of the CPI’s and then the CPM’s West Bengal state assembly party until his retirement in 2000.
By the early 1960s, the CPI was in increasing crisis. While this crisis was to a considerable extent rooted in dissension over the party leadership’s close relations with the Congress Party, even after the Congress government had removed the CPI-led government in Kerala, it was exacerbated by the 1962 Sino-Indian border war and the Sino-Soviet split.
Basu, apparently with considerable reluctance, joined a dissident walkout in 1964 and was one of the nine members elected to the CPM’s Politburo at the party’s birth. West Bengal, it need be noted, was one of the centers of the opposition to the “revisionist” CPI and Basu’s parliamentary career would likely have been seriously harmed had he not joined the new party.
The founding document of the CPM affirmed its enduring commitment to the Menshevik-Stalinist two-stage theory. It declared that sections of the Indian bourgeoisie, including elements of the big bourgeoisie, will be driven into conflict with imperialism and “compelled to come into opposition with state power” and, therefore, can “find a place in the people’s democratic front.”
CPI cadres influenced by Maoist theories of protracted peasant-based guerrilla warfare as the means of leading the democratic revolution to victory participated in the founding of the CPM. But the new party did not align itself with China, let alone embrace Maoism.
Rather the CPM took an independent, Indian nationalist direction, declaring its support for neither Moscow or Beijing. Like the pre-split CPI, it continued to focus its work on parliamentary politics and trade union struggles predicated on an acceptance of the limits of collective bargaining.
By the late 1960s West Bengal and increasingly India as whole were again rocked by great social struggles.
The Maoists broke away from the CPM to form the CPI (Marxist-Leninist), shortly after seeking to instigate a “people’s war” at Naxalbari, a remote village in northern West Bengal.
Turning their backs on the struggle to politically educate the working class and make it the political spearhead of all the toilers, the Maoists sought to incite revenge attacks on landlords and other petty oppressors. Even more politically destructively, they mounted violent attacks on their CPI and CPM opponents. These tactics only served to spread political confusion and provide the state with the pretext for wholesale repression.
The CPI and CPM, for their part, responded by aligning themselves with the Indian bourgeois state in its campaign to eliminate Naxalism. In 1967-68 and again in 1969-70, the CPM and CPI participated in two short-lived West Bengal United Front governments. These involved various self-proclaimed socialist parties and a breakaway from the Congress Party, the Bangla Congress. In both governments, Basu was deputy to a Bangla Congress Chief Minister.
Ultimately both the CPI and Bangla Congress party made their peace with Indira Gandhi and the Congress party leadership. The CPM then failed to rally parliamentary support for a CPM-led West Bengal government.
According to his Stalinist admirers, Basu’s greatest accomplishment was as architect of West Bengal’s Left Front government which first came to power in the 1977 state elections and has continued to rule the state without interruption to this day.
But the Left Front’s victory came as a shock to Basu and the CPM leadership. They had been ready to form an electoral bloc with the Janata Party—an ad hoc coalition of Indira Gandhi’s bourgeois opponents including the Hindu nationalists formed in 1977 after she had ended the two-year Emergency—for the June 1977 West Bengal elections. They were even prepared to have allow Janata nominees to contest a majority of the seats. But the negotiations fell apart when the Janata Party leadership sought to drive a harder bargain.
More fundamentally, throughout the preceding period the CPM had worked to subordinate the working class opposition to the Emergency and the Congress government to its maneuvers with various bourgeois opposition parties, helping pave the way for the Janata Party to win the 1977 elections and for the bourgeoisie to defuse the wave of social unrest that had embroiled India for most of the preceding decade. As for the Stalinist CPI, the CPM’s partners in the West Bengal Left Front, it had supported Indira Gandhi and the Congress government even as it smashed the 1974-75 railway strike and imposed the Emergency.
One further point need be made: If the Indian bourgeoisie was willing to countenance a CPM-led Left Front government, it was because the Stalinists had demonstrated their ruthless defence of the “national interest” by their support for and collaboration with the state suppression of the Naxalites in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
Under the Chief Ministership of Jyoti Basu, the West Bengal Left Front government did, in its first years in office, institute some reforms, most significantly a land reform that benefited substantial sections of the peasantry.
But when the Indian bourgeoisie abandoned its historic strategy of state-led national economic development to embrace export-led growth, the West Bengal government quickly fell in line, embracing privatization and special economic zones, legally prohibiting strikes in IT and IT-enabled industries, and otherwise pursuing pro-big business policies.
In January 2008 Basu forcefully defended his successor, the current West Bengal Chief Minister Buddadeb Bhattacharjee, after Bhattacharjee had defended his government’s pro-investor policies, including the use of police and goon violence to support the expropriation of peasants for special economic zones, by asserting that there is no alternative to capitalist industrialization.
In defending his successor and political pupil Basu declared: “Socialism is not achievable at this point of time. We have been working within the capitalist system and as such private capital has to be used while social welfare programmes by the state government would continue.”
He added: “Socialism is a far cry. Socialism is our political agenda and it was mentioned in our party document but capitalism will continue to be the compulsion for the future.” The political blindness of this Stalinist veteran becomes all the more glaring when it is realized that these words were uttered just 8 months prior to the historic breakdown of capitalism with the Wall Street meltdown of September 2008.
The accolades being heaped on Basu by the Indian establishment are, from their perspective, richly deserved.
As the principal leader of the CPM, especially during the last quarter century of his life, Basu played a pivotal role in politically suppressing the working class and in assisting the bourgeoisie in confronting numerous crises—from the shipwreck of state-led capitalist development and the political crippling of the Congress Party, through the social crisis produced by neo-liberal “reform” and the destabilizing impact of the bourgeoisie’s turn to communal and caste-ist politics as a means of containing social discontent.
In the coming weeks, the World Socialist Web Site will have more to say about Basu’s political career, because an exposure of the role Indian Stalinism has played in propping up bourgeois rule in India is pivotal for the development of a genuine revolutionary socialist party of the Indian working class.

The Guardian

Jyoti Basu obituary
Veteran communist politician who nearly became prime minister of India
Derek Brown
guardian.co.uk, Sunday 17 January 2010
Jyoti Basu, who has died aged 95, was one of the last Indian politicians whose careers started before the end of British rule. He was a stalwart of the much-fractured communist movement, but his devout socialism was tempered by pragmatism and an unerring political instinct. He was chief minister of his beloved West Bengal state for more than 23 continuous years – longer by far than any other chief minister of any Indian state.

That remarkable tenure was made possible by Basu's towering popularity, the result of seven decades of public and political service, most of it in Kolkata (or Calcutta, as it was known for most of his long life). He could have gone to the very top, as India's first communist prime minister in the mid-1990s, but his chance evaporated when his Communist Party of India (Marxist) (CPM) decided to boycott the United Front coalition, which went on to rule under HD Deve Gowda of the Janata Dal. Basu thought the boycott a calamitous mistake, but true to style he remained steadfastly loyal to his party.

Jyoti Kiran Basu (the middle name was quickly dropped) was born into a well-to-do Hindu family. His father, a respectable doctor, was later horrified by Jyoti's choice of a political career, and even more by his choice of party. But the boy's early years were comfortably uneventful. He was educated in private schools and graduated from Presidency College, Kolkata, before sailing to Britain in 1935 to study law.

There, he became fascinated by leftist theory and practice. He attended lectures by Harold Laski, and got involved with the Communist Party of Great Britain. He wanted to join the party, but was dissuaded by its general secretary Harry Pollitt, who knew the young Indian could get into hot water if he returned to the British Raj as a known communist. Still, there was plenty of political work to do in London: Basu agitated for independence, and acted as a fixer for visiting dignatories, including Jawaharlal Nehru, arranging for them to meet leaders of the Labour party and the wider socialist movement.

Having qualified as a barrister at the Middle Temple, Basu returned to Kolkata in 1940. Almost immediately, he plunged into politics, becoming an organiser for the Communist Party of India (CPI), with the task of spreading the word among railway workers. It is a measure of his industry and effectiveness that he soon became general secretary of the rail workers' union.

In the meantime, British rule in the subcontinent was passing none too peacefully to its close. Basu, briefly imprisoned in 1945, was elected to the Bengal legislative assembly in 1946, the year before independence and partition, and immediately became leader of the communist opposition to the ruling Congress party. In the rough and tumble of West Bengal politics, Basu was an astute tactician, but he remained an essentially provincial politician with little prospect of advancement.

That changed in 1964, when the CPI underwent a dramatic split. It is often represented as a schism between nationalists who staunchly supported India in the brief but disastrous border war with China in 1962, and those who believed that it had been a war between socialism and capitalism. In reality it was a left-right split, with Basu in the former camp. He became chief of the CPM in West Bengal. At the last count there were at least 15 communist parties in India, ranging from mild left to raving revolutionary, but only the CPI and the CPM really count electorally.

Under Basu, the CPM built a formidable, some would say ruthless, state apparatus. It was denied victory in the state elections of 1972, which were shamelessly rigged by the even more ruthless Congress machine, but was swept to power in 1977.

Over the following 23 years, Basu achieved much, and failed quite often too. He brought reform to a largely feudal landscape, and his redistribution of land-wealth made him electorally invincible. Even better, he brought stability to a previously chaotic state. But rural reform was paralleled by urban stagnation. Kolkata remains the most lovable of Indian cities, but communist rule has denied it the new prosperity visible in other centres such as Delhi and Mumbai (Bombay). Nowhere is the stultifying effect of the regime more evident than in the Writers' Building, a relic not just of the Raj but of the East India Company, where legions of clerks, peons and other penpushers juggle endlessly with crumbling heaps of forms, dockets, chits and files, to no apparent purpose.

Basu remained an idol to the working class and rural peasantry, but in the end became a symbol of the statism which is so despised by today's MBA-brandishing classes. Had he become prime minister in 1996, he might well have restored prestige to that much-damaged office, through his honesty and other old-fashioned virtues. On the other hand, his instinct for hands-on control might have brought India's modern boom to a shuddering halt.

A steadfastly private man, Basu married twice. His first wife died after only 16 months of marriage. He had a long and happy second marriage with Kamal who predeceased him. They both doted on their son Chandan, who survives him.

• Jyoti Basu, politician, born 8 July 1914; died 17 January 2010

SITARAM YECHURY ON J B

Aloof? A warm man full of life
SITARAM YECHURY

I first met Comrade Jyoti Basu in 1980 when we had the central executive committee meeting of the Students Federation of India (the CPM’s student arm) in Calcutta. He was in his first term as chief minister and I had to escort him to the party fraction meeting.
The first impression I had was that he had lots of questions to ask about what the younger generation was thinking and doing. It was not usual for him to look after the students’ front. MB (M. Basavapunniah) was in charge of the SFI but could not go to Calcutta for the meeting. So Jyoti Basu substituted for him.
The 1980 general elections were about to take place and the party’s “July crisis” (inner-party differences on the central leadership’s decision to withdraw support to Morarji Desai and back Charan Singh instead) was still fresh. Therefore, there were lots of questions from the students on the party line.

Although dealing with students was not his normal beat, so to speak, and nor was he a member of the central politburo team, Basu handled the questions very well. I realised then, and saw it many times over the years, that the hallmark of his style was always speaking to the point, businesslike and candidly — clearly stating that many a time we cannot determine the course of events but would have to make a choice between the available options.

We (Yechury and several younger comrades) were invited to the central committee in 1984 and took part in many meetings and inner-party discussions. But my personal interaction with Jyoti Basu happened mostly when we were travelling together abroad or in India. I used to accompany him on election campaign tours in the Hindi-speaking states. Although he used to agonise about speaking in Hindi, I must say he made a very sincere effort, much better than most of the younger comrades coming from non-Hindi states.

My first trip with him abroad was to Nepal in 1989. Since he was a state guest, his itinerary included a visit to the Pashupatinath temple. I asked him why he didn’t refuse to go. He then explained some basic facts about statecraft to me. He said that just like India took all visiting dignitaries to Rajghat irrespective of whether they agreed with Gandhi’s philosophy or not, we would have to visit this temple despite being atheists.

My major travels with him were in the late ’80s and early ’90s to the Soviet Union and China to understand the developments that eventually led to the disintegration of the USSR. These were invariably five-member delegations led by general secretary E.M.S. Namboodiripad and included MB, (Harkishen Singh) Surjeet, Jyoti Basu and myself. My role was essentially to take down notes and ask a question only when permitted to do so.

It was on one of these trips to Beijing that during dinner Jyotibabu told me, “Sitaram, you are a very dangerous person. With each of us you speak in a different language (in Bengali to Basu, in Telugu to MB, in Tamil to EMS and in Hindi to Surjeet). I do not know what tales you carry about us to each other!”

He had a wry, subtle sense of humour. I remember another occasion when we travelled to Cuba. Suddenly, after Jyotibabu had retired for the day, there was a message that “El Commandante” wanted to meet us. Reluctantly, he dressed up and we went to meet Fidel Castro just before midnight. The meeting lasted more than an hour and a half. Fidel was asking a string of questions such as how much coal India produced, how much steel, how much cement, et cetera, et cetera. Jyotibabu muttered under his breath to me in Bengali, “Eki aamar interview nichchhe na ki (Is he taking my interview or what)?” Then Fidel turned to me and said: “At his age, I don’t expect him to know all these figures. But as a young man, at least you should know them....”


As a measure of respect for Jyoti Basu, Fidel emerged unexpectedly at the airport to see us off. The entire staff was completely taken aback with Fidel’s sudden
appearance. Jyotibabu once again turned to me and whispered in Bengali: “Revolution hoye koto bochhor holo (How many years since the revolution took
place)?”
I replied: “Chauteesh (thirty-four).”
Pat came his reply: “Ekhono guerrilla tactics bholeni (He still hasn’t forgotten his guerrilla tactics).”

On our way back from Havana, we had to spend some time in Madrid. Jyoti Basu was to be a state guest, not me. Our ambassador asked him in advance whether he wanted to do anything special in Madrid. Jyotibabu in turn asked me and I suggested that we must see Picasso’s Guernica. He conveyed that to the ambassador.
When we reached Madrid, Jyotibabu wasn’t feeling well and did not feel up to driving to the gallery though it was specially kept open for his visit. But he wanted me to go. When I told him the gallery had made an exception only for him, he said: “How will they know who is Jyoti Basu? Just go and see it.”

In Cuba, whether it was at the beach of Valadero or visiting the pubs frequented by Ernest Hemingway or attending the cultural shows Cuba is famous for, the very human Basu would thoroughly enjoy everything that life had to offer. For all his appearance of being aloof, he was an incredibly warm human being. Jyoti Basu proved through his long life of dedication that it is only a good human being who can be a good communist, and only if you love and live life fully can you contribute to the struggle for the emancipation of humanity.

(As told to Manini Chatterjee)
Sitaram Yechury is a CPM politburo member and Rajya Sabha MP from Bengal