The upright, honest man who breathed life into CPM after USSR's collapse
Times of India | 9 August 2024
Bhattacharjee with Jyoti Basu in KolkataBhattacharjee with Jyoti Basu in Kolkata12 KOLKATA: Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee breathed life into the CPM when the Left ideology was on retreat after the Soviet debacle. Bhattacharjee detected the fault lines in the hegemonic party structure and took a liberal Left course with the party dynamics pegged on Bengal's development. His honesty was the CPM's selling point.
Unlike many in his party, Bhattacharjee had many ups and downs in CPM.He had walked out of Jyoti Basu cabinet in 1993 and made it to the CM's chair seven years later.
He resigned from the govt over an instance of his stand-off with a senior state bureaucrat. But he continued in the party.
Few months later, Bhattacharjee was re-inducted in the cabinet. After the 1996 assembly polls, he was handed over the home (police) department and in 1999, he was elevated to deputy CM. In 2000, Jyoti Basu retired and Bhattacharjee was sworn in as CM.
Bhattacharjee nursed a dream to put Bengal back on the industry map and went a whole hog chasing it. It gave hope to people that can't be overlooked citing Singur and Nandigram. In fact, the LF govt could fetch substantial investments during his tenure. IT majors Wipro and Infosys came to Bengal during his time and Sector V turned into a bustling place. Mega manufacturers also started setting shops in the Kharagpur before auto-maker Tata Motors came to Singur.
But all these called for a drastic change in party mindset that was a difficult task. Bhattacharjee made use of glasnost within party circles. Old guards called him the Gorbachev of Bengal. But that didn't deter him from his resolve because his priority was to create jobs for the educated youth, set up new education centres with private investment. To do it, Bhattacharjee reintroduced English from class I more than two decades after the Left had banished the language from primary level.
CPM always found him a difficult man to handle. The party couldn't dump him either. He was the crowd puller in CPM rallies.
Party bosses in Delhi couldn't hold him back when Bhattacharjee told the trade union leaders on one occasion that the Bharat Bandh call wouldn't apply to Bengal because people observe Bhasa Diwas on that day. Even when out of power, Bhattacharjee showed his defiance in run up to the 2016 assembly polls when Congress-CPM had fielded jote candidates in Bengal. The CPM leader didn't hesitate to share dais with Rahul Gandhi at Park Circus as part of a rally when Left leaders dithered to announce the Congress-CPM alliance.
Bhattacharjee perhaps got a little tired fighting too many battles within and outside. But he was a regular at Alimuddin Street till early 2019. His last public appearance was at the Brigade on Feb 4, 2019.