It was an irreparable damage: Buddha on Singur in his book
Times of India | 9 August 2024
Kolkata: Bhattacharjee tried to move his state away from the falling returns of subsistence agriculture and use surplus skilled manpower to build a robust growth path through industries. He also okayed contract farming and invited private investments in agricultural infrastructure (for processing and packaging farm produce and increasing production).Governments in the state and the Centre took all these cues much later.
Bhattacharjee also wanted his party to come out of its over-dependence on crippling bandhs and, instead, create a positive work culture. And, unlike many of his CPM colleagues, he genuinely strived to break his party’s hegemony in educational institutions and public life. In all these, as much as in everything else, his efforts to steer the CPM in a different direction may have come too late.
It would, however, be a mistake to measure Bhattacharjee’s popularity only by votes. Yes, he lost in his own assembly constituency, Jadavpur, in 2011 when his party lost office. But many credit him — and his poll rally in evidently frail health — for his party winning back the seat five years later (though it lost Jadavpur in 2021).
In an age when self-aggrandisement is the norm among politicians, he earned respect — if not votes — by going into a retired life fit for both a Bengali bhadralok and a communist apparatchik. Bengal may have voted him out of office but, in that forced retirement, it discovered in him one more of its icons: a frail old man, wearing a pyjama, happy being away from public glare, leading a peaceful, retired life that would be the envy of many richer in wealth.
All this while, he wrote two books — Phire Dekha and Phire Dekha II — where he made observations on his tenure as CM, role of opposition and also role of the governor. Bhattacharjee, while reflecting on Singur-Nandigram days leading to the Tatas moving out of Bengal, wrote: “It was an irreparable damage to the state. Sometimes I wonder where I made the mistake. Was it land acquisition itself or was it the process of land acquisition? Was I too soft on the opposition? We will take lessons from that experience.”
Bengalis may not have found him fit for CM’s office but his pottering around a modest govt flat — in a not-too-well-to-do Palm Avenue neighbourhood after retirement — reassured them: politics was not all knavery and a politician could also be a bhadralok.