Comrade Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee is no more. His party — the CPI(M) — had taught him to be a fighter and to continue fighting until the last breath. This is exactly what he did: in his role as an organiser in the youth movement, as a party leader and as an administrator in the West Bengal government.
He fought — not like a dogged bull mindlessly banging a formidable wall, but like a seed fighting to sprout through the hard ground. That’s how he fought the death too, defeating it on more than one occasion, in a manner that would have inspired his beloved author Gabriel García Márquez to set the plot of his novel.
Bhattacharjee left the Chief Minister’s Office in 2011, and more than a decade has passed since then. A decade is a lot in the life of an individual and it’s even more for a state and its people. Young boys and girls, with eyes shining with the dreams shown by the Left Front, are no longer in the state. They are in Bengaluru, Pune, Gurgaon, Hyderabad and Chennai, writing computer codes and programmes. They are in Gujarat, Delhi, Chennai and Kerala sweating in the factories. This is one of the biggest realities of this decade — a decade of the miscarriage of the dreams of an entire generation.
This dream was based on the premise that the development of society and economy with primarily agrarian base and a burgeoning youth population needs to be pushed forward through labour-intensive investment industrial and services. The Left Front under the leadership of Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee sought to undertake this herculean task with the limits that a Communist Party was running a state government. The last 13 odd years have shown the audacity of the dream, as well as its absolute necessity. With every passing year, this is becoming more and more relevant in the signs and slogans of the students and youth of the state.
Comrade Buddhadeb was related to iconic poet Sukanta Bhattacharya, who along with Kavi Nazrul gave voice to the trials, tribulations, dreams and frustrations of the Bengalis during the colonial period. In one of his famous poems Sukanta writes:
“O the Great Life, no poetry any more, Bring on the hard harsh prose today, Let the jingle reared in verse disappear, Strike with the hard hammer of prose instead.”
Unlike the advice of his uncle Sukanta, Comrade Buddhadeb “never sent poetry on leave”. However, he never desisted from striking the “prosaic earth” with the “hammer of prose”. If audacity and necessity defined the policies of the Left Front government; none of it was disjunct from the poetry of life and people.
At the peak of the obnoxious and shameful ganging up of opportunist forces from across the political spectrum; in a rather amusing manner the corporate media had begun to coin the term “Brand Buddha”. The sinister motive behind this coinage was coated with the portrayal of Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee as someone who stood for development and growth, unlike his party which stood for archaic vision. After more than a decade, the real intentions of this coinage are in front of all of us. At one level, it’s obvious that the ploy was to create a wedge between Buddhadeb, the man, and the party, and the movement – thereby isolating one from the another. At a more obnoxious level, this tried to whitewash the concrete fact that the Communists have always stood for growth and development of productive forces — with Operation Barga, the land reform, being a necessity at one particular juncture and similarly push towards industrialisation being a necessity at another juncture.
Comrade Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee is no more. However, the contradictions that he was seeking to resolve are becoming more alive with every passing day, with every passing moment. We, the generation, who have and are bearing the brunt of these contradictions in the endless search for home are the breathing testimonies of the same. Comrade Buddhadeb and his party tried to travel on an untravelled path. That journey isn’t over. In fact, the caravan is getting stronger as the contradictions sharpen. It’s in this caravan that he shall continue to be alive. It’s in this caravan that Buddha shall continue to smile.
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