The Week Magazine, January 19th, 1997

A missed opportunity

HAD eight more men thought like Jyoti Basu did, he would have been the Prime Minister of India. Even Basu's critics conceded that it wasn't personal ambition that propelled him, but a genuine conviction that the left alone could present a credible and stable alternative to the Congress and the BJP. Had the central committee voted with Basu, Indian communists would have made history. In Kerala in the 1950s they become the first communists in the world to have been willingly given power by others.
Friends like Mulayam Singh Yadav of the Samajwadi Party and Chandrababu Naidu of the Telugu Desam were the keenest that Basu don the mantle, though Karunanidhi was all along rooting for the more reluctant V.P. Singh. First Surjeet and Basu successfully persuaded the politburo, packed with their friends, to endorse the view that the CPI(M) could head a non-Congress secular government. The proposal then had to be endorsed by the central committee which according to the party constitution is "the highest authority of the party between two all-India party congresses".

On May 13, the central committee met and general secretary Harkishen Singh Surjeet made his presentation. But the wet blanket was ready, most of the southern members fed on the harder EMS line having come prepared. The attack was said to be bitter, laced with favourite communist abuses like 'capitalist-roaders'a dn 'revisionists'. Finally when the vote was taken, 20 voted in favour of Surjeet and Basu and 35 against. Surjeet offered to resign his general secretaryship, but was asked to remain in his post as long as the central committee, which had elected him, desired.
Basu retired hurt ot Banga Bhavan, the West Bengal guest house, where Janata Dal and other party leaders called on him. Surjeet, part of a gang of leaders which was later to concretise as a steering committee, formally conveyed the central committee decision to them. It was then that virtually every non-Congress, non-BJP leader, including V.P Singh, told him how wrong the central committee was. Meanwhile, the 'friendly leaders' were also phoning up the hardline leaders in the central committee.

The politburo then decided to request the central committee to reconsider its decision, something unprecedented in the party. So on May 14 the committee met in the afternoon where Surjeet conveyed the feelings of friendly parties. He would win a few more hearts, but not enough to properl Basu to prime ministership or any CPI(M) leader into the cabinet room. The margin now fell to 11 from the 15 the previous day.
Another version was the Surjeet did not win any hearts at the second meeting. A few members had left the city on may13 and could not attend the second meeting. Late in theevening, Prakash karat read out a brief resolution-perhaps the most historic one after the party split of the sixties.
Would history have changed had a handful of men voted the other way? Opponents of the Basu line didi not think so. It would have been unstabler than Deve Gowda's, they said.
For one, Gowda has been running the United Front government with a lot of political tact which neither Basu nor any CPI(M) leader is trained to have. All along kGowda had an understanding with Narasimha Rao, having called on him more than 25 times. Certinly, Basu could not have done this and even if the did, the party would have called him all the favourite communist epithets and thrown him our more mercilessly than it did Nripen Chakravorty of Trupura.
Basu has been heading a coalition cabiner for 20 years, but it is one in which the CPI(M) is the paramount power and the partners are all letists and have similar ideologies and progarmmes.
The very fact that the common minimum programme of the United Front did not reflect much of the CPI(M) or the leftist line showed that the majority would have disagreed with Basu in the cabinet room. The situation would have been something similar to the one faced by another man who ruled India from Calcutta exactly two centuries ago-Warren Hastings who was outvoted every day in his council till he got all his opponents recalled.
That Basu had not been able to sell his line even to his own central committee showed that he could not have been any more successful in the cabinet room. For nearly two years since the Chandigarh Congress, the young turks in the central committee have been impeding his moves.
For instance, Basu desired to groom his barrister-fried Somnath Chatterjee as his successor in West Bengal and had tried to get him into the state committee. But the young turks checkmated the move and later they even forced him to induct Basu-baiter Buddhadev Bhattacharjee as home minister of West Bengal.

CPI(M) leaders insisted that the struggle was not a personality clash, but had more to do with the lines each group espoused. The young turks were of a harder core and were contemptuous of the parliamentarism of the elders. In fact, they ensured the sidelining to Saifuddin Chowdhary, formerly the party's deputy leader in Parliament and even denied him the ticket in the 1996 Lok Sabha election.
At the Chandigarh congress, the younger leaders had struck forcefully at what they called 'growing parliamentary opportunism and bourgeois vices which have crept into the party". In fact,immediately after the election, the party had even launchee a rectification campaign.
Now Basu's outburst would only show that the fight is not yet over. There is a lot more spirit left in the old man who, his admirers feel, will live to fight another day.

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