KOLKATA: Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee, 80, the first Left Front CM who wanted to give an industry- and investor-friendly face to Bengal and his party, passed away around 8.20 am on Thursday at his modest Palm Avenue flat in Kolkata following a cardiac arrest. He was 80 and is survived by wife Meera and son Suchetan.
Bhattacharjee, a man of many apparent contradictions, will above all be remembered for being a communist CM who wanted to take his state to a path of industrial growth without corruption and kickbacks.It was probably inevitable that he would be misunderstood, both as a Marxist at CPM’s Alimuddin Street HQ and as an administrator at the Writers’ Buildings headquarters. The consequence, too, was inevitable: his 11 years in the CM’s office ended with CPM’s electoral defeat in 2011 from which it is yet to recover in 2024. Redemption, though, has followed much quicker than anyone, including Bhattacharjee himself, expected.
His efforts to make Bengal a hub for industrialists may have failed both administratively and politically; but it is a measure of his success that every party in Bengal now has to swear by industrialisation. tnn
Kolkata: Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee, 80, the first Left Front CM who wanted to give an industry- and investor-friendly face to Bengal and his party, passed away around 8.20 am on Thursday at his modest Palm Avenue flat in Kolkata following a cardiac arrest. He was 80 and is survived by wife Meera and son Suchetan.
Bhattacharjee, a man of many apparent contradictions, will above all be remembered for being a communist CM who wanted to take his state to a path of industrial growth without corruption and kickbacks. It was probably inevitable that he would be misunderstood, both as a Marxist at CPM’s Alimuddin Street HQ and as an administrator at the Writers’ Buildings headquarters. The consequence, too, was inevitable: his 11 years in the CM’s office ended with CPM’s electoral defeat in 2011 from which it is yet to recover in 2024. Redemption, though, has followed much quicker than anyone, including Bhattacharjee himself, expected.
His efforts to make Bengal a hub for industrialists may have failed both administratively and politically; but it is a measure of his success that every party in Bengal now has to swear by industrialisation.
A neta whose popularity can’t be measured by votes
It is a measure of Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee’s success that every party in Bengal now has to swear by industrialisation and make it a point to present itself as an industry-friendly entity wooing investors. In both his failures and redemption, Bhattacharjee can claim kinship with the original Perestroika man of communism: Mikhail Gorbachev. The Soviet leader tried to restructure his nation and his party but, ultimately, presided over the USSR’s break-up. And, much like Bhattacharjee, Gorbachev found solace in history being much mellower in judging his efforts than the people he once led. And, for both, redemption came before their death.
Bhattacharjee tried to move his state away from the falling returns of subsistence agriculture and use the 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). Govts 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 the crippling bandhs and, instead, create a positive work culture. And, unlike many of his CPM colleagues, Bhattacharjee 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 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 rally in evidently frail health — for his party winning back the prestigious seat five years later (though it lost Jadavpur again in 2021). And, 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, Bengal 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 some observations on his tenure as CM, the role of the opposition and also the role of the governor. Bhattacharjee, while reflecting on the 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 the chief minister’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.
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