January 22, 2010 (From my weekly syndicated column which is carried in rediff.com, 'The Kashmir Times', 'The Assam Tribune', 'Lokmat', 'Madhyamam', 'Rashtriya Sahara', 'Navhind Times', 'Rajasthan Patrika', 'Deshbandhu', 'Kalantar' and other papers.)

Jyoti Basu was the odd man out or an exception to the rule in many contexts, which made him unique. Unlike other distinguished Communist leaders like SA Dange, EMS Namboodiripad, PC Joshi, BT Ranadive, Gangadhar Adhikari, P Sundarayya and AK Gopalan, he was neither a theoretician nor a mass leader known for his grassroots work among workers and peasants. Nor was he an organisation man in the mould of Harkishan Singh Surjeet, the last general secretary of the Communist Party (Marxist), who primarily concerned himself in national-level party matters, or Pramode Dasgupta, who built and controlled the CPM’s organisational machine in West Bengal.

Rather, Basu was a party pragmatist with a managerial style who concentrated on the public side of CPM politics and on building social coalitions that would bring it to power. No other leader in the world has equalled his success in being elected to run a major territorial-political entity with an 80 million-strong population continuously for 23 years. Basu could have stayed on as CM beyond 2000 if he wanted to.

Basu’s greatest acumen lay in electoral politics, administration and governance. In 1964, Basu was exceptional in being the sole individual among his peers who came from privileged backgrounds and were educated in Europe, who chose to go with the CPM when the undivided Communist Party split. Most such people, including Adhikari, Indrajeet Gupta, Hiren Mukherjee, and Nikhil Chakravartty stayed with the CPI, which retained most party intellectuals.

Even more significantly, Basu stoically submitted himself to the organisational hegemony of the party machine. Basu was an unbending party loyalist, who believed in orthodox forms of discipline and “democratic centralism”—based on concentric circles of authority within the party, and the norm that once a decision has been taken after internal debate, party members must follow it unquestioningly.

In 1996, Basu became uniquely famous as “the best Prime Minister India never had” when the CPM Central Committee decided that he shouldn’t accept the United Front’s offer of that post to him. The decision was driven by a narrow consideration: with its 51 MPs, the Left wouldn’t be able to control the Front. But this meant forfeiting great advantages, including prestige and greater acceptability for the Left. Arguably, this might have delayed or prevented the BJP’s rise to national power two years later. Ironically, those in the CPM who were most vocal in opposing Basu ended up backing Mayawati as the Third Front’s Prime Ministerial candidate!

Basu was a pragmatist in another sense. Within the options made available to him by the CPM on a particular issue, he would choose the simplest, most practical and least radical one so it wouldn’t disturb the status quo too much and carry with it both privileged industrialists—whom his party has been wooing for investment—, and poor people, among whom it had its roots.

This was evident in the manner in which the Left approached land reform in West Bengal. In place of a radical transfer of land ownership to the tiller and the landless, which it implemented in the 1950s in Kerala, it opted in West Bengal for Operation Barga in the late 1970s, which registered tenants and gave them a 75-percent harvest share if they used their own inputs.

Jyoti Basu went to great lengths to reassure private capital of friendly treatment. He said in his first term as Chief Minister: “Let the capitalists understand us. We shall also try to understand their point of view.” He favoured handing over some of West Bengal’s many sick industrial units to multinationals (e.g., Britannia Industries), and wanted the West Bengal Electronics Development Corporation to form a joint venture with Philips. No wonder he developed a close rapport with several industrial magnates, including Messrs Dhirubhai Ambani, Ratan Tata and RP Goenka.

Basu’s popularity in Bengal was also rooted in his strong Bhadralok upper-class, upper-caste identity. This was reassuring to the elite, which continues to grossly dominate the state’s economic, social and political life. But this came at a price: exclusion of Dalits, Adivasis and OBCs—and even Muslims, who form one-fourth of the state’s population—from governance and political representation. In this respect, West Bengal lags behind many other states. It has slipped particularly badly over the past decade in social development indicators.

The rate of decline in rural poverty has halved in West Bengal since 1994. Worse, according to National Sample Survey, “the percentage of rural households not getting enough food every day in some months of the year” is highest in West Bengal (10.6 percent), worse than in Orissa (4.8). The state has 9.61 lakh school dropouts in the 6-14 age group, higher than Bihar’s 6.96 lakhs. Of India’s 24 districts which have more than 50,000 out-of-school children, nine are in West Bengal.

The Left Front’s health and education record is equally unflattering. As the official Human Development Report (2004) admits, spending on and access to health services have stagnated. Some indicators—immunisation, antenatal care, women’s nutrition, and doctors and hospital beds per one-lakh people—are below national average. West Bengal has not opened a single new primary health centre in a decade. It has the lowest rate of generating work under the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act—a mere 14 person-days per poor family, against the national average of 43, in place of the promised 100 days a year.

India’s worst recent food riots have occurred in West Bengal—especially in poor districts like Purulia, Bankura and Birbhum—when starving people raided the godowns of dishonest ration-shop owners, all CPM members. Purulia is one of India’s poorest districts—with 78 percent of its people below the poverty line. After 32 years of Left Front rule, more than 40 percent of West Bengal’s poor don’t have ration cards. Meanwhile, some of the gains of Operation Barga are eroding. Seventeen percent of registered tenants have lost their land and another 27 percent are in insecure possession.

This dismal record speaks to the repeated failure of the Left Front to do its elementary duty by the poor and an erosion of the rationale of the CPM’s tenure in power. Although Basu wasn’t politically active in the last few years, he bears a share of responsibility for this record.

Basu, then, is akin to Yasser Arafat, the tallest leader of the movement for a sovereign, independent Palestinian state, who died in 2004. Basu brought the CPM close to the mainstream Arafat put the Palestinian issue on the global agenda—a great historic contribution. But he signed the Oslo peace accords which imposed a hideously skewed and grotesquely unjust settlement on his people. Arafat’s once-secular and progressive Fatah suffered a loss of its credibility and support and yielded place to the Islamicist Hamas group. Hamas won a plurality in a free and fair election. There’s a growing danger that the CPM will lose West Bengal to the Trinamool Congress in the same way.

Basu leaves a mixed legacy. The Left Front is on the defensive and is still paying the price for its advocacy of “industrialisation-at-any-cost”. Chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee has a crude, reductionist, dogmatic view of history, which sees industrialisation of any kind as the sole measure of progress. He fails to understand that neoliberal corporate-led industrialisation lacks the employment and social-political potential of classical capitalism. Rather, it leads to the destruction of livelihoods. Ordinary people, in particular the poor, are increasingly getting alienated from the CPM.

If the CPM loses the 2011 Assembly elections in West Bengal, it will suffer a huge national setback. In the state itself, Trinamool will unleash unspeakable violence against it to settle old scores and capture new areas. In Kerala, the Left faces an uphill battle, as its rout in the 2009 Lok Sabha elections suggests. The Left has failed to grow in the Hindi heartland.

A nationally weakened Left could go into serious long-term decline. The Left has grown in India even while Communism went into a tailspin globally after the collapse of the USSR. This was a great achievement for two decades. Its reversal would be an equally great pity.

Luckily, Jyoti Basu won’t live to see the unravelling and humiliation of the Left. Finally, he must be admired for standing by his atheist convictions and donating his body for medical research. Not many people show such courage at a time when it’s most needed—amidst the explosion of blind faith, superstition and worship of godmen and every conceivable irrationality in India.