Former West Bengal chief minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharya breathed his last earlier today at his Kolkata residence, but history will ironically remember him as the last Communist chief minister of a state where the Left held sway for 34 years.
Born in a scholarly family and being a prolific writer himself, Bhattacharya was the quintessential ‘bhadralok’ (a colloquial Bengali term for ‘a refined gentleman’) who sought to bring about change not just in West Bengal but also in Left politics.
Much like former Soviet Union president Mikhail Gorbachev, Bhattacharya took it upon himself to revive West Bengal’s economy and shed the state’s anti-industry image.
Gorbachev sought to reform the Communist Party through the concepts of ‘glasnost’ (openness) and ‘perestroika’ (change), but the reforms he started to revive the country’s stagnant economy and to relax the repressive regime inadvertently set off a chain of events which brought about the end of Communism in Europe, and the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. In 1990, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his role in ending the Cold War.
Bhattacharya, too, focused on reviving West Bengal’s economy through industrialisation – a strict no-no in Communist parlance and ideology. He actively wooed industrialists to set up business in the state to generate jobs for the youth. His public denouncement of the CITU, the CPI(M)'s trade union wing, for frequent strikes too earned him many admirers, and contributed to his image of a progressive and clean leader. Bhattacharya returned as the chief minister in 2006, with the Left Front winning 235 of the 294 seats in the West Bengal assembly.
The Singur land acquisition row
In 2006, the then Tata Group chairman Ratan Tata announced the Tata Nano project - to manufacture the world’s cheapest car, at Rs 1 lakh. The West Bengal government led by Bhattacharya promised to give Tata nearly 1,000 acres of land needed for the plant. Singur was chosen as the site and the cars were scheduled to roll out by 2008.
But, all hell broke loose as the government started acquiring the land under the Land Acquisition Act of 1894. Thousands of farmers came out in protest, alleging their agricultural land was illegally converted into industrial property.
Sensing a political opportunity, Trinamool Congress (TMC) supremo Mamata Banerjee, who had not been able to dent the Left’s vote-bank in the assembly polls, took up the cause of the farmers. She even went on a hunger strike on the Singur issue, and called it off only after then president A.P.J. Abdul Kalam and prime minister Manmohan Singh appealed to her. Bhattacharya’s efforts to convince Banerjee through talks failed.
The CPI(M) stalwart failed to foresee the dangers ahead in a constituency which had sided with the TMC in the 2006 assembly polls at a time when the popularity of the Left Front was at its peak. The movement in Singur also got support from civil rights activists like Medha Patkar, and authors Arundhati Roy and Mahasweta Devi.
By 2008, Tata suspended work at Singur, citing protests and violence. Though the state government decided to give the farmers an improved compensation package, Tata exited the state later that year, taking the Nano project to Gujarat.
The Nandigram fiasco
Close on the heels of the Singur Nano plant, the Left government also declared the setting up of a Special Economic zone in Nandigram in Purba Medinipur district in the state, with Indonesian conglomerate Salim Group, for a 4,000-acre chemical hub. Protests broke out, with villagers clashing with CPI(M) workers on January 2, 2007, resulting in six deaths. Villagers blocked the area earmarked for the SEZ.
On March 14, Bhattacharya ordered around 2,500 cops to enter Nandigram, which left 14 people dead allegedly in police firing. Trinamool Congress proved to be the beneficiary again, as the Left government lost credibility and Banerjee emerged as the champion of the masses.
The two incidents dealt a body blow not only to the Left parties in West Bengal but also to Bhattacharya’s popularity.
Abdur Rezzak Mollah, who was the minister for land and land reforms in the Left Front government from 1977 to 2011, in an interaction with Caravan magazine in 2016, said that the top leadership of the CPI(M), including Bhattacharyya, was “out of touch” with the ground reality. The party expelled Mollah in 2014 for his criticism of the land policies, and he joined the TMC in 2016.
Mollah’s assessment holds water, as the common refrain in the political circles was that though Bhattacharya the ‘bhadralok’ played a crucial role in promoting the Bengali art and culture, he lacked the “tact and guile” of his predecessor Jyoti Basu.
It culminated in the rout of the Left Front in the 2011 assembly elections, with the alliance led by the TMC winning a whopping 227 seats, thus ending the Left’s 34-year-old reign in the state.