Our Jyoti Babu

For the past couple of days there have been a deluge of Jyoti Basu memoirs and anecdotes splashed across newspapers and screens. Like millions, I did not have an opportunity to meet the communist leader, who was chief minister of our state for 23 long years. But I met hundreds of people who were meticulously kept out of the purview of the class that Basu stood for.

He was born an elite and died a communist despite being among the very few Indians picking up legal nuances in England or heading a flourishing state for close to quarter century. As a barrister, he could have excelled in the profession like no other but his choice to serve people made him immortal in this country. When he breathed his last on January 17, he left behind a legacy of communism theorised by Marx — something not much in practice in India some seven decades ago when the young man inclined towards it.

From the bookshelves, Basu took out Marx on the streets of Calcutta and the dusty roads of rural Bengal. In the process, he abolished English at primary level of education, got more hawkers on pavements, helped workers fight against factory-owners, virtually banished industrialists to set up shops in other states, forced people to hit the streets during working hours, and most importantly, at the dawn of cyber century, he turned down a central plea in introducing computers in government offices.

During the first decade since his ascent to the chief minister’s chair, his major contribution was land reforms — a step still followed and feted by the rest of India. I was a kid then living in a village in Burdwan district, known as Bengal’s rice bowl. Land reforms was not the subject I used to read in St Jude’s School, an English-medium school preferred by my parents to a Bengali-medium one, but I could fathom from the rallies attended by hundreds of farmers that some changes had taken place in the pockets not touched by the Congress, the main national party which just celebrated its centenary then, all those years.

My parents had foresight; at least they knew the perils of avoiding the lingua franca in a time when the world has started shrinking. Their idea was simple: knowledge would spread fast and efficiency in English was the only way to lead a decent life of an educated man. Later, when I was a student of RKM, Narendrapur, during the early ’90s, computer class was made compulsory for us at secondary level. My batchmates at Barasat PCS Govt High School — where I studied for two years before going to RKM — were not so fortunate.

The huge walls of Narendrapur prevented us from going outside except five times a year. Thanks to Basu and his idea to promote have-nots, I learnt how to make safe passage amid hawkers screaming at Sealdah on my way home during vacations; but we never felt the heat of a Bengal bandh or rail blockades or industrial strikes or chakka jams! All these hurdles to economic prosperity I had to face after coming out of RKM. It was a shocking yet great experience. Later, at Santiniketan when I was studying English literature there, the skeleton of Jyoti Basu’s education policy was open in front of me. At our hostel, only a few among 300-odd inmates could write or speak English fluently. Of course, most of them had no privilege to study in private English-medium schools in Calcutta or in the hills of Darjeeling. Too much of Bengali robbed them of the rights to learn the Queen’s language.

Calcutta is now a dying city — once the most important citadel of power next only to London during the days of Raj —while relatively new ones like Bangalore and Pune are way ahead. Forget the Mumbai work culture, lazy Calcuttans can’t be compared to the hard-working people from Bihar. We still live in the past built either by the British or by Bidhan Chandra Roy. Basu could not conceptualise anything like Roy’s Salt Lake; despite in power for 23 years he could but only ring the death knell for industrial units in Durgapur, Roy’s dream city. Bengal still produces the best of brains in the country, but the state probably records the maximum number of brain-drains. Who wants to work in an IT company here and face the wrath of muscle-flexing CITU members nurtured by none other than the departed soul for whom tears flowed on the potholed Calcutta roads this morning? Industries have started bidding good-bye to Calcutta since the ’80s — the last major one being the exit of Nano in 2008 — as there is hardly any policy to hold them together.

Till death, Basu was the leader of the masses, the party in particular. But as the head of Bengal, he hardly did anything for it to prosper but prepare a solid base for the red brigade to stay on for maybe another quarter century.

©Supratim Pal, 2010