Veteran Communist leader and former West Bengal Chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee was fond of quoting a phrase from Charles Dickens’s ‘A Tale of Two Cities’. “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times…” It was a phrase he repeated at almost every public event he attended as Chief Minister for his two terms, 2001 to 2011.
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This was not only because he understood the importance of the hope and aspirations of the people of his State – particularly the young generation. As the world settled into the first decade of the new millennium, he became the Chief Minister in 2000 when he was 56. He moved quickly to initiate changes as he dreamt of changing the status quo, and deliver the people of West Bengal from the stagnation they were in.
Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee (1944-2024)
After the Left Front was ousted from power after three decades in 2011 by Mamata Banerjee, Bhattacharjee remained in public life till 2016. His failing health had confined him to his Palm Avenue residence in Kolkata for the past eight years. He passed away on Thursday ( August 8) at 80.
Bhattacharjee was the last of the great Communist leaders from West Bengal, a quintessential Bhadralok, who loved to read poetry, Kafka and Marquez. Honest and transparent, he dreamt of transforming West Bengal from an industry-starved to an industry-resurgent State. At his numerous public meetings, he kept harping on one topic - jobs for the youth. “There are thousands of students who are coming out of our colleges and what will we offer them? They want work. Will they have to go out of the State?” he would ask.
But things were far from easy. As Chief Minister he had to grapple with the difficult task of land acquisition for industrial purposes and met with violent resistance in Singur (Hooghly district) and Nandigram (Purba Medinipur). Even though his dream failed to materlise, he did not budge from his stand – that industrial development was of utmost importance in the State and the need of the hour. While admitting some lapses in the way the land acquisition process was initiated, he was convinced that land reforms that formed the basis of the Left rule in the early decades would not sustain for much longer.“ ‘Krishi amader Bhitti, Shipla amader Bhabishyat ‘( Agriculture remains our core, but industry is our future),” Bhattachrjee emphasised.
In the tumultuous time of the seventh Left Front government ( 2006-11) when a ‘rainbow alliance’ of the Opposition led by Trinamool Congress would make governance difficult and ultra Left extremism raised its head in the State’s Jangalmahal ( south western) region, and the Darjeeling hills were in flames over agitation for a separate State, Bhattacharjee would rely on political solutions rather than use brute force. “We will fight them politically,” he would say.
In his memoirs Phire Dekha II ( Looking back), he touches on these questions. “Sometimes I wonder where I made the mistake. Was it land acquisition itself or was the process of land acquisition that was wrong? Was I too soft on the Opposition? We will take the lesson from that experience,” he wrote.
Born in 1944 in north Kolkata, Bhattacharjee graduated in Bengali (Hons) from the city’s reputed Presidency College (now Presidency University). From a very early age he became associated with the Communist movement and became the state secretary of the Democratic Youth Federation of India, the youth wing of the Communist Party of India ( Marxist). He became the Minister of Information and Public Outreach in the first Left Front government in 1977. Except for a five-year gap (1982 to 1987) when he lost the Assembly polls, Bhattacharjee remained one of the most important Ministers of the Left Front cabinet, and in 2000 he became the Chief Minister of the State when Jyoti Basu handed over the baton to him.
Always clad in a crisp white dhoti and kurta, he was a poet at heart. To a great extent he was the inheritor of a great literary tradition left behind by his uncle Sukanta Bhattacharjee, one of the greatest poets of the Communist movement in Bengal. Bhattacharjee himself wrote a number of plays and translated works of Marquez, and dramatised and adapted Kafka’s ‘Metamorphosis’.
It was Bhattacharjee as Minister of Information and Culture who introduced the International Film Festival to the city in the early 1990s, where some world cinema’s masterpieces would be screened, and great filmmakers across the world would be brought over to Kolkata.
A Communist Icon, his legacy is not limited to his political, administrative and literary skills but also in the very way he lived. Even after occupying the high office of Chief Minister, Bhattacharjee lived in a two-room government flat in a housing colony in south Kolkata, which he shared with wife Meera and daughter Suchetana, who came out as a transman last year, till the end of his life. The CPI(M) leader ‘s personal and political integrity is something his sharpest critics would not dare to point any fingers at. Bhattacharjee had even resigned from Jyoti Basu’s Cabinet stating that he will not work with ministers against whom there were allegations of corruption.
After the legendary Jyoti Basu retired from active political life, Bhattacharjee was the principal architect of Left Front’s victories in the Assembly polls of 2001 and 2006. Beyond his image of a simple, cultured, Bengali gentleman, Bhattacharjee had great political foresight. He had cautioned the Trinamool Congress government against flirting with issues that were communally sensitive and mixing religion with politics. He had warned them of the rise of the Bharatiya Janata Party in the State. “If you are giving honorarium to Imams, then tomorrow you will have to give it to the priest,” he had predicted.
While the former Chief Minister kept away from public life because of his failing health, leaders of the party and candidates contesting elections would pay a visit to him at his Palm Avenue residence. During the run-up to the 2024 Lok Sabha campaign, the CPI(M) released an AI generated video of the veteran Communist leader seeking the support of Left candidates.
At a time when West Bengal is in a political flux the slogan coined by him at the Brigade Parade Ground in 2016, ‘BJP hatao desh bachaoo, Trinamool hatao Bangla bachao’ (Remove BJP, Save Country, Defeat Trinamool, Save Bengal) still forms the bedrock of not only the Communist movement, but the entire Left movement of the State.
