By an IPS correspondent

KOLKATA – On Sunday, when this eastern India metropolis of moderate winter experienced one of the chilliest days of the season, the weather was no deterrent for the tens of thousands who lined the streets to catch a glimpse of a 95-year-old communist leader’s body soon after a teary-eyed comrade announced his death.

The red flags fluttered and chants of red salutes filled the air as a sea of communist foot soldiers joined the common people who thronged the streets, many breaking down in tears, as they paid their last respects to Jyoti Basu, the communist patriarch and architect of India’s mainstream parliamentary communism.
People began bidding a tearful farewell to Basu, who came close to becoming the first communist prime minister of India but for his own party puritans. Basu, born on July 8, 1914, died of multiple organ failure. His body was due to be donated to medical science on Tuesday, after a funeral to be attended by India’s political royalty and foreign dignitaries.

The passing away of Basu – India’s longest-serving chief minister whose unbroken 23-year-old rule from 1977 to 2000 of a left front coalition in West Bengal state is a history in itself – is seen as a blow to the communist movement in India as a whole, wilting under fragile unity, political “foolhardiness” and lack of pragmatic icons.

“The death of Basu is a big setback to the left’s unity in India, especially in West Bengal, one of the three Indian states where communists have a presence,” said political analyst Sabyasachi Basu Roychowdhury.

Ashok Ghosh, a left veteran and leader of a left front constituent, the All India Forward Bloc, admitted the passing away of Basu would weaken the communist front.

The left front in West Bengal has ruled the eastern state since 1977 after Basu’s party, the Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPI-M), led a coalition of small left outfits to power.

During its nearly 23-year rule, Basu presided as chief minister with an iron grip on the administration until November 2000, when old age ailments forced him to pass the baton to his then deputy, Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee.

Basu was considered a pragmatic icon of Marxism who made communism a part of India’s mainstream politics and survived the ideological crisis triggered by the Soviet Union’s collapse in the early 1990s with his sheer charisma and practical policies.

But after his retirement, his reformist successor Bhattacharjee’s shift from agriculture to industry met with debacles over his land acquisition policies that angered the communists’ traditional electorate, the farmers, who were the biggest beneficiaries of the left front’s land-reform initiatives.

Bhattacharjee’s policies triggered bloody conflicts and strengthened the opposition.

The number of left front seats in the new Indian parliament fell below 25 from 60 earlier in the 545-member Lower House after the most recent general elections, in April-May 2009.

“The absence of Basu, who was a left liberal accepted by all, will certainly affect the left in West Bengal ahead of state elections in 2011. They are already weakened by the rejection of farmers and the rise of the opposition,” said Roychowdhury.

“However, I don’t think the left’s unity will crumble immediately. It will take some time. The various constituents of the left front are together for vested interests, and so they will not beak that unity at one go.”

Some of the junior partners of the CPI-M in the left front also consider the death of Basu a big loss to the communist movement in India.

“We could go to him for support and in times of crises. He would listen to us, advise use, guide and direct us and ensure that we did not disintegrate. Now we are without a guardian,” said Kshiti Goswami, a West Bengal minister and leader of the Revolutionary Socialist Party, a constituent of the left front.

“I think the left’s unity could break without him,” said Goswami, who had wanted to resign from the left front several times after gross human-rights violations were committed in the Nandigram region in West Bengal, where the government wanted to set up a low-tax special economic zone and a chemical hub.

“When I wanted to resign over the human-rights violations, he held my hand and asked me to preserve the left’s unity built with so much sacrifice and struggle. Now, where will we go?” asked the leader whose confidence in a big ally, the CPI-M, the party to which Basu belonged, has been shaken since the killing of farmers during police firing in Nandigram.

The violence in Nandigram, located about 150 kilometers south of the provincial capital, Kolkata, reached a flashpoint when, on March 14, 2007, police fired on villagers, killing 14 people. Hundreds were injured and women raped by armed Marxist cadres as the year-long conflict raged.

Although the government promised no land would be acquired in Nandigram after the resistance, the farmers remained unconvinced after farmlands in Singur near Kolkata were seized to build a factory for the manufacturing of the Nano, billed as the cheapest car in the world, from Tata Motors, one of the biggest Indian carmakers.

The CPI-M’s general secretary, Prakash Karat, who was opposed to Basu attaining the seat of prime minister in 1996, a decision the late leader had termed as an “historic blunder”, said the patriarch had been able to put into practice what the leftists had preached.

The left also paid a heavy price in the 2009 elections for withdrawing support for the Congress government in New Delhi over a civil nuclear deal with the United States.

According to long-time colleague and former speaker of parliament’s Lower House, Somnath Chatterjee, Basu’s biggest strength was his understanding of the people and his non-partisan approach to national issues, which endeared him even to arch rivals like Congress, the left-of-center party that has mostly ruled India since it gained independence in 1947.

“He understood the people and so remained a leader of the people,” said Chatterjee.

(Inter Press Service)