Lakshman Seth

Calcutta, May 11: Lakshman Seth was in his elements when he tried to browbeat CRPF officer Alok Raj into following the ruling party’s commands.

The middle-aged MP has risen from the ranks of ambitious apparatchiki to become a ruthless satrap whose writ runs across East Midnapore.

After Nandigram erupted last year over the move to acquire land — initiated by Seth, also the chairman of the Haldia Development Authority — the chief minister and his party repeatedly admitted “political and administrative mistakes”. But the leadership took no step against Seth.

The Haldia authority had sent a notice to the local administration identifying 29 mouzas in Nandigram for acquisition and Seth had followed it up with a campaign disregarding farmers’ discontent.

It landed the Left Front government in its worst crisis in 30 years and the CPM in a public relations soup. An embarrassed and angry chief minister had asked the people to tear up the land acquisition notice but Seth, the “uncrowned king of Haldia”, never repented his action. He asserted his “right to issue a notice for a development plan”.

Top CPM leaders — from Prakash Karat to Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee — lamented how the “Opposition succeeded in misleading the people before the party and the government could explain their good intention to turn Nandigram into another Haldia”.

But the state CPM brass neither censured Seth nor reviewed the nature and extent of his mistakes despite the central committee’s directives.

In the party’s internal documents, Bhattacharjee later said Nandigram was a “coll-ective failure” and Seth, lying low for some time, returned to the limelight after armed CPM cadres recaptured Nandigram last November.

Seth’s hawkish line gradually won over the entire party, including Karat.

Although Nandigram figured in the recent CPM congress, Seth remained unscathed.

The importance of being Lakshman Seth lies in the fact that he serves the party’s twin objectives and represents its twin faces — a pragmatic, investor-friendly and development-minded man who deals with support and discontent with a carrot and a stick.

Seth’s total control over the party and Citu in the region was underlined recently when he threatened to shut down Haldia Petrochemicals, the flagship of Bhattacharjee’s drive for industrialisation.

The state Citu secretary saw no need for the strike but said “it was always better to talk to Lakshman as far as Haldia was concerned”. Seth is the only one besides Jyoti Basu to be addressed as “our respected leader” in Haldia.