July 25: Somnath Chatterjee should re-read his copies of George Orwell’s Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four if, from time to time, he now has a queer feeling that he doesn’t exist.

For, Chatterjee may have kept the Speaker’s chair but, in the eyes of his former party, he has lost one status he had enjoyed all his life like any other human being: personhood.

To Stalinists, anyone who falls out with the Party and its Leader is a non-person. Nineteen Eighty-Four, which describes a futuristic totalitarian state, labels them “unpersons” who are erased from existence by alteration of records.

Except that the Party resurrects them now and then as bogeymen, as a warning to its flock never to stray.

For Chatterjee, the process began as soon as the CPM expelled him on Wednesday. Party Kerala secretary Pinarayi Vijayan dubbed him a “betrayer” while ally RSP’s T.J. Chandrachoodan labelled him a “Mir Zafar”.

To the Forward Bloc’s Debabrata Biswas, Chatterjee had, in his 40 years with the CPM, “never been a Leftist. Be it his attitude or lifestyle, he was a bourgeois to the core.”

This was the signal that the Left, which had so far seen the eloquent Chatterjee as an asset in Parliament, would now be running him down at every opportunity, the way it had slandered many ex-members as thieves, corrupt men or police informers. (See chart)

The Speaker can now expect the cold shoulder in Parliament from his ex-comrades, who will be avoiding any reference to him in party statements, documents or publications. The honorific of “comrade” that Prakash Karat insisted on applying to him, ignoring the convention of the Speaker’s impartiality, would now be a strict no-no.

Chatterjee’s 79th birthday celebrations today provided an indication: amid the stream of visitors, from Sonia Gandhi to the BJP’s Ravi Shankar Prasad, there were no Red faces. To the CPM, he may now well be Snowball Chatterjee.

In Animal Farm, after pigs lead a revolution against human oppressors, their hero Snowball loses a power struggle against his rival Napoleon, is branded a collaborator and expelled, and becomes a non-person (or non-pig). Yet every time any plan by Napoleon, created after Stalin, goes wrong, Snowball (Leon Trotsky) is invoked as the plotter.

Such true-blue Stalinist purges are impossible in democratic India but CPM leaders hinted that a “belittling” campaign was about to begin against Chatterjee.

Politburo member Sitaram Yechury appeared to fire the first salvo from Tiruchirappalli today, linking Chatterjee to the alleged bribery attempts ahead of the trust vote. “I learnt from the media and was directly informed that money was transferred to the MPs through the Speaker’s office,” a PTI report quoted him.

A central committee member from Bengal said Chatterjee’s role as chairman of the West Bengal Industrial Development Corporation and the Santiniketan-Sriniketan Development Authority would now come under the scanner. “(Writer and social activist) Mahasveta Devi had accused him of destroying the environment of Prantik by allowing a private group to build housing complexes there,” he said.

A Bengal industries department official said Chatterjee had spent “a huge amount’’ to renovate his office as WBIDC boss. “His move to strike one-time settlements with defaulters who owed substantial money to the WBIDC had also created a controversy,” the official said.

Chatterjee may consider how the CPM treated once-powerful Kerala leaders M.V. Raghavan and Gowriamma after their expulsion. The party removed their pictures from its local offices and even tarred the foundation stones laid by them.

Articles in Deshabhimani referred to the duo only to condemn them. The iconic Gowriamma, once projected as shadow chief minister, became mere K.R. Gowri and the popular MVR was reduced to Raghavan.

Yet MVR had once become a cult figure for CPM cadres after he hurled his slippers at then Congress chief minister K. Karunakaran in the House. As a non-person, he was roughed up in the Assembly by former party colleagues.

After years of social boycott, though, he and Gowriamma are beginning to receive invites to weddings in CPM leaders’ families.

Some party leaders think Chatterjee would not be so lucky, having never had the organisational stature of the Kerala duo or Nripen Chakraborty, the expelled Tripura chief minister. Others say that not being a mass leader, he will face less vitriol since he is not a political threat.

Chakraborty had the best ending of all. His legendary standing couldn’t stop his expulsion after he refused to give up his chair in 1995, but the CPM took him back two days before he died in December 2004, aged 99.

That last-minute revision, in honour of his “long service to the communist movement”, got Chakraborty an obituary in CPM publications and a funeral draped in the Red Flag.

With inputs from Jayanth Jacob, John Mary and Anindya Sengupta