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It’s the boardroom of the Haldia Institute of Technology (HIT) and the soft-spoken, diminutive man at the head of a long, oval table looks like anything but a fire-breathing Marxist. Lakshman Seth, in a crisp white shirt and dark pinstriped trousers, appears more like the chairman of a company. In reality, he is both — a political leader with a foot in the business world.
The three-time CPI(M) MP and the party’s strongman from Haldia presides over what his detractors describe as an “emerging” business empire in the petrochemical hub, a four-hour drive from Calcutta. Seth heads not only what is Bengal’s first private engineering college but also a slew of other thriving educational institutions in Haldia, including a business school and a law college.
On a recent drizzly evening, he invites me to “have a look around” the sprawling and imposing engineering college with a towering concrete arch serving as its gate. “It is my baby and I will have to take care of it,” he says, explaining why he spends most of his evenings at the institute these days.
But this is just the beginning. Seth has grand plans for Haldia: a knowledge city with a plethora of schools and colleges for higher education; a health city offering both health care and health education and a culture hub with auditoriums, open-air theatres, craft villages and museums. “I want Haldia to turn into a full-fledged city and industry alone cannot make it,” he says.
Not for nothing is he known as the badshah of Haldia. For the last two decades, the reigning MP from Tamluk — Haldia is a part of the constituency — has been the chairman of the Haldia Development Authority (HDA), the local planning board. But more than anything else, he is valued by his party — and feared by industry — as a trade union leader who holds the key to the smooth functioning of several local industrial units and, of course, the crucial Haldia port.
To be sure, his political fortunes have see-sawed in recent times, but the leader remains in the spotlight. In January, he was blamed — and reproached by none other than Bengal chief minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee — for triggering trouble at Nandigram, near Haldia. And now he is being hailed for helping the CPI(M) script an impressive victory in the July 22 municipal poll in Haldia, which many saw as a “referendum” on Bhattacharjee’s pro-industry policy.
Yet in some ways the politician-cum-militant trade unionist seems transformed. As a leader of the Centre for Indian Trade Unions (CITU), the CPI(M)’s powerful labour wing, Seth says his “perspectives” have changed over the years and that he no longer believes in militant trade unionism. In a competitive, market-driven economy, he says the interests of workers and industry are intertwined. “You have to look after both, not one at the cost of the other,” Seth, 58, says.
Time has changed and so has Seth. I see more of Lakshman Seth the politician the next morning at Shramik Bhavan, the local CITU office. The yellow, three-storeyed building on a dusty, pot-holed street in the industrial township looks more like an apartment than a party office, as the locals call it.
It’s a bit of both really. The CPI(M) whole-timer lives with his family — Tamalika runs the local municipality as its chairperson — in a flat on the first floor, while the ground floor houses the CITU office. And in a cavernous hall on the ground floor where dozens are waiting to meet Seth, I notice the palpable signs of change — or writing on the wall. A framed portrait of Swami Vivekananda hangs amid portraits of Marxist heavyweights Pramod Dasgupta and B.T. Ranadive. For Bengal Marxists, nobody — not even a Hindu religious leader — is an untouchable any more.
It is around 9 in the morning when Seth limps in, the result of a recent car accident that he says he was lucky to survive. He gestures me to follow him into a small room off the hall that apparently serves as his office. The wall facing his desk is plastered with fading black-and-white and sepia photographs of former Bengal chief minister Jyoti Basu. Seth was his follower though speculation is rife about his relationship with Bhattacharjee, Basu’s successor in government. “Jyoti Basu and Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee are big leaders and a small fry like me can never get close to them,” he says, dismissing all speculation.
But before he can pick up the thread of our conversation — cut off the evening before by an “urgent” phone call from the CPI(M) district unit — a young man walks in. He has applied for a job, but not got a call for an interview. Seth asks his secretary to check with the company. The youth leaves after touching his feet. Minutes earlier, a sobbing woman had walked in to tell Seth how she had been harassed by her supervisor. Seth called someone up and the woman stopped weeping. She touched his feet and left.
For Seth, the open adulation is a part of life. But the man who comes from an impoverished Scheduled Caste family in what was then undivided Midnapore knows what deprivation is all about. Yet what he remembers most of his childhood is not poverty but the sense of “homelessness”, which he says still haunts him. An activist of the undivided Communist party, Bishnupada Seth, his late father, was in jail when he was born in a relative’s house in 1949. His father was a bargadar or a sharecropper with no land to speak of. Unable to feed the infant, his mother took him to his aunt, who adopted him.
Seth grew up at his aunt’s house in Barghashipur village near Haldia, not knowing, as he puts it, what his own home was like. “I wasn’t born there; I didn’t grow up there with my five siblings and I have never gone back there,” he says. The aunt put him through the local junior high school and then through Tamluk College, where he did a B.A. in history.
In 1970, he enrolled in Calcutta University to do a master’s degree in history and bachelor’s in law and got “unknowingly” sucked into the student politics of the day, he says. But his days as an activist of the Students Federation of India were shortlived. A year later, on a trip back home, he was “mobbed” by hundreds of unorganised dock labourers who urged him to “lead” them in their fight for higher wages. “Haldia had very few educated people back then, so they came to me. Some of them even knew my father, so I couldn’t say no,” he recalls.
The Haldia Dock Shramik Association was born soon after that and Seth realised that he had found his “true” calling as a trade union leader. The year 1971 saw the start of work on the construction of the Haldia port and Seth had his baptism by fire. Angry dock workers demanding a 50-paisa raise clashed with the police and in the resultant firing several of them died. “So much blood of our comrades all around me — I will never forget the day,” he says.
Gallons of water have since flown down the Haldi River. Seth acknowledges that he has changed, not so much as a person but as a politician. He now believes in “creativity and free thinking” in politics. Gone are the days, he says, when you could stay “confined” to an ideology. “You have to let your mind fly like a free bird and come up with solutions to the various problems facing today’s society,” Seth says. To him, ideology is nothing but “an accumulation of facts” gathered in a lifetime. “Ideology has to be dynamic or else it will die,” he says.
In many ways, Seth seems as pragmatic as the Bengal chief minister but between them a feeling of “coldness” persists, party insiders say. Bhattacharjee was angry with him because he had “made public” in a public rally and then in an HDA notification his government’s plans for land acquisition at Nandigram.
Seth remains unfazed. He says he announced the government plan to counter a campaign the Opposition was waging and to dispel confusion. “The Trinamul Congress was misleading the villagers, saying all 99 villages in the Nandigram block would be acquired. So I set the record straight and declared that only 27 villages would be acquired,” he says, adding that he has done nothing wrong. He, however, feels that both he and the chief minister were “right, from our individual perspectives”.
In his 37 years in politics, Seth has clearly seen it all. He has seen Nandigram — the March 14 firing on villagers — and hopes to see the remaking of Haldia. He has seen his business-like boardroom, and the sprawling campus. What he always looks forward to seeing, though, is his adopted home of two decades at Shramik Bhavan. Somewhere down the line, the party, home and business have all become one.