Surjeet

New Delhi, Aug. 1: Harkishen Singh Surjeet, who died today at the age of 92, joined the national movement and went to jail for the first time when he was just a lad of 16.

He joined the Communist Party of India at the age of 20. And he was the youngest of the nine “founding fathers” of the CPM when it came into being in 1964.

But it was only in the closing decades of his life that Comrade Surjeet — often dismissed as “a peasant among Marxists and a Marxist among peasants” — really came into his own, playing a pivotal role in the turbulent advent of the coalition era in Indian politics.

Surjeet, in many ways, was uniquely suited to the role history threw up for him. Of all the communist leaders of his generation, he was the one who always had a yen for “realpolitik”, the ability to communicate across and beyond party lines, a zest for the little political games and manipulations that are so necessary even when the goal itself is lofty.

In a team comprising ideological purists such as P. Sundarayya and B.T. Ranadive, organisational strongmen like Pramode Dasgupta, and mass leaders of the likes of A.K. Gopalan, Jyoti Basu and E.M.S. Namboodiripad, Surjeet was their window to the world of bourgeois politics — a man who knew the intricacies of the Akali movement like no other, who had friends dating back to the pre-Independence era in the Congress, and who befriended the new post-Mandal players in the Hindi belt with the ease of a Dale Carnegie.

By the time he replaced the redoubtable EMS as general secretary in 1992, Indian politics was on the threshold of unprecedented change and Surjeet’s life-long skills came into full play. Surjeet had always belonged to that section of the Left movement which believed that Indian communists had a historic role — far in excess of their limited electoral strength — to play in the building of a secular republic and must engage more fully in the messy world of “bourgeois” politics to attain their still-distant socialist goal.

From 1978 onwards, when the Salkia Plenum endorsed the line to turn the CPM into a “mass” revolutionary party, the party as a whole moved in this direction. But it was only in the 1990s that the CPM-led Left became a serious player on the national scene.

In 1989 itself, the Left gave outside support to V.P. Singh’s short-lived National Front government in keeping with their staunch opposition to the Congress. But after the demolition of the Babri Masjid and the unfolding of the BJP’s Hindutva agenda, the CPM’s “twin-danger thesis” was gradually given up and the BJP was declared the principal ideological adversary.

It was in 1996 when the eleventh general elections threw up a completely fractured verdict that Surjeet stepped out of the shadows of the CPM headquarters to become the chief architect of coalition politics. His chief aim was to ensure that the BJP did not form the government. The secondary aim was to keep out the Congress from a leadership role.

Given the configuration of the Lok Sabha, to achieve the twin aims required Herculean efforts, and it is doubtful that any man without Surjeet’s indefatigable energy and unswerving resolve could have achieved it.

After the 13-day Vajpayee government failed to win a vote of confidence, Surjeet spent endless hours confabulating with leaders of every party big and small to stitch up a rainbow coalition called the United Front and secured the “outside” support of the Congress for it. He was almost alone in his endeavours — his party comrades let him do all the talking. But when the assortment of regional satraps who formed the United Front insisted on making Jyoti Basu the Prime Minister of the new coalition, his comrades stepped in and vetoed it.

Surjeet was bitterly disappointed. But he was a quintessential party man. He never said a word in public (never echoing Jyoti Basu’s “historic blunder” thesis), kept away from the party headquarters for just a day or two, and then devoted himself to overseeing the running of the United Front government and to his duties as party general secretary.

At the CPM’s 18th Congress in Calcutta in 1998, Surjeet argued in favour of his line of joining the government in 1996 but that line — never mind the stand taken by Basu and Surjeet — was once again defeated.

And once again, Surjeet showed no traces of bitterness or anger — just a twinge of disappointment that the majority of his comrades remained unconvinced that a small communist party could lead a government without a basic change in the correlation of class forces in the country.

The 1996 experience was not a flash in the pan. Very few outside the Left movement realise that Surjeet — for all his affable persona and ability to cut deals with an assortment of political players — was to the end a dedicated communist and a disciplined soldier of the party in the truest sense of the term. He never let the adulation he received go to his head, never put himself above the party and his “politicking” was always anchored to the party’s collective understanding — to do the utmost to hold aloft modern India’s secular foundations and to promote a Left-Centre axis which was essential to fight the communal forces.

In 1998 when he tried in vain to replace the Vajpayee government with a Congress-led front and in 2004 when that actually came into being, Surjeet always implemented the party line.

Over the last few weeks, Surjeet has been extolled by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh among others for his role in establishing the UPA. But those who knew him well also know that Surjeet would have resisted the present government’s perceived pro-US tilt and carried out the party decision to break with the government after its “betrayal” of the Left.

It is another matter that Surjeet may not have stuck to just the official meetings of the UPA-Left committee and in all likelihood would have spoken informally to Sonia and Manmohan to convince them that a Congress-Left rupture at this stage would be politically disastrous for the country.

Surjeet’s passing away marks the end of an era. He belonged to a generation for whom politics was a commitment, not a career; a passion, not a means to pelf and power; a 24/7 engagement, not a day job.

Surjeet had friends in different parts of the world and the NRI Sikh community was a perennial source of party funds. Many accused him of “wheeling and dealing” but his life was an open book, his home an open house — which welcomed everyone from a Sonia Gandhi to a humble peasant from interior Punjab.

The graveyard, a cynic once said, is full of indispensable men — scoffing at the idea that mere mortals can be bestowed such importance. But from time to time in every movement, there are men and women who become irreplaceable. For the communist movement and national politics as a whole, Harkishen Singh Surjeet will find no replacement.