Smells left When, in 1997, the CPM's Bengali organ, Ganashakti, brought out an anthology to mark the 50th year of India's independence, the editor had to grapple with a minor problem. Nobel-winning economist Amartya Sen had contributed an article, but the rest were by party mandarins and ideologues. It being a party publication, the editor decided, Sen's piece had to give way to a party ideologue's in order of priority. It was another Sen - Alimuddin Street's resident economist - who took the pride of place over Amartya. Nirupam Sen, though, plays it down with an air of modesty that doesn't usually go with his image as hardline party pedagogue. 'My education is nothing to talk about. I took an ordinary bachelor's degree, not an honours, from Burdwan Raj College. My involvement in student movement left me little time for studies.' It is possible that Sen later burnt plenty of midnight oil to get a proper Marxist education to become a major member of the party thinktank in Bengal. For the party faithfuls in Bengal, he is the native version of the Delhi duo, Prakash Karat and Sitaram Yechuri, for whom the party dialectics were an extension of the debate sessions at Jawaharlal Nehru University. Like his politburo mentors, Sen revels in long speeches, in party forums or public meetings, dissecting national and international situations and offering guidelines on What's To Be Done. He is never impassioned, never high-pitched and rarely ever populist. 'He (Sen) is so cool and realistic. Quite a contrast to Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee who was obviously brimming over with enthusiasm. I really was impressed with Sen,' remarks a leading businessman who met the chief minister and his virtual deputy, the commerce and industries minister, within days of the new Left Front Government assuming office. Sen's importance is underscored not only by his heavyweight portfolios (including Planning and Development, a snatch from finance minister Asim Dasgupta), but also by the fact that he has been given the unofficial number two slot despite being a first-timer in government. Sen obviously is an important man in the CPM's scheme of things. His rise in the party hierarchy has now been capped by a Cabinet position second only to the chief minister's. Having joined the party in 1964 (the year the CPM was born of a split in the undivided Communist Party of India) and received wholetime membership four years later, Sen served just one term as MLA - between 1987 and 1991 - but got his first crucial party position in 1989 when he became secretary of the party's Burdwan district committee. The position was crucial because Burdwan was - and still is - crucial in the CPM's organisational power game. It was at the Burdwan conference of the undivided CPI in 1959 that Promode Dasgupta became the provincial secretary. After the birth of the CPM, the first party plenum was held at Burdwan in 1968. The Burdwan gang, as detractors called it , comprising Harekrishna Konar, Benoy Choudhury, Benoy Konar, Subodh Choudhury and Rabin Sen, was openly pro-Chinese in their line , not only on agrarian rebellion and reform, but also on the question of inner-party struggles. This group was once the hardcore of the party and its leaders were not much enamoured of the so-called liberal intellectuals shining in the arc lights in Calcutta. He was inducted in the state secretariat in 1994 and in the Central Committee in 1998. 'I grew up in the company of leaders like Harekrishna Konar, Benoy Choudhury and Subodh Choudhury. They would come to our house in Burdwan town because my father was also a party activist,' Sen recollects. His father, a practising kaviraj, had a tough time with seven children - four sons and three daughters - when the CPI was banned in 1948. The family had to leave its Burdwan town home and move from village to village to evade the police. Sen himself had to experience similar ordeals for seven long years from 1970 when the sensational murders of the Sain family members in Burdwan sent the police on a hot chase of CPM leaders and activists accused in the case. 'I changed name to Haridas Banerjee and long after I resurfaced in 1977 (when the Left Front first came to power), people would call me Haridas,' Sen says with a chuckle. With the same name he attended the all-India conference of the Students' Federation of India at Trivandrum (now Thiruvananthapuram) in 1971. When in 1974 the police arrested him during the nationwide railway strike, 'they thought they had picked up one Haridas Banerjee.' With a background of a diehard communist, how does Sen see his new role as Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee's Man Friday for Bengal's great leap forward ? The realist in him comes out as he outlines his - or 'actually the chief minister's - priorities. 'We know how the role of the public sector, which had earlier been the engine for industrial growth and creation of jobs, is being curtailed because of the Centre's policies. Now, growth and jobs have to come in a big way from private enterprise.' Hence the interface with captains of commerce. The priority areas are also identified - agro-industries, IT, small industries and self-employment. But he also knows that nothing much has happened to expect a sudden capital rush into Bengal. Sen's mission therefore depends on something big - change the Bengali mindset. Bengalis, he says, must not lose any more time to get out of babudom, the colonial legacy that made them live off government jobs. The old Marxist's new mantra: let a hundred entrepreneurs bloom in every Bengal town. His government would act as facilitator and help every budding Bengali entrepreneur of today bloom into tomorrow's businessman. The communist ideologue hopes his capital idea will work for a New Bengal.