Indira Bhavan

Calcutta, Jan. 20: The Trinamul Congress and the Congress have decided to oppose any proposal to convert into a museum the government bungalow where Jyoti Basu had lived as a tenant the last nine years of his life.

Basu had lived in the Salt Lake house since shifting from the Raj Bhavan after complaining about lack of sunshine there in 1989, but he became a tenant there after stepping down as chief minister in November 2000.

The CPM used to pay the government Rs 8,895 every month for the seven-bedroom Indira Bhavan, officially a guesthouse under the urban development department. The house has four bedrooms on the ground floor and three on the first floor, and a sprawling courtyard in front.

In upscale Salt Lake, an ordinary three-bedroom accommodation costs around Rs 10,000 a month in rent.

State irrigation minister Subhas Naskar recently submitted a proposal to chief minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee convert Indira Bhavan into a museum housing Basu memorabilia.

Naskar today said he had initiated the proposal as the land on which the house stood belonged to his department.

The Congress’s Subrata Mukherjee said: “Basu was just a tenant there since stepping down as chief minister.”

“We shall launch a statewide campaign if attempts are made to convert Indira Bhavan into a museum solely for storing Basu’s books and other articles,” added Mukherjee, a state Congress working president.

Mukherjee suggested that Indira Bhavan, built in 1971 to house Indira Gandhi when she came here to chair a four-day AICC session, be instead “converted into a national museum with memorabilia belonging to Indira and former Bengal chief ministers like B.C. Roy, P.C. Sen and Ajoy Mukherjee”.

Painter Suvaprasanna, a leading light in Mamata Banerjee’s cultural cell, said Trinamul would not accept a museum at Indira Bhavan for its “tenant”. “I have spoken to Mamata about it. If the government is bent on converting Indira Bhavan into a Basu museum, we shall seek the governor’s intervention.”

The government, however, suggested that the fury could be premature.

Urban development minister Asok Bhattacharya said: “It is still just a proposal. The cabinet has to decide on the museum after the party clears the move.”

However, he also said that it was well within the government’s rights to convert Basu’s house into a museum. Bhattacharya added that the house where Prime Minister Indira used to live had also been converted into a museum after her “tragic death”.

The Congress’s Mukherjee said the two cases could not be compared because Indira was still in office when killed in October 1984.