Subhas Chakraborty 1942-2009

Subhas Chakraborty was never known as a copybook communist and always played a maverick, most of the time at the expense of his party, the CPM.

In a regimented party that swears by collective wisdom and ideological dogma, he was an incorrigible individualist who often challenged or belittled the might of apparatchiks who rule the party in the name of “democratic centralism”.

Keen to identify himself as a man of the masses, he didn’t conceal his disdain for party top guns who reached the roost without popular mandate.

He may have called himself a “disciple” of Jyoti Basu and even considered him his “personal god” and likened him to Lord Krishna, but Chakraborty did not always follow in the party patriarch’s footsteps.

Basu always remained a “loyal soldier of the party” and adhered to party discipline even after it committed the “historic blunder” of not allowing him to take the offer of prime ministership in 1996. But Chakraborty was a perennial rebel who never minced his words when he felt that the party brass did wrong or took an outdated position.

Drawn to the communist movement at an early age, the young member of a refugee family from East Bengal was always known for his down-to-earth attitude, ability to gel with the man on the street and organisational skills.

Initiated in the refugee movement as well as the student and youth movements in the stormy 1960s and early ’70s, Chakraborty emerged as one of the five young Turks in the CPM under the wings of the then party state secretary, Pramode Dasgupta.

Dasgupta groomed Chakraborty along with Biman Bose, Anil Biswas, Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee and Shyamal Chakraborty as the new crop of party leaders. Bose was the senior-most among them.

Subhas Chakraborty’s peers outgrew him in stature and power both in the party and the government while he remained a CPM state committee member since 1972 and a state cabinet minister since 1982 without a berth in the powerful party state secretariat or the central committee.

The leadership inducted him into the secretariat last year, 36 years after he became a state committee member, only after Jyoti Basu publicly prevailed upon CPM general secretary Prakash Karat. But Chakraborty was refused a seat in the central committee while many of his juniors were accommodated. Bose, Biswas and Bhattacharjee became politburo members.

Many in the party consid- ered him a loose canon with a penchant for controversies and felt his quixotic fights betrayed his frustration at being left out in the cold by the hierarchy. He did not conceal his bitterness but insisted that he had paid the price for being outspoken and out of sync with the ruling dogma.

For example, he went to the Kali temple at Tarapith and offered puja inviting sneers from the party top guns. Undeterred, Chakraborty defended the move by saying that a mass party like the CPM should not stay away from the everyday cultural life of the masses.

Many would recall his prompt action to dispose of godman Balak Brahmachari’s body from the Sukchar (in North 24-Parganas) ashram in 1993 when his disciples refused to part with it even 50 days after his death, believing he would come back to life.

Clearly, he had a problem accepting Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee, his junior in the party, as leader of the government and had brushes with him on many issues.

In 1986, Chakraborty had organised Hope 86, a soiree with Bollywood and Tollywood stars at Salt Lake stadium, inviting sharp criticism from the party’s cultural establishment as well as the Opposition.

In the recent past, he fought a proxy war with Bhattacharjee over the election of the Cricket Association of Bengal president, in which he opposed the chief minister’s candidate, then city police chief Prasun Mukherjee.

In politics, too, he crossed swords with the party brass many a time. He was one of the handful of CPM leaders who had opposed the refusal to allow Basu to become Prime Minister not only in party forums but also in public.

Recently, he vehemently opposed the expulsion of then Lok Sabha Speaker Somnath Chatterjee from the party after the latter refused to step down from his chair in tune with the CPM decision to snap ties with the UPA government.

Undeterred by censure from the Prakash Karat-led central leadership, he advocated Chatterjee’s readmission to the party, a demand later endorsed by Bhattacharjee.

Many in the state CPM leadership may have felt the same way, but it was Chakraborty who publicly questioned Karat’s sagacity in burning bridges with the Congress over the Indo-US nuclear deal.

He even tinkered with the idea of leaving the party before the 2001 Assembly elections to float a separate party along with Saifuddin Chowdhury and Samir Putatunda, but was prevented from doing so by his mentor and protector, Basu.

The party brass also stomached his idiosyncrasies, often censuring him publicly but shying away from throwing him out, primarily because of his strength as a mass leader as well his popularity among the rank and file.

Many may not remember him as a dynamic minister or a great administrator but his image as a man of the masses will perhaps go uncontested. He was known as a public leader, fiery and temperamental, who never concealed his emotions and was always accessible to people from all walks of life and across the political spectrum.