“See my condition,” he said, “I have to meet you like this, sitting on my bed.” It was the day prior to his 95th birthday. “I can’t hear in one ear, and can’t see in one eye.” “You are not missing much,” I suggested, “there is so much around us one doesn’t want to hear and so much one does not like to see.” He smiled a wan smile, a variant of the dry smile of his that has been the photographer’s despair. I am not sure he had heard me.

When I went to call on him again on December 13, 2009, a day prior to my demitting office, he was weaker. He started the conversation by saying, “I cannot see, I cannot hear…” His mouth was parched and he clenched his teeth as he spoke, in apparent irritation with his condition. This birdlike figure, now confined to his bed, had been part of my consciousness for much of my adult life as a larger-than-life figure and yet real, distant and yet accessible, a figure from history and also from tomorrow’s newspaper. He had, of course, been that for millions, whether communist or non-communist, political or wholly apolitical.

I met him at regular intervals in places as far removed as London and Pretoria, New Delhi and Calcutta. It was in London, where I was working as director of The Nehru Centre, that I had got to know Jyotibabu. The year was 1993. The Nehru Centre had organized a commemoration of the 200th year of Cornwallis’s Permanent Settlement. Jyotibabu was the chief speaker. His head buried in the text, he read in an unfluctuating timbre and tone from a prepared script. And as he progressed from page to page of the closely typed document I could see many in the audience ‘switching off’. Jyotibabu, too, seemed to realize this for he suddenly stopped midway and, looking up through his spectacles, said, “You can see I am reading this out. It has been written for me by an expert who knows all these things. I do not know all this myself. I am also learning as I read this. You see, for most of my life I have been among the people, with little time to read or study….” The audience burst into applause in appreciation of the candour of this man who had shaped history, while most of the listeners had only read history and some had written on aspects of it. He visited us at The Nehru Centre again the following year to unveil a bronze bust of Tagore made by Somnath Hore which we had been lucky enough to obtain through the then minister of culture in West Bengal, Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee, and the facilitation of my friend of many years, V.K. Ramachandran. The Centre had arranged the procedure to be worthy of the originality of the masterpiece. Jyotibabu was requested to press a button that would cast a beam of light through the darkened hall onto the bust. As the work came to light and life, an exclamation rose from the audience collectively, loud and clear. But I can never forget the look of sheer wonder, at once childlike and hugely knowledgeable, that passed for a brief moment over Jyotibabu’s face. Never one for verbal excess, he said to me, “It is a good piece.” And added, “One of Somnath’s best.”

Jyotibabu visited South Africa in 1997, with his wife, Kamaldi, and four associates. He was driven straight from the airport to the presidential office in South Africa’s capital. Mandela had been president for just over two years. Jyotibabu had governed West Bengal for over two decades. As the high commissioner for India, it was my privilege to receive the visiting Indian dignitary at the airport (where, unnoticed by our bouquet-holding welcoming party, he had disembarked with other economy class passengers from the plane’s rear), and to accompany him on his calls and visits. “Excellency,” I said to our iconic host, “Chief Minister Basu is the longest serving head of a communist government in the world after Fidel Castro.” This was a quite unnecessary introduction, for President Mandela knew his guest’s political history well. But, as it turned out, my comment required nuancing. Correcting me gently, Jyotibabu said to President Mandela, “I may be the longest serving head of a communist government after Comrade Fidel, but I believe I am the longest serving head of an elected communist government in the world.” And it was in that unique capacity that South Africa gave a red-carpet welcome to this leader of the Indian Left who was, clearly, more than a party’s leader, more than a shining star of doctrine, ideology or political adherence, more than a chief minister. And more than the mould that political evolution had encased him in. Then, explaining one of the objects of his visit, Jyotibabu said to Mandela, “Mr President, I understand that your party, the African National Congress, is in alliance with the South African Communist Party and with the apex organization of trade unions. In my province of West Bengal also, we are in alliance with other parties and with like-minded Unions. Your alliance has grown in your struggle. Our recent history has been different. But be that as it may, we need to learn from you, from your struggle, and see as to how the interests of the common people can be served through such partnership arrangements, within a democratic framework, and how we can explain our programmes better to the masses.”

President Mandela heard Jyotibabu intently, his eyes narrowing and his forehead furrowing to capture the essence of his visitor’s intent. “Also, Mr President, I understand your struggle has been well-documented by your own people. Unfortunately, we have not done that. Our history remains largely undocumented, so our understanding of historical processes has been hindered. I want to collect specimens of your documentation so that we can do something in that direction.” And then Jyotibabu said something I can never forget. “Mr President, we have to constantly educate ourselves.”

On the drive to the airport for his departure, he asked me, “When are you returning to India?” I said I had but just taken up my assignment. “When you come back ,why don’t you work in West Bengal?” “That would be a privilege,” I said, whereupon one of his colleagues said to him, “If a person who has been an Ambassador or High Commissioner is to serve within an Indian State, it can only be in one capacity.” “Yes, I know,” Jyotibabu said laconically.

A couple of years later, I was back in India, as secretary to President K.R. Narayanan. The phone rang in my home one evening to say Chief Minister Basu was in town and would like me to see him. I mentioned this to President Narayanan the next morning who said I must of course see the veteran leader if he wants me to. Jyotibabu met me in his suite in Banga Bhavan. He was wearing a shirt and a coloured lungi. He was looking both relaxed and also not. “You see, the time has come for a new Governor to be appointed in West Bengal and the Union Home Minister himself has rung me to suggest a name… I have given my agreement…” As he spoke, the conversation in the car on the way to the airport in Johannesburg came flooding back to me and I divined what Jyotibabu was intending to convey. Jyotibabu then smiled that dry smile of his that has become his ‘signature’ and said, “I just wanted you to know, that is all… and let us see… perhaps… some day in the future… I hope.” As I drove out of Banga Bhavan, I said to myself if there is such a thing as simple decency in public life, Jyotibabu has to be its best example.

Five years later, as I entered the Throne Room at Raj Bhavan, Calcutta, under a very different political constellation for the swearing-in ceremony, I saw Jyotibabu seated in the first row. He was not chief minister. And he was not in the best of health. But he had come for the event. I was quite overwhelmed. Seated beside the chief minister, Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee, he was clearly the head of a large family, respected, if not adhered to, by all. After the ceremony was over, as I walked up to him, he said, “So, congratulations,” and then added with his characteristic economy with words, “finally.”

My visits to see him in Indira Bhavan were always brief and whenever conversation went beyond that thoughtless genre of ‘polite talk’, it was because he chose to steer it further. On a couple of occasions he gave me, in a few chosen words, his concept of a governor’s role, describing Professor Nurul Hasan as “an ideal Governor”. And that discussion, needless to say, was minimalist. Jyotibabu offered, on those occasions, certain perspectives on my way of working in what might be called homeopathic doses.

Jyotibabu honoured my wife and me by joining us for dinner on a couple of occasions. On one such evening, over his favourite menu of Chinese food, he reminisced about his time as a student in London. “I disagreed with Rajani Palme Dutt over his assessment of Gandhiji. I could not accept RPD’s characterization of Gandhiji as a bourgeois leader. I said Gandhi was the first man to rouse the whole nation.” He then told me of his visiting Gandhiji at his Hydari Manzil camp in Beliaghata, Calcutta, in August 1947 when the city had been engulfed by communal riots. “Bhupesh Gupta and I went to him and asked what, in his opinion, we in the communist movement should do at that point in time. Gandhiji said that going by his limited experience, the best thing to do would be to organize peace marches, joint Hindu-Mussalman processions. And we did try but it was not of much use as the processions got broken up…” I was struck by the phrase “limited experience”, used (as Jyotibabu recalled ) by Gandhiji to describe his own millennial expertise in that field. And I was struck equally by Jyotibabu’s laser-sharp recollection of that meeting. It was for me a great fulfilment to see Jyotibabu open the new exhibition gallery at the same house, now renamed Gandhi Bhavan, in Beliaghata on August 15, 2007.

Over my last two visits to him, when he received me in his bedroom, I noticed that on a dressing table at the far end of the room, stood three framed pictures. One was of Kamaldi, one of his grandchildren and the third one, smaller than the other two, of Venkateswara, the deity worshipped in Tirupati. I did not ask about it and assumed that it had been placed there by some devout person and that Jyotibabu had not interfered with that gesture. I do not know about its provenance, but it said a great deal to me, that little picture there.

For Jyoti Basu to be ideologically committed was not the same thing as being intellectually closed, to be doctrinally connected was not the same as becoming an island of received wisdoms. Consistency was not coextensive with conceptual stagnation, nor loyalty the same as mental slavery. He knew in the core of his being that vitally important as an ideology is, there is such a thing as the web of Life which has its dividing lines but also interconnections. When he strove it was for the success of his beliefs, not for the defeat of others’. This is what has made and will sustain his image as a political leader who, to adapt T.S. Eliot’s phrase, “cared and did not care”.

Communist by training and patrician in temperament, Marxist by conviction and a liberal democrat in practice, mass leader and recluse, Jyotibabu’s goal was a classless social order. And his road? Made of the rough terracotta of politics and the gleaming marble of power, its surfaces were discrete. But these dichotomies did not seem in him self-contradictory or self-defeating. This was because he established very early on his own special blend of affinity and autonomy, the space he shared with his associates and the space he reserved for himself.

Jyoti Basu’s leadership will be remembered for what it did in terms of the land-human population congruence. ‘Land reforms’ are the two words that will rise in anyone’s mind when asked to name his innings’ most lasting achievement. The same land-population congruence, necessitated this time not by landlordism and inequity but by sea-surge and the inevitable push-back of millions, now demands attention, urgent attention. The foresight and quiet, undramatic determination that this phenomenal man showed is an urgent need. Will the region be as farsighted as he was, as brave, and as wise? There can be no more abiding way of paying tribute to this leader of leaders than addressing this waiting behemoth of a challenge.

Original Author: GopalKrishna Gandhi
Source: The Telegraph

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