True leader
People looked up to him, cheered him, emulated him but kept a respectful distance from him because he was someone special
Manojit Mitra
Nobody dared call him Jyoti-da. He was either Jyoti Babu or Mr Basu. In this West Bengal of ours where everyone is everyone else’s Dada (the biggest of them all being Saurav Ganguly who was born on the same day as Jyoti Babu), the nonagenarian who passed away recently kept himself above such things.
People looked up to him, cheered him, emulated him but kept a respectful distance from him because he was someone special. His party always treated him differently and deferentially. He knew it and liked it that way. He was the champion of the masses who was not anxious to hide his aristocratic origin and patrician air. And they loved him for it.
His years in England not only brought initiation into Marxism. They also, presumably, instilled into him some of the better points of Anglo-Saxon culture which he retained till the end. While dhoti and kurta remained his uniform, his speech and manners were markedly British: an unsmiling, taciturn exterior, brevity in speech, terse, laconic answers to questions, a brush-off as soon as you tended to overstay the welcome.
Which is not to say that he lacked a sense of humour. In The West Bengal Assembly, an agitated Siddhartha Sankar Ray once complained to the Speaker, “Sir, I have been falsely accused of ...of...doing trouble in my locality”. From the Treasury benches, Chief Minister Basu interposed softly, “Created”. The right verb for which Ray was fumbling!
He handled things coolly and from a height. The day the Assembly House was raided by policemen, angry over the murder of one of them, everyone ran away (except Bangla Congress’s Sushil Dhara), but Basu sat tight in his chamber (then Deputy Chief Minister). The policemen entered his room, broke a jug, but lost their plot when he took them on. He gave them a tremendous dressing-down and they slunk away sheepishly.
No one ever credited Basu with a profound knowledge of Marxism. But when he spoke, everyone listened. He was the party’s face, the “posterboy” in today’s lingo. The threadbare analysis of Marxism and Leninism was left to theoreticians like Gopalan, Sundarayya and Basavapunniah while Basu commanded the masses. He was one of the major forces that made the CPI(M) what it is now. Had he joined the CPI during the 1964 split, the story might have been different. And without a shadow of doubt, he was the reason behind the party’s monolithic character until now. His absence will be felt sorely in the party because he was the unifying influence that the CPI(M) needs now more than ever. Outside the party also, he will be missed equally. For while others merely followed, Jyoti Babu led.
(The author is a
veteran journalist )
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