PRAGOTI

 Pragoti presents before its readers a guest blog from historian Subho Basu.

In 1981 I joined SFI ‘defecting’ from the Indian Students Association. I knew why I did so. Between 1977 and 1982 Bengal witnessed a social revolution: sharecroppers got their rights to obtain 2/3 share of the produce, agricultural workers were engaging in collective bargaining, students were studying up to class XII without fees, the unemployed were obtaining a meager allowance and above all working classes were asserting themselves as a critical force in remaking society. It was an exhilarating experience.  At the center of this was Jyoti Babu. In this era of liberalization and post colonial identity politics, it is difficult to imagine the impact of Jyoti Babu as a symbolic leader.

From 1946 onwards Jyoti Babu participated in popular movements to reshape Bengal politics. He was at the forefront of the movement for the establishment of communal harmony in 1946, in the 1950s he was the voice of refugees in the assembly and in the 1960s he became associated with the food movement. After coming to power he supported the land reforms initiative of Comrades Harekrishna Konar, Abdullah Rasul and Binoy Chowdhury. During the emergency regime he opposed the Congress Raj tooth and nail, despite his personal friendship with Indira Gandhi and Siddhartha Roy, ‘the butcher’. From 1977 onwards, he not only enabled Binoy Chowdhury to implement land reforms and install Panchayati Raj but also prevented communal riots from engulfing Bengal. Every North Indian state from 1977 onwards suffered from vicious anti-Muslim and anti-Sikh pogroms except West Bengal led by the Left Front government. Jyoti babu and the Left Forces stood between rioters and the peace and harmony of Bengal society.

He was a disciplined soldier of the party. In a country where, for the sake of political office, people change their political loyalties, Jyoti Babu accepted the Party’s stricture not to become Prime Minister with dignity. Despite many disagreements with some of his later policies, he remained for me an ideal Marxist socialist, a voice of workers and peasants of Bengal. I deliberately used his popular epithet ‘Babu’ to indicate the  emptiness of politics of gesture. Jyoti babu , without surrendering his ‘babu image’, remained a Marxist socialist while many others who abandoned the struggle donned the mantle of radicalism by employing many empty gestures. So in spite of fashionable and systematic denigration of Jyoti Babu in many Indian newspapers after his demise,  I remain a fan of a man who stood for removal of poverty from rural Bengal,  enabled workers to assert the right to engage in collective bargaining and maintained communal peace in one of the nastiest moment of our history.  He would go down in the history as a symbol and leader of a movement that destroyed quasi-feudal structure of the Bengal countryside and liberated the Bengal peasantry from the residues of the Permanent Settlement. This is no mean achievement for a ‘babu’!

Subho Basu

Santiniketan/ Syracuse, NY