Jyoti
Basu
(1914–2010)
Utsa
Patnaik
JYOTI
Basu’s life and political work spanned an astonishingly long
era. His very
early childhood was spent in Calcutta
during the
First World War, and by the time he was a college student,
first at St Xavier’s
and later Presidency
College, both India
and the world were in the
throes of the Great Depression. Jyoti Basu belonged to a
well-to-do
professional family and went to England,
as did many others of his background at the time, to study to
be a barrister.
He spent four years, from 1935 to 1939, in a
depression-ravaged England
with fascism rising in Europe,
and underwent a decisive intellectual transition, becoming a
strong and
lifelong adherent of Marxism with the resolve to enter the
arena of political
struggle. When he returned and joined the illegal Communist
Party of India in
1940, war had already broken out in Europe
and
was to engulf the Asian theatre less than two years later.
This was followed by
the great Bengal Famine, the tumultuous years of Partition,
communal riots and Independence.
BENGAL AFTER
INDEPENDENCE
The
meteoric rise of the Left in Bengal and its consolidation, the
repeated
evidence of trust and confidence the masses of Bengal have
reposed in the Left
for over three decades, and Jyoti Basu’s role in it cannot be
understood
without some understanding of the situation of Bengal after Independence,
in the 1950s and 1960s. It
inherited a legacy of two centuries of colonial rule, an acute
food problem,
problems of refugee influx and resettlement, and above all, an
unresolved
agrarian question. It was the cadres of the Left movement
which tackled these
early problems decisively, working tirelessly among the
masses, and later, with
the formation of Left Front governments, tackled the agrarian
question and
improvement of mass welfare.
Today
very few people have any knowledge of the extreme poverty and
destitution to
which the ordinary people in Bengal had been reduced by the
time Independence
came, least of all Bengal’s own bhadralok intellectuals
whose
unremitting ‘western gaze’ has meant their being hegemonised
by false theories
emanating from Northern universities. In fact many of these
intellectuals are
making comfortable positions for themselves in foreign
universities by denigrating
our national freedom movement in some form or the other. The
people belonging
to that generation in Bengal which is now in its mid-forties
or less in age,
have known nothing but Left rule since they began to be aware
of politics at
all. Therefore few commentators today have any understanding
of the situation
before that rule or the significance of the progress the
people have made, even
though there has been some predictable reversal in the
neo-liberal era in the
trend of progress. A brief recapitulation of the results of Bengal’s
long subjugation and the legacy it inherited may not be out of
place.
Bengal
was the very first region of India
to be colonised from 1765 onwards (this date is when the
Company acquired the
sovereign right of collecting taxes and began to rule). Bengal
was initially
the richest province of British India and the value of land
tax collected under
the 1793 Permanent Settlement was actually more than the total
land tax
collected within Britain in that period. Bengal was the
revenue base from where
British conquest extended over the whole of India,
with the annexation of Punjab
coming almost a
century later in 1848. Bengal experienced a paradoxical type
of ‘development’:
it was systematically ripped off by Britain,
which took away every year
vast volumes of products, crops and textiles from peasants and
artisans,
essentially as tax, without any real payment. This was because
a part of the
taxes collected from these very same peasants and artisans
were used to ‘buy’
their products by the Company, so in effect they were handing
over these goods
free, as that part of tax. Such systematic denuding of the
province every year
over a long period continuously depressed the incomes and
purchasing power of
the masses, and one important index of impoverishment was the
steadily
declining nutritional level of the population. At the same
time, the zamindari
system and the new educational system created a class of
urbanised rich
rentiers and rising professionals who were, by upbringing and
education,
completely subservient to imperial interests. Calcutta
grew ever larger as the port city through which unpaid exports
were sent out of
the country, and Lancashire textiles were imported to the
detriment of Bengal’s
spinners and weavers. All of this provided
employment to traders, transporters and port coolies so that
the proportion of
workers in tertiary or service sector activities went up while
the proportion
working in manufacturing fell, and this remained true even
with jute and cotton
textile mills coming up.
The
inter-war depression affected rural people badly as crop
prices declined, and
so did employment. Between 1911 and 1947, per capita food
grains availability
fell by 38 per cent in undivided Bengal,
mainly because there was absolute decline in rice output as
more land and
resources went to the export crops the rulers wanted. In no
other province was
the situation so bad as to lead to an absolute fall in
foodgrain output itself,
although every other province saw a fall in per head grain
output. Long-term
impoverishment and lowered nutrition reduced the resistance of
the population
in Bengal and made it more
vulnerable to the
shock of the great famine.
The
history of colonised Bengal
had begun with a
massive famine, the 1770 famine which killed an estimated
one-third of the
population; and it ended with another massive famine, the
famine of 1943–44
which killed over 30 lakh persons and reduced five times that
number to utter
destitution. This was a famine created by the British
government which placed
the entire burden of financing Allied troops and air
operations in the
anti-Japan war, on India.
But because Bengal was near the frontline, in practice the
construction of
barracks and airstrips, the maintenance and provisioning of
the Allied troops
and air force personnel, all took place in this eastern
region, and it was the
primary resources of this region which had to meet the vastly
increased demand.
Rs 3,800 crore was the extra expenditure burden put on the
people during the
war. The result was rapid food price inflation, a trebling of
rice prices over
only eighteen months, reducing the already undernourished
rural poor to
starvation. A war, whose cost a rich industrial Britain
should have met, was imposed on the people of Bengal,
and the price they were made to pay was over thirty-one lakh
lives. But all
this does not alter the bhadralok intellectuals’
reverence for all
things western, and we do not find to this day a single
realistic economic
analysis of the Bengal famine which places the blame where it
belongs, on the
deliberate policy pursued by the imperialists to put the
burden of war finance
on defenceless peasants and artisans of India in general and
on Bengal in
particular. No people have perhaps suffered as much as the
people of Bengal have done
under colonial rule, and none has been
more badly served by its west-oriented liberal intellectuals –
a proposition
which remains true to this day. Those who have served the
people well have been
the political activists of the Communist movement including
pre-eminently Jyoti
Basu, who de-classed themselves from bhadralok servility
by their
adherence to and practice of Marxism.
As
early as 1940, the Floud Commission (Land Revenue Commission,
Bengal), in its
report, had drawn attention to the fact that actual tenant
cultivators could
not be called labourers since they provided the cattle,
ploughs, all inputs and
their labour, but had to hand over half their gross produce
including
by-products as rent to the superior right holder. Though an
Act was on the anvil
to increase the share of the bargadar, nothing was
done by the
government led by Suhrawardy, who admitted to Jyoti Basu (as
he points out in
his memoirs) opposition from landed interests as the reason.
After the war
ended, the peasantry was prepared to wait no longer. A major
agrarian agitation
erupted, the Tebhaga movement, which demanded increase of the
adhiyar–bargadar’s
share to two-thirds of the crop. This was led by the Krishak
Front of the
Communist Party and was particularly active in the districts
of Mymensingh, Barisal,
Rangpur, Dinajpur, Jessore, Khulna and 24-Parganas.
It succeeded to some
extent in raising the tenant’s share of the produce. The
movement of 1945–47
ended with Partition and the expectation of new measures from
the government of
Independent India and Pakistan.
FORMIDABLE
TASK OF
RECONSTRUCTION
Quite
apart from the actual loss of lives in the famine, by the time
of Independence, Jyoti Basu’s
Bengal was flooded with
millions of peasants and artisans reduced to destitution, and
millions of
people poured in from the eastern part of Bengal
after Partition. Nevertheless, the joy of political
independence was
irrepressible and the ultra-left slogan ‘Yeh azadi jhuti
hai’ (‘This
freedom is a lie’) found few takers. Reconstruction was a
formidable task and
without the work of the communists among the refugee
population and the
peasantry from whom they recruited new cadres, the successive
Congress
governments would have got nowhere. Although the West Bengal
Estates
Acquisition Act and the West Bengal Land Reforms Act had been
passed by 1953
and 1955 respectively, implementation was slow and the
festering unresolved
agrarian problem meant that the vital agricultural sector
remained in the
doldrums. Shortages persisted, reaching crisis point in many
years. The Food
Movement of 1959 was a landmark agitation the Communist Party
undertook. During
the India–China conflict in 1962 large numbers of communists
in India
were
jailed. Just as the imperialist war of 1914–18 in Europe had
sorted out the
communists from the social democrats, the China conflict was
the catalyst which
sorted out the left communists from the others and led to the
split of the
Communist Party of India (CPI), with Jyoti Basu being one of
the
founder-members of the new CPI-Marxist or CPI(M).
Soon
afterwards the Party in Bengal
had to contend
with left adventurism and its violent cult of individual
assassinations as the
Naxalbari movement erupted. Large numbers of cadres lost their
lives in this
period with the ensuing repression. A split in a communist
movement can be
dangerous if either right revisionism on the one hand or left
adventurism on
the other, dominates and the militant middle, despite its
correct line, cannot
carry the majority of the members. While in Bengal
the split and subsequent challenges were successfully handled,
in Andhra
Pradesh that had one of the strongest units of the CPI and
with the proud
legacy of the Telengana movement, decimation unfortunately
resulted since large
numbers of cadres went with either one or the other wrong
trend. We see today
again the rise of left adventurism and massacres of the
innocent in the
country, and while it faces inevitable defeat, before that
occurs it will take
a heavy toll in lives in the years to come.
UNPRECEDENTED
RECORD
While
Jyoti Basu had served in the 1967–70 United Front government
as well, the
opportunity to make a real difference to the miserable
situation of the people
of Bengal came with the
electoral victory of
the Left Front and government formation by the coalition led
by the CPI(M). The
Left Front was repeatedly voted back to power by the people of
Bengal in five successive
elections after that, creating
a world record of governance by communists within a federal
parliamentary
system, continuously for thirty-three years to date. What
explains this
unprecedented record which, it can be confidently stated, will
never be broken
in any other country? So anti-egalitarian is the economic and
social structure
in this country and so deeply rooted are the consequent
structures of
exploitation, that any sincere attempt to break this structure
and to
ameliorate the condition of the masses produces an
overwhelming response from
them. They gave their loyalty in abundance. The bhadralok
in the cities
and the rural elites continued in the main to pursue their
conservative agenda,
but the rural masses and the working classes were solidly
behind the Left Front
policies.
Bengal
was the only state which had put a ceiling on land-holding
from the very
beginning in the legislation, abolishing zamindari in the West
Bengal Estates
Acquisition Act 1953, and nearly eight lakh acres of land was
estimated to be
surplus above ceiling. Between 1967 and 1970, with the first
United Front
government in which Jyoti Basu served, six lakh acres were
distributed. Later
amendments lowered the ceiling to 6.2 standard acres subject
to a maximum of
17.3 standard acres for a nine-member family. After the Left
Front assumed
power, within a matter of three years between 1977 and 1980,
nearly 10 lakh acres
more ceiling surplus land was identified and three-quarters of
this actually
distributed within a few years. These implementation measures
resulted in a
larger area of ceiling-surplus land being distributed to the
landless in West
Bengal alone under Left Front rule by year 2000, than in
several other states
of India
combined to date. The revival of local democratic institutions
and regular
holding of panchayat elections were an integral part of the
success in
identifying and distributing ceiling-surplus land.
But the
abolition of zamindari estates did not mean a complete land
reform or end of
rentiers, for zamindars were only the very top of an entire
pyramid of
intermediaries who performed no labour but lived on the
surplus produced by the
actual tillers, the majority of whom had no legal existence
since they were
unrecorded sharecroppers. They still had to hand over half
their gross output
to the jotedar even when they provided the livestock assets,
working capital
and labour. In Bihar, an
attempt to register
the actual cultivators had to be called off owing to landlord
resistance. In Bengal, it
was the vision and determination of Jyoti Basu
and Harekrishna Konar, supported by Benoy Chaudhuri, which
accounted for
Operation Barga being carried through. Democratic
participation was the very
essence of this vision. As Harekrishna Konar had put it: "The
indispensable condition for success in implementation is that
the agricultural
labourers, poor peasants, bataidars, who are really interested
in land reform,
must be roused; their initiative and courage will have to be
developed so that
they can stand up before the mighty power of the landlords and
they must be asked
to come forward in an organised way to help the government to
implement."
The
innovative strategy of taking administration to the villages,
of involving
local peasant organisations, panchayats and potential
beneficiaries themselves,
while using to the full the hitherto unutilised provisions of
the law, worked.
Particularly noteworthy is the use of the Indian Evidence Act,
which permits
oral evidence to be collected and presented to counter the
written documents
marshalled by the powerful landlords to deny legal rights in
the courts to the
sharecroppers on oral leases. All measures of land reform
taken together,
including distribution of homestead land, are estimated to
have benefited
nearly three-fifths of rural households. Jyoti Basu was
acutely conscious that
whatever had been achieved was only implementation of the
democratic tasks of
the bourgeoisie, which the latter itself was no longer capable
of implementing,
and very far from any completely egalitarian radical land
redistribution which
is part of the socialist agenda. He repeatedly pointed out
that Bengal had to
function within a legal system which safeguarded private
property and a federal
structure which restricted the measures which could be taken,
that it was ‘not
the republic of West Bengal’. Nevertheless with all caveats,
what had been
achieved was of tremendous significance in unleashing the
confidence of the
masses, enabling them to pull themselves up by their own
efforts out of the
mire of acute poverty and degradation.
The
1980s was the golden decade for India
and particularly for Bengal,
while the impetus
was maintained well into the 1990s. Revival and vigorous
functioning of local
self-government institutions, combined with the fresh impetus
to productivity
in rural areas, led to Bengal surging ahead with the highest
annual rate of
foodgrain growth in the whole of India
at 4.2 percent, compared to
2.5 percent average in other major states, over the period
1980–81 to 1998–99.
This was crucial because, as Adam Smith had pointed out two
centuries earlier,
foodgrain prices determine all other primary prices through
feedgrain and wage
goods prices, and strongly impact labour-intensive
manufacturing as well. Cheap
food benefits the wage-paid working class, while the rural
producers do not
face large dips in prices when they raise output growth as
long as a
procurement system is in place. The state’s policy was
expansionary in the
1980s with development expenditures growing at over eight
percent annually, the
highest rate in India.
There
was a substantial positive trend growth in employment and
incomes in both rural
and urban Bengal, and the consumption expenditure data show
that a larger
decline took place in poverty in Bengal
than
in any other state. Of course, given the fact that the initial
level of
destitution, for the reasons analysed earlier, was much higher
in Bengal than
in most other regions, even this large order of improvement
did not mean that
all the problems of Bengal’s poor were solved. Medical
services’ expansion to
the required extent was thwarted by urban doctors with a
dog-in-the-manger
attitude – refusing to serve in rural areas, they nevertheless
agitated against
a plan to have a special health worker cadre with a shorter
training period to
deliver basic health care. They acted as a selfish
professional group bent on
maintaining their monopoly of skills, and they continue to
constitute a highly
conservative body at the national level, determined to exclude
deprived social
groups from their ranks. Despite these problems, one must
appreciate the
remarkable improvement in many important aspects of welfare
that Bengal achieved.
National
Sample Survey (NSS) data show that while in 1977–78, when the
Left Front first
assumed government, as much as 40 percent of the rural
population in West
Bengal could not spend enough to access even 1,800 calories
energy, a very low
level, fifteen years later, by 1993–94, this proportion had
dropped to 17
percent, the largest reduction in extreme poverty anywhere in
India over any
period. Thus nearly a quarter of the population, constituting
the very poor,
had moved up in nutritional status. The significance of this
may be judged by a
comparison – in rural Gujarat, Maharashtra
and
Tamilnadu in 1993–94, as much as 36, 38 and 43 percent of the
population
respectively was unable to get even 1,800 calories per day.
For a state which
had come through a traumatic war-time famine and rural
destitution, the large
order of improvement in the situation of the poor in Bengal
was a particularly important achievement. While in rural Bengal
in 1977–78, as much as 67 percent of the population could not
spend enough to obtain
even 2,100 calories daily, fifteen years later this figure had
dropped to 42
percent. Similarly there was a substantial decline in urban
poverty as well, to
18 percent below an 1,800 calorie intake by 1993–94, much
lower than in other
urbanised states. After 1991 there was very sharp contraction
in public
spending by the central government and all states as
neo-liberal policies were
imposed on the people. West Bengal
too was
obliged to engage in public spending cuts as there was
substantially reduced tax
devolution from the central government and loans carried very
high interest.
After
the demolition of the Babri Masjid and rise of the Bharatiya
Janata Party (BJP)
elsewhere, a young Bengali intellectual was heard by this
author to remark
rather complacently that Bengalis were not communally minded,
unlike people in
other states, and right-wing communal forces could make little
headway. This
understanding however underestimates the strength of
communal–chauvinist forces
in Bengal, forgets communal riots during Partition, and does
not give due
credit to the unremitting struggle of the Left parties against
communalism and
in promoting progressive thinking, which marginalised these
forces but which
have never been fully defeated. It should be remembered that
it was a Bengali
who had provided leadership of the Hindu Mahasabha and set up
the Jan Sangh,
which was to reinvent itself as the Bharatiya Janata Party in
the 1970s. It was
Bengal which had spawned
chauvinist organisations
of the extreme right such as Anand Marg and Amra Bangali.
After the assumption
of government by the Left Front, no quarter was given to
communal forces; the
parties representing these forces and their violent behaviour
was described by
Jyoti Basu as ‘uncivilised’, an adjective the use of which was
very typical of
the man and which incensed the BJP leaders. Jyoti Basu took
decisive action to
smash every attempt – and they did occur – by right-wing
forces to promote
communal disharmony in Bengal.
For over three
decades while other areas of the country saw instigation of
violence and
communal rioting, including the capital Delhi which went up in
flames in 1984,
in Bengal minority communities have felt safe because Bengal
has been made to
remain free of communal violence. And that has been a major
achievement of
Jyoti Basu and the movement he led.
Jyoti
Basu wrote his own epitaph thus – ‘There is nothing more
valuable in life than
the love of the people. We are always ready to sacrifice our
lives for a
greater cause.’ A most remarkable life, spent in struggle and
service of the
exploited. A life to be emulated, but impossible to emulate.
This
article was published in Social Scientist,
Issue 446–447,
Volume 38, Numbers 7–8, July–August 2010. Sub-Headings have
been added - Ed
People's Democracy