Kolkata: Veteran Left leader and former West Bengal Chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee, who passed away at his Kolkata residence on Thursday morning at 80, was a firm believer of the slogan “Agriculture is our base, and industry is our future.”
The veteran CPM leader was unwell for a while, suffering from respiratory problems that led to frequent hospitalisations. He was put on life support last year after he contracted pneumonia.
As an alumnus of Presidency College, Bhattacharjee’s journey from a school teacher to a full-time politician is a testament to his dedication. His political career saw him serve as an MLA, a state minister, and eventually, the Deputy Chief Minister. His tenure as the Chief Minister, marked by the Left Front’s victories in the 2001 and 2006 Assembly polls, was a significant chapter in West Bengal’s political history.
Even during the closing years of the Left Front regime in West Bengal, when the entire state was rocked by a movement against land acquisition for industry, Bhattacharjee maintained that without industrial development, the long-term welfare of the workers could not be achieved.
And there lies the irony.
Sailing over a wave of slogans for industrialisation, the CPI(M)-led Left Front retained power in Bengal for a record seventh consecutive term in 2006 with a brute majority, winning 235 seats in the 294-member West Bengal Assembly.
Buoyed by the landslide victory, Bhattacharjee went about his task of fulfilling the industrialisation dream.
On the day of his swearing-in ceremony that year, Tata Group Chairman Ratan Tata announced that he would set up a Tata Motors small car factory at Singur in the Hooghly district.
Proposals for WIPRO’s second unit and Infosys’ first unit on the outskirts of Kolkata followed, and both these I-T giants were allotted 50 acres of land each.
Next came the proposal from Indonesia-based Salim Group for setting up a chemical hub at Nandigram in the East Midnapore district.
However, amid all these, discontent was growing among the farmers in both Singur and Nandigram over the state government’s proposed land acquisition for industrial projects.
It was during this time that the Trinamool Congress, led by Mamata Banerjee, sensed an opportunity in the growing discontent among the farmers. They strategically used the farmers’ unrest as a turning point to challenge the Left Front government’s three-decade rule.
The rest is history.
In Singur, the Trinamool led the agitations for days by blocking the National Highway in front of Tata Motors’ Nano small car project site.
The Trinamool also launched agitations against fresh government approval for a special economic zone (SEZ), which posed uncertainty for the proposed projects of WIPRO and Infosys.
Amid all these challenges, Bhattacharjee remained resolute in his commitment to industrialization, even if it meant going against his party’s stance. He lamented that he was part of a party that still believed in ‘strikes and lockouts’.
“Thousands of talented youths are passing out college every year with dreams in their eyes. Unfortunately, they have to travel to far-off places in search of jobs. We will have to stop this brain drain at any cost. For that purpose, we need large-scale investments both in the manufacturing as well as the services sector,” he told media persons frequently at the Writers’ Buildings, which used to be the state secretariat then.
However, as the agitations in Singur and Nandigram grew in scale, posing a serious threat to the state government, the latter was forced to scrap the project in Nandigram before Ratan Tata announced the Group’s decision to pull out from Singur in October 2008.
“I think some time back, I mentioned that if somebody puts a gun to my head, you will pull the trigger or you take the gun away because I will not move my head. I think Ms (Mamata) Banerjee has pulled the trigger,” Ratan Tata famously said that day.
Since then, mediapersons covering the events and the Chief Minister closely noticed Bhattacharjee getting into a shell, as his daily interactions with reporters started to become less frequent.
His isolation from the public eye deepened after the 2011 Assembly polls, which not only marked the end of the 34-year Left Front rule but also his personal defeat from the Jadavpur Assembly constituency, a seat he held for five consecutive terms, at the hands of Trinamool’s Manish Gupta.
With his passing, the dream of an ‘industrially-rejuvenated Bengal’ remains unfulfilled, a poignant reminder of the potential future that could have been.
(IANS Obituary)
