hi,below is a piece by jug suriya.it is, as they say, different from the usual
obituary one encounters.
regards.
Thank you, Jyotida
Jug Suraiya
Though we never met, i have much to thank Jyoti Basu
for. Had it not been for him – or rather, for the party that he so eminently
represented for so many years, even before he became Bengal’s chief minister in
1977 – i may not have been in Delhi,
working for the TOI, and writing this column. It was thanks to Jyotida, and the
policies of the party that he stood for, that i – like many middle-class
professionals – had to leave what was then called Calcutta as an economic
refugee and try and make a new life for myself in distant and
alien Delhi.
I was brought up in Calcutta,
and i never wanted to leave. In a way, i never did leave Calcutta; it left me,
and many others like
me, like an ebbing tide leaving us stranded on whatever shore we could find to
call home. In my case, this was to be Delhi,
a place which, in the 23 years that i’ve been here, has got inured to me, as i
have to it.
Delhi is so different
from the Calcutta that was, and from the Kolkata that is. The Calcutta – or at
least, the middle-class central Calcutta – that i grew up in was a gracious,
civilised city, in many ways the leading
city of India. It was a safe
and clean city. Every afternoon, the streets would be washed down with hosed
water to settle the dust. Along public footpaths, flower beds bloomed and
children walked unescorted to schools. The best educational institutions – both
schools and colleges – were in Calcutta. Calcutta University was the foremost
university in the land, and the jewel in its crown was Presidency College. I
couldn’t get into Presidency
– my school-leaving marks (from La Martiniere) weren’t good enough – but i did
make it into St Xavier’s, where Jyoti Basu had himself studied as a schoolboy
more than 30 years before me.
Jyotida was very much a product of the cultural sense
and sensibility that was fostered not only by St Xavier’s but by the city as a
whole: urbane, cosmopolitan and liberal-minded. In some ways, Calcutta wasn’t
just a city but a world view,
a perspective that Jyoti Basu reflected so well, the quintessential Calcuttan
equally at home with Shakespeare and Tagore, the pucca sahib in an elegantly
pleated bhadralok dhoti.
How did Calcutta become a Cinderella in reverse, the glittering belle of
the ball turn into a
provincial drab? The CPM had a stock reply to that question: stepmotherly
treatment by the Centre. By this simple formula the party absolved itself of
all responsibility for Calcutta’s
growing ills that saw the city transform itself from a hub of industrial and
intellectual activity into an economic and professional backwater whose
stagnancy bred little other than the mosquito bites of daily frustrations.
Jyotida was chief minister for 23 years; his party has
ruled Bengal uninterruptedly for over 30
years. During this time it presided over the so-called flight of capital from
Calcutta, as industry and business sought safe havens far
from Bengal’s increasingly intractable labour
unions.
The CPM did undertake one of the most successful rural
land reform movements in the country. But Operation Barga came at a price:
neglected Calcutta sank into a quagmire of despair. And in the countryside,
those who dared to
vote against the Marxists were in danger of having their hands chopped off; a
macabre reminder not to vote for the Congress’s hand symbol. Absolute power had
corrupted absolutely.
I was first offered a job in TOI in Delhi in early 1986. It took me till
July
1987 to accept the offer; i didn’t want to leave Calcutta. When i did leave,
people accused
me: How can you betray Calcutta like this? A little later the same people asked
me if i could find them a job
in Delhi. Who
had betrayed whom? Had we betrayed Calcutta, or
had Jyotida’s Calcutta betrayed us?
Delhi,
for all the savagery of its climate and its denizens, has been good to me, as
has the TOI. I’m grateful to both. And to Jyotida, for having forced me to fly
the nest of Calcutta and find a new home elsewhere. I’m also grateful to his
politburo, who didn’t
let him become PM. Because if he had, where would i have fled to then?
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