Basu listened, laughed and mildly flirted

The year that Jyoti Basu became chief minister of West Bengal was the year my family moved to Calcutta from Bombay (both cities were thus called in 1977). It was a strange time for India.

The Emergency had just been lifted and the great Indira Gandhi, grand empress of India, had been defeated in a general election.

There was excitement about the change everywhere and the triumph of democracy against authoritarianism. In Bengal, the election of the first full-fledged Communist government was also in some sense a triumph for democracy, odd though that may sound.

Of course, at that time no one could have foretold that Basu would go on to be the country’s longest serving chief minister nor that the Left front would rule Bengal, seemingly in perpetuity.

As Basu and his government concentrated on much-needed land reforms and bolstering the trade unions, Calcutta — recovering from the aftermath of Naxal violence and the Bangladesh war — was no city of joy.

Power cuts that lasted 14 hours, endless “michhils” or processions which meant traffic jams could last up to five hours and the feeling of being crushed under the weight of an imploding civic system made for mixed feelings as far as the middle class were concerned.

As for Basu, he did not fit the conventional model of an Indian Communist. His family was well-off, his son was in business and he, it is said, liked a whiskey or two at the Calcutta Club.

Plus, his car was a Toyota — at any rate he did not ride into the Calcutta Club in a rickety Fiat or even a Calcutta transport bus carrying a mandatory jhola. He was a figure who was made for legend and myth as he stood apart from and above his colleagues and his peers.

But it was many years later that I got to meet him, under unusual circumstances. As it happened, two of my grand uncles had been Communists in their youth — as was customary —  and spent some years underground with Basu.

Both relatives went on to become complete capitalists — also the norm — but maintained a close relationship with Basu and his family. On two occasions in the 1990s — when I coincidentally happened to be in Kolkata (as it was by then) some family members were invited to dinner with him at a Calcutta five star hotel.

By this time, Basu was clearly contemplating retirement — the historic blunder had already been made and Prakash Karat and the politburo had denied him the chance to become prime minister.

He sat spryly and wisely on one side of a sofa and refused to be drawn into conversations about politics, the recent spurt of industrialisation in Bengal or even the future of the state and the country. Instead, he was content to listen and let others do the talking. But there were some exceptions.

Every now and then, he would speak, but mainly to the women of the party. He just asked a few questions — about themselves, their lives, what they were doing. He listened and laughed and made a few dry wisecracks. He was arrogant with the men but all charm with the women — the ages of whom ranged from 70 to 14 and all of whom were given the same special treatment.

It was an intriguing view of a powerful man or perhaps it was an expression of that power. He was content not to grab the spotlight — under which he had lived for so long — but apparently would rather do some very mild flirting and effectively use the twinkle in his eye. He showed the sophistication which he was known for.

The evening provided a glimpse into the other side of power. All too often, our politicians do not come across as human but Basu was all that and more.

He was known then and is admired today for his sagacity, his pragmatism and his good counsel in times of trouble. He was, as a result, held up to a higher standard for most of his public life and castigated when he failed — as we all inevitably do.