Nonagenerian Jyotibabu in His Labyrinth
Jete Jete Ekla Pathe Nibhechhe More Baati......
As I went through the Indian perliamentary election results, I observed Trinamul Congress sweeping over the left parties led by the CPIM (details you can read from the national press). The reason I admire Rommel as one of the finest generals, for the same reason I have to write on Mr. Jyoti Basu for the benefit of my landed- homeowner- noncommunist colleagues and students. I have to describe Mr. Jyoti Basu in a fair and unprejudiced manner as a redneck professor (however temporary).
As the nonagenerian patriarch , a nice father, ponders inside his labyrinth, he must be paging through the memories of his
prodigal sons and his neglected abondoned children. I also paged through my memory to re-discover how he became a legend. When I was very very young, my villagers used to talk about Atulya babu, Ajay Babu, Jyoti Babu and Profulla Babu. With Jyotibabu, Bengalis went through "Jukta-Front" Governments, Naxals, 71's Kolkata, Indian Emergency, the long long left rule and finally the Trinamul Congress. If the rise of the left power in Kolkata were due to Jayprakash Narayan and Jyotibabu, is the fall of the left due to Rahul Gandhi and Mamata Bannerjee?
The patriarch had other options. He could have become prime-minister with the Congress, had he resigned from the CPIM. He also could have started a new party, after the disintegration of the former Soviet Union, if he were not happy with the SFI/CITU and precursors of Trinamul Congress. He stuck to his ideology and theory instead.
The other day one student asked me "what is left?" He found the term in the front page of Times of India. I laughed and said " they are communists"! He did not get scared! I could imagine what would have happened, as a child, had I asked my father or grandfather about "Charu Mazumdar" or "Vinod Mishra". They must have gotten paranoid. Discussing about politics (left or right) in a lower middle class Brahmin family living in rented house or in a railway quarter is not same as attending lectures by Nehru in Durbar Hall of Delhi.
And that is the reason Mr. Jyoti Basu takes due credit from my family.
SG,
Bangalore,
May 17, 2009.
