Jyoti Basu
Jyoti Basu was an Indian Marxist theorist, communist activist, and politician. He was one of the most prominent leaders of Communist movement in India. He served as the 6th and longest serving Chief Minister of West Bengal from 1977 to 2000. He was one of the founding members of the Communist Party of India. He was a member of Politburo of the party since its formation in 1964 till 2008. He was also a member of West Bengal Legislative Assembly 11 times. In his political career, spanning over seven decades, he was noted to have been the India's longest serving chief minister in an elected democracy, at the time of his resignation. He declined the post of Prime Minister after the 1996 Indian general election after the CPM refused to let him head a multi-party coalition as it would not be able to implement Marxist programs and relinquished the prime ministership to Deve Gowda.
Early life and education
Jyotirindra Basu was born on 8 July 1914 to an upper middle class Bengali Kayastha Hindu family at 43/1 Harrison Road, Calcutta, British India. His father, Nishikanta Basu was a doctor whose hometown was the village of Barudi, Narayanganj in Dhaka District of the Bengal Presidency while his mother Hemlata Basu was a housewife. He grew up in an Indian style joint family and was the youngest of three siblings. He had an affectionate nickname called Gana. One of his elder uncles, Nilinkanta Basu was a judge in the Calcutta High Court. His family also retained ancestral lands in Barudi where Jyoti Basu is described to have spent part of his childhood. The Barudi home of Basu was later turned into a library after his death, reportedly on his wishes.Basu's schooling began in 1920 at Loreto School Kindergarten in Dharmatala, Calcutta. His father shortened his name from Jyotirindra to Jyoti during the time of admission. However, three years later he was shifted to the St. Xaviers School, Calcutta. He completed his intermediate education from St. Xaviers in 1932. Subsequently, he took an undergraduate course in English from the prestigious Presidency College. Following his graduation in 1935, he acquired admission in the University College, London to study Law and became a barrister at Middle Temple on 26 January 1940. He had already left for India by the time he acquired his barristerial qualification which he received in absentia.
During his stay in London, he became involved in political discourse and activism for the first time. Besides his general curriculum at UCL, he would attend various lectures on political organisation, constitutional law, international law and anthropology at the London School of Economics. Due to which, he is also credited as an alumnus of LSE. He had reportedly attended the lectures of the political theorist and economist, Harold Laski and was influenced by his anti-fascism. By 1937, Basu was an active member of several anti-imperialist Indian students unions such as the India League and the Federation of Indian Students, and had become acquainted with young Indian communists such as Bhupesh Gupta and Snehangshu Acharya.
In 1938, he had also become a founding member of the London Majlis and subsequently its first secretary. Apart from raising public opinion for the cause of Indian independence, one of the primary functions of the Majlis was to arrange receptions for Indian leaders who were visiting England at the time. Through the Majlis, Basu came into contact with various Indian independence movement leaders such as Subhas Chandra Bose, Jawaharlal Nehru, Krishna Menon and Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit.
Before 1947 and independence movement
On returning to Calcutta, India in early 1940, Basu enrolled as a barrister at the Calcutta High Court, and married Basanti Ghosh. However, in the same year, he also inducted himself as an activist affiliated with the Communist Party of India. His entry into the communist movement at the time had reportedly been in opposition to the wishes of his relatively well off family. Following the Meerut conspiracy in 1929, the Communist Party had also been made illegal by British authorities, as a result Basu was initially involved in providing liaison and safe houses for underground Communist leaders in the Independence movement. However soon afterwards, he also became involved in organising railway workers, planning strikes and is described to have preferred direct action over ballot box in the initial years.In 1941, Basu was appointed the party secretary of the Bengal Assam Railway and tasked with organising a workers union. By May 1943, he had become the representative of the Calcutta Port Engineering Workers' Union in the All India Trade Union Congress, while the Bengal Assam Railway Workers Union under him increased its membership to over 4,000 with union members present in Dacca, Calcutta, Kanchrapara, Mymensingh, Rangpur and Assam.
In the following Bengal famine of 1943, the members of the Communist Party including Basu were involved in famine relief work. The party also organised "People's Food Committees" which would attempt to force hoarders into releasing their stocks for distribution; Basu participated in the organisation of such committees in Calcutta and Midnapore. According to Basu's testimony, they only had a small organisation at the time and did the best they could while the famine took the lives of over 3 million people. Basu was elected to the Bengal provincial committee of the Communist Party in the same year. He would later participate in the Tebhaga movement between 1945 and 1947 that sought to end the food crisis in Bengal, in a supportive capacity as a railway unionist.
By 1944, Basu had started leading the trade union activities of the Communist Party. He was again delegated to organise labourers working for the East Indian Railway Company in order to further the interests of the Indian workers and is described to have been instrumental in the formation of the Bengal Nagpur Railway Workers' Union of which he became the general secretary. With the merger of the Bengal Nagpur Railway Workers' Union and the Bengal Delhi Railroad Workers' Union in the same year, Basu was elected the general secretary of the new combined union. He would also be elected as the secretary of the All India Railwaymen's Federation.
In 1946, Basu was appointed by the Communist Party to contest as the candidate for the Railway Employees' constituency in the Bengal Legislative Assembly. He subsequently defeated Humayun Kabir of the Indian National Congress and was elected to the assembly. He is noted to have given a "soul stirring speech" on the presiding food crisis in the Bengal Assembly; according to him the only means of solving the issue was to completely dismantle the Zamindari system and the Permanent Settlement agreement, and to drive out the British with haste. Basu had also organised a continuous railway strike in support of the 1946 Royal Indian Navy ratings revolt, and later secured the release of various political prisoners on 24 July 1946.
Communist Party of India (1947–1964)
Interim government in West Bengal (1947–1952)
Following the partition of India, Basu remained as the member of the now divided West Bengal Legislative Assembly. Prafulla Chandra Ghosh of the conservative Indian National Congress became the first Chief Minister of West Bengal. The Congress however faced civil unrest from the onset; hartals, civil disobedience and demonstrations had soon become the order of the day in the face of a Congress government that was seen as unresponsive to the social and economic distress that was widespread in the state at the time.The new assembly therefore instituted the West Bengal Special Powers Act 1947 modelled on the Defence of India Act 1915; the act gave unchecked power to the bureaucracy and the police to suppress public agitations allowing law enforcement to detain individuals for up to 6 months without trial on reasonable grounds, which was justified on the grounds of maintaining the law and order situation. The bill was inordinately criticised and opposed by Basu who declared that "it seeks to perpetuate ". In 1948, the government sought to extend the act through the West Bengal Security Ordinance which would remove the restriction of "reasonable grounds" for imprisonment. According to Basu, the new ordinance had made it clear that the Congress intended to establish a police state in West Bengal. By this time, the state of West Bengal had already been declared as a "problem province" by the Congress administration and Bidhan Chandra Roy replaced as the new chief minister.
During the presentation of the ordinance as a bill in the assembly, Basu attempted to oppose it on a clause by clause basis but in vain due to the dominance of the Congress in the assembly, only the two communist legislators Ratanlal Brahmin and Basu along with independent members opposed the bill. Basu argued that while the Congress spoke of Kisan Raj, it had made no progress in abolishing the Zamindari system and had instead developed vested interests with the Zamindars themselves which resulted in the persistence of poor socioeconomic conditions and the employment of repressive tactics against agitations.
In the following period the Communist Party was made illegal by the government on allegations of trying to incite on open rebellion and Basu repeatedly arrested as a result; on 24 March 1948, he was imprisoned for a period of three months and released on the orders of the Calcutta High Court. In December 1948, he married a second time, but soon went into hiding and kept changing residences due to an ongoing crackdown on communist leaders. For a period at the time, he had reportedly lived alongside Indrajit Gupta, who would later become the Home Minister of India. In 1949, Basu had remained as the vice-president of the All India Railwaymen's Federation. In the same year, the federation had held a strike ballot which displayed overwhelming support for a railway strike on 9 March in demand of better wages and working conditions in the Indian Railways. The strike notice was however withdraw by the socialist leadership of the federation to whom the government had shown a reconciliatory attitude but the communist members under the leadership of Basu insisted on proceeding with the strike which resulted in disciplinary action being taken against the communists. Subsequently, the government also decided to crack down on the communist leadership by arresting 118 leaders involved in the railway sector in West Bengal including Basu. In the aftermath, the strike was a failure as the administration mobilised troops and police force to prevent any disruption from communist influenced union members.
After the adoption of the Constitution of India in 1950, the ban on the Communist Party was lifted on the orders of the Calcutta High Court. In September 1951, Congress attempted to renew the Security Act with the introduction of the West Bengal Security Bill of 1951 which raised criticism in the assembly on the lines of creating an environment of fear and intimidation on the eve of the first elections to the assembly which were to be held in December. Although the bill was passed once again despite Basu's persistent opposition, this time he had garnered the support of a number of Gandhian Congress members including from the former chief minister and architect of the bill, P. C. Ghosh, all of whom had resigned from the party and formed their own Kisan Mazdoor Praja Party by the time of voting. In same year, the Bengali daily organ Swadhinata of the Communist Party was resumed and Basu appointed as the president of its editorial board. The legislative assembly elections for 1951 were also held by the Election Commission in March 1952 instead.