Buddhadevdas Babu

A spectre is haunting the CPI(M) – the spectre of Buddhadev Bhattacharjee. On Sunday, for those who still cared to look eastwards, to see Bhattacharjee changed from the clean-shaven, white dhoti-clad former West Bengal chief minister whom Mamata Banerjee trussed aside in 2011 to someone sporting a thick white beard and pyjama and looking vaguely hungover behind his dark glasses was to see the poribortan – change – that has undergone the CPI(M) in the last four years.

We had heard of Buddha-babu’s gradual withdrawal from public life because of the pulmonary disease he has been suffering from for almost a year (thanks to his lifelong smoking habit). We had seen less and less of him among his comrades, and when we heard last month that he had informed his party colleagues that he would like to leave all party positions because of his poor health, we saw the party reflected in the man and the man reflected in the party.

We registered more than a simple change of face in the 71-year-old Bhattacharjee on Sunday as he addressed the sea of heads at the Brigade Parade Ground. For one, it was not state CPI(M) secretary Biman Bose, three years Bhattacharjee’s senior but as anachronistic as ever, who presided over proceedings but Bhattacharjee. Even as he addressed the crowd, the Tata logo tellingly visible on top of the Tata Centre highrise looming to his right, the successor to Jyoti Basu tried to muster some hammer and brimstone by focusing on the twin evils of the Trinamool Congress and the BJP.

But what he managed to muster was more Lear than Leninist: “Brigade calls for this government to go! The power that is needed to overthrow this government, we need that power!” adding, “This government has turned this state into a hellhole. This hellhole cannot go on!” It is clear that despite the battle around the corner in the 2016 assembly elections for the position of the main opposition party in Bengal being with the BJP, it is the Banerjee government that Bhattacharjee wants to be in the CPI(M)’s crosshairs.

Seated next to his longstanding bete noire, the Teflonated national general secretary Prakash Karat, Bhattacharjee looked out of place, out of time. And yet perhaps because of exactly that, he seems a truer reflection of today’s CPI(M) a month before the 93-seat civic body elections and a year before the 294-seat assembly polls in the state. Across the aisle from where the last Left Front chief minister sits, the man who will probably succeed Biman Bose as state secretary — and therefore lead the CPI(M) to the 2016 assembly polls – Surjya Kanta Mishra seems daunted not so much by the crowds in front of him but by the patriarchs on his left.

And craning his neck up at the sky, Bhattacharjee looks the part of the protagonist of one of his favourite novels, Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Autumn of the Patriarch. He knows that he has failed to stem the rot in the party, unable to even brandish the once-legendary support (read: power) to cadre members across West Bengal. Even according to its own figures, the CPI(M) reckons that 50,000-odd party workers have been rendered homeless across Bengal since the Trinamool took to the wheel in 2011 – a fact that would hardly make an enticing offer for fresh entrants in a party that has been seeing membership diminishing every month.

In all this, the bearded figure seated near the centre of the dais on Sunday is barely in the middle of things any more. His request to be relieved from a party may or may not be granted at the five-day 24th state conference that started on Monday, depending on how the national leadership sees him as a venerable mascot playing foil to the other former chief minister but less venerable VS Achuthanandan in Kerala.

What one saw of Bhattacharjee at the Brigade Parade Ground earlier this weekend was a Buddha-babu in Devdas mode — not clutching a bottle, but the vestiges of being political; not pining for a Paro but quietly mourning for a people whom he had sought to lead into the future in a very different way from how governments before his had and the government after his does; not finding unstable comfort in Chandramukhi, but in The Party, whom Buddhadevdas loves and loathes at the same time by now in a very similar bhadralok gone-to-seed way.