In his seat, Jyoti Basu is a fading star

SATGACHIA: Jyoti Basu was the Left Front's legendary longest serving chief minister of Bengal. He was also MLA from Satgachia constituency. A little over 50km south of Kolkata, today Satgachia remembers Jyoti Babu well but perhaps not very fondly. "I used to see him at election time, giving speeches in the maidan. But he hardly ever came here. He used to say, 'I am the chief minister of all of Bengal, why should I favour Satgachia just because its my constituency?'" remembers 77 year old Premchand Deshmukh, a former jute mill worker.
Bustling town markets and idyllic village scenes make up Satgachia's picturesque landscape. Dotted with ponds and fields, shaded with coconut, palm, banana and supari trees, krishnachura flowers in full bloom, Satgachia could be the ideal pastoral water colour.
Satgachia was one of the first CPM bastions to fall to the Trinamool in 2001, part of the great momentum in which Red stalwarts fell like ninepins in Mamata's anti Left purge. In 2014, 9-time CPM winner Basudeb Acharia humiliatingly lost Bankura to actor Moon Moon Sen. In Barrackpore the 20 year reign of CPM heavyweight Tarit Baran Topdar was brought down by the TMC's Dinesh Trivedi. Satgachia too is part of that pattern. Today the constituency has been represented 3 times by the TMC's Sonali Guha. "When we ring her up even late at night, she always comes rushing. We could never think of doing that with Jyoti Babu," says medical doctor Sheikh Arab Ali. "He was like a rainbow. We could look at him but not touch him."
Then and now: Basu campaigning in Satgachia, 1989 (left). In 2016, with illustrious Russian comrades for company, the ex-CM who passed away in 2010 waves from the wall (right). (TOI photos)
"Can anyone forget the great Jyoti Basu?" asks former Jute mill worker Shankar Pramanik. "He created something in Satgachia out of nothing. But its the Trinamool which has given us pakka roads, tubewells, ambulance services and a hospital. Jyoti Basu only started the drinking water plant which was completed by the Trinamool."
Left cadres ruled Satgachia with an iron grip from 1996 to 2001, a control that was so total that Jyoti Basu could win in 1977, 82,87,93, 98 without even spending too much time here. The constituency was managed by his deputy Gokul Bairagi, a widely disliked figure who subsequently contested and lost against the TMC. The only photos or remembrances of Jyoti Basu in Satgachia are in the CPM office. Black and white snaps of the forbidding Red supremo in all his stern unsmiling hauteur hang on the walls although the new generation of party workers say they don't remember him at all.
"We don't really remember Jyoti Basu, but we do know that when he started representing Satgachia there was nothing here," says 28 year old CPM zonal in charge Bishwanath Panja. "There was never a corruption syndicate in his time as there is now. Jyoti Basu never pushed himself here because the Left doesn't believe in personality cults the way the TMC does."
Tarun Ray, zila parishad official and TMC member says during Jyoti Basu's time the residents of Satgachia were constantly deprived. "There was no electricity. When the power went off, we would all say Jyoti Basu chole gelen. We saw electricity as rarely as we saw Jyoti Basu." That is why, he says, TMC wins today by 25,000 to 30,000 votes.
Lack of personal contact with voters, reliance on the party machine to deliver victories, a zealous attachment to de-humanising ideology, the familiar pattern of the Left's joyless pulverizing politics plays out in Satgachia as well. Remembers 74 year old Binarani Naskar, "Jyoti babu had a lot of stamina, he used to walk very fast. But he never sat with us or drank chai with us. Only CPM workers used to control our lives. Today when Mamata comes here she talks to us."
The consistent complaint from Satgachia residents is the lack of job opportunities. Says resident Ankur Bera, "people in Satgachia are still living by farming and agriculture. There is only one Birla jute mill nearby and that too we never know when its closed or open. There are two schools. But where will young educated people go for jobs?"
Voters here say they are proud that Satgachia was Jyoti Babu's constituency although they never felt they belonged to him. "The Left did not believe in joga-jog (personal contact) with people. Jyoti Babu would come by helicopter and leave," says schoolteacher Aparna Pramanik. "The footsoldiers of the Left were horrible," remembers Sheikh Afzal Durji, "they can never win again here."
In the 'lal durg' or red fortress of Satgachia, today the Trinamool is triumphant. Says farmer Paresh Manna, 70, "We get rice for Rs 2 from the TMC. The Left used to talk about big things but never did anything." Says local journalist Kunal Malik, "If Leftists are supposed to care about the poor then Didi is the true Leftist."