By IANS,
Kolkata: A colourful mass leader with a penchant for courting controversies, Subhas Chakraborty was a rare leader of a regimented Communist party who never shied away from airing views and acting contrary to the party line.
The scenes of inconsolable weeping at the AMRI Hospital where he died Monday morning at age 67 and the swelling crowds of admirers along the route from the hospital to Peace Haven, a funeral parlour, is testimony to Chakraborty’s popular appeal, a yardstick to gauge the success of a public figure.
Gloom also descended in Kolkata’s sports hub, the Maidan, and several clubs flew their flags at half mast. Chakraborty took keen interest in sports and was always seen in his wide Panama hat.
Although his party held the view that religion was the opium of the masses, Chakraborty advocated that Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPI-M) leaders should take part in religious festivals to maintain mass contact.
He offered puja at the revered Shiva temple in Tarakeshwar last year. Even CPI-M patriarch Jyoti Basu, otherwise a strong backer of Chakraborty in the party, disapproved of the Tarakeshwar act. But Chakraborty remained unfazed.
Very recently, in a televised interview, Chakraborty forcefully held that party bosses needed to contest elections to understand the public pulse well, a comment many interpreted as a snub to general secretary Prakash Karat.
In that interview, he also expressed his opposition to Karat’s efforts to cobble a Third Front in the run up to the Lok Sabha elections. Chakraborty was publicly censured for his comments but the matter ended at that.
He also went against the party line of not observing the birthdays of living leaders by organising grand celebrations on Basu’s birthday every year.
Time and again, during his uninterrupted ministerial stint for 27 long years, Chakraborty’s comments caused a stir in the corridors of the CPI-M, but he escaped virtually unscathed.
Each time, the organisational bosses shied away from taking stern action against Chakraborty, partly because of the patronage of Jyoti Basu and largely because of his grassroot support base.
However, his controversial public stands and complaints about his often ‘uncommunistic’ approaches saw Chakraborty failing to keep pace with his contemporaries in the CPI-M’s hierarchy, despite over half a century of his association with the communist movement.
His organisational capability was noticed by legendary CPI-M leader Pramod Dasgupta. He was drafted into the state committee in 1971 alongside Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee and Biman Bose. Four years later, the late Anil Biswas was included.
But while the other three made it to the state secretariat and CPI-M central committee in the 1980s and subsequently to the politburo, Chakraborty got a berth in the state secretariat only last year. And that too after Jyoti Basu publicly demanded that Chakraborty be included in the central committee and state secretariat.
Known for his ability to mobilise the masses for CPI-M’s mammoth rallies in the sprawling Brigade Parade Ground, Chakraborty was many a times entrusted with tough responsibilities which he carried out successfully.
An instance was the controversy following the death of a godman Balak Brahmachari in 1993 whose thousands of followers refused to cremate him saying he was still alive. Following a directive from Basu, Chakraborty carried out a bloodless mission along with the administration – he freed the body from the custody of the guru’s followers and got it cremated.
Chakraborty boasted time and again: “I have the ability to implement whatever I plan, except making a dead man alive.”
He also took on party bosses by coming out in support of former Lok Sabha speaker Somnath Chatterjee when the latter refused to resign from the post ahead of the July 2008 trust vote in parliament.
Chakraborty had said then: “The post of speaker has its sanctity and is above party politics. Chatterjee was elected unanimously by the members of all political parties. The speaker’s case should not be viewed as a CPI-M party affair.” That remark too invited censure from his party.