West Bengal's Communist Leader Draws 25,000 at Rally

[user-Narotham Reddy]

From: Joydeep Mitra <joy...@bcmp.med.harvard.edu>

West Bengal's Communist Leader Draws 25,000 at Rally

By JOHN F. BURNS: February 12, 1998: New York Times: <let...@nytimes.com>

SONARPUR, India -- When Jyoti Basu arrived for an election rally in this
town on the southern fringes of Calcutta, a crowd of about 25,000 people
greeted him with shouts of "Lal Salaam!" meaning "Red Salute!" The podium was
draped with red bunting and a hammer-and-sickle insignia. Basu's first words
were in similar vein. "Comrades," he said, "I bring you fraternal greetings!"

In an India increasingly enamored of American-style capitalism, Basu might
be taken for a man out of his time. At 83, he is the pre-eminent figure in
India's fractured Communist Party. For 20 years, he has been chief
minister of West Bengal, a state with 75 million people.

His base is Calcutta, a city of 12 million people with dying industries
and festering slums that is an archetype of problems that accumulated in
the decades when India took the Soviet Union for its economic model.

Despite the Communists' failures, Basu remains hugely popular. "I love
Comrade Jyoti and everything he stands for," said Vishwanath Mitra, a
skinny stubble-bearded man who sat in the crowd clutching a red banner.
Mitra, 42, said he had worked for years as a painter for 3.50 rupees an hour,
barely 30 cents in the 1970s, before Communist reforms increased his daily
pay to 60 rupees, now about $1.30. "All I have achieved in life, I have
achieved through this flag," Mitra said.

But as Indians prepare for a general election that will culminate in a
final round of voting on March 7, Communists across India are having to do
some fresh thinking. For several years now, Basu's government has been hailed
by Western businessmen as one of the most investment-friendly among India's
25 states, to the point that some Indians question whether Basu's faction of
the party, the Communist Party of India (Marxist), remains Communist in
anything but name.

Now, another ideological somersault seems to be imminent, forced by the
political arithmetic of the election. Only 20 months ago, after a 1996
general election that produced the most splintered parliament in India's
history, Basu was invited to become prime minister in a coalition
government of 13 regional and leftist parties.

Under pressure from Communist hard-liners, Basu refused, saying the party
did not wish to compromise its principles by heading a government that
it could not fully control.

Basu later described the decision as a "historic blunder." But by then
the coalition government, under two lackluster prime ministers from
center-left parties, was stumbling toward political oblivion, finally
collapsing in December 1997.

This led to the current election, and polls that have established a
further rise in popularity of the Bharatiya Janata Party, or BJP, the
right-wing Hindu nationalist group whose specter forced the accommodations
between squabbling groups that produced the coalition government in 1996.

This time, Basu and the Communist Party of India (Marxist) have said they
will join a coalition and will agree to Basu's heading it, if the opportunity
arises. The reasons for the change of heart were made clear in Basu's speech
at the rally here, in which he said that the BJP's rise had confronted
Indians with a choice as crucial as any since independence in 1947.

Although the BJP has never been closer to winning an election, it has
chosen not to play down elements in its creed that have prompted critics
to say it favors a "Muslim bashing" India in which 700 million Hindus
would suppress the rights of 120 million Muslims.

In its election manifesto, the party has advocated a raft of policies that
are anathema to Muslims, including plans to build a Hindu temple on the site
of a 16th-century mosque, in the northern city of Ayodhya, that was
destroyed by a Hindu mob on Dec. 6, 1992.

To Basu, an atheist raised in a Hindu family, the BJP's plans amount to
an assault on the foundations of Indian democracy, as laid down by
Mohandas K. Gandhi and others in the independence generation. "The choice
before us has never been more clear, or more crucial," the Communist leader
said. "This is the 50th year of our independence, and the 50th year after the
assassination of Mahatma Gandhi, and it is time to think of what kind of
nation we have become."

He added: "After 5,000 years of civilization, do we want an India where
political power will rest with people who destroy mosques? Do we want to
be ruled by barbarians who will attempt to divide us on communal lines?
Or do you want an India where all people are treated equally, whatever
their religion, their caste or ethnic group? I say to all of you, this
is a dangerous moment in our history, so you must think very carefully
before you vote."

For Communists, the BJP's rise has required a shift in attitudes toward the
Congress Party, which ruled in New Delhi for most of the country's first
40 years as an independent nation. For much of that time, Congress was
anathema to the Communists. But recently Basu and other pragmatists have
argued that Communists must identify "the main enemy" -- the Hindu
nationalists -- and bury old differences with Congress.

The logic has become compelling in the wake of the resurgence of the
Congress Party under Sonia Gandhi, the Italian-born widow of Rajiv
Gandhi, the Congress Party leader assassinated in the final days of
campaigning for the 1991 election.

Drawing vast crowds across the country, Mrs. Gandhi has raised hopes
among Congress supporters that the party, in a slump for years, may revive
enough to emerge from the election with enough seats to lead a coalition.

Recent polls have suggested that Mrs. Gandhi's campaign is making inroads
into the BJP's earlier lead, perhaps enough to make a non-BJP government
possible. Outlook magazine, a widely respected weekly, reported in its
current edition that its latest poll, among 16,300 voters across the country
in the last week of January, showed the BJP and Congress neck and neck in
popular support, with slightly less than 30 percent backing for the parties
and groups allied to them. The poll showed 23 percent support for the United
Front, an alliance of parties that formed or supported the departing
government, including Basu's Communists. The remaining 17 percent
supported other splinter parties, or were undecided.

One of Basu's trickiest tasks has been to respond to Mrs. Gandhi's emergence
as a potential prime minister, a prospect that privately concerns many veteran
political leaders who may be forced to join in a Congress-led coalition or,
like Basu, are considered prime ministerial candidates themselves.

At Sonarpur, Basu described Mrs. Gandhi as "a housewife," a term also used
by BJP leaders. But the Communist leader sought to differentiate his remark
from that of the BJP leaders, who have lost no opportunity to belittle Mrs.
Gandhi.

"By calling her a housewife, I mean only honor to her, and in any case
I am not wrong," he said. "I am simply pointing out that she has spent
much of her life as many Indian women do, nurturing her children and
running her home."

As chuckles rippled through the crowd, the Communist leader added an
afterthought, as if to preserve his ideological rectitude, and perhaps
his hopes of becoming prime minister.

"Some say Sonia is Italian, that she has no right," he said. "But this
is nonsense; she is an Indian citizen, and has as much right to enter
politics as the rest of us. In any event, the issue has been overstated.
The Congress Party is rotten to the core, and even if the Son of God
were to appear in India, he could not save it."