The last legacy that Basu leaves is a spacer his party at the Centre. A Left liberal heading the Union government should give the Indian polity a new direction.
Jyoti Basu ended his tenure as the longest serving chief minister ever in India in October this year. It had been almost exactly a year since he had first made public his desire to demit office on the ground that his health was not up to the task of governing a fractious state with numerous political, economic and social problems. And, to be fair to him, for some time Basu had been operating on less than all cylinders, spending lesser and lesser time in the state's administrative headquarters at Writers' Buildings, with Buddhadev Bhattacharya, his deputy, shouldering more and more of the quotidian administrative load. The public and the media were, nevertheless, taken aback by the suddenness of this decision to retire. Intense speculation about the party's motives behind letting the 'patriarch' go was fuelled primarily because of the timing of the decision.
In the first place, the elections to the State Assembly are scheduled for early next year. And it was more than conceivable that Basu could have kept going with an even more attenuated workload for another six months or so. His health did not seem to have registered any dramatic decline. Secondly, the party announced its decision to let Basu step down just a few days after its special conference, held in Trivandrum had endorsed his line that in future the party could participate in a coalition government at the Centre, should the opportunity present itself. This was a decisive victory for Basu's views over the policy espoused by the 'hardline', and hitherto majority, group within the party.
Why was it that the party allowed Basu to go, in a sense, finally proclaiming that he was no more the indispensable prop of the show in West Bengal, at the moment of his triumph? Basu could have played a crucial role in the elections that the party will soon have to fight in West Bengal. The Left Front government which has ruled that state since early 1977 does not have the aura of invincibility that it had even a couple of years ago. The Trinamool Congress, a splinter of the Congress, has mounted an increasingly credible challenge to the Left Front. Its leader, Mamata Bannerjee, now a senior cabinet minister at the centre, has managed to become the centripetal pole of the anti-Left forces— and votes—in the state.