Former West Bengal Chief Minister and CPI(M) Politburo member Buddhadeb Bhattacharya will be deeply mourned by the people of West Bengal, cutting across the political divide.

As the Chief Minister of West Bengal for over a decade, and previously a Cabinet Minister in four of the five Left Front governments led by Jyoti Basu, Buddhadeb Bhattacharya displayed character traits that have become increasingly rare among those who govern.

He epitomized probity in public life.

The modest two-room apartment in which he continued to live with his family throughout his ministerial tenure until the very end of his life stands as a testimony.

Like many of his generation, Buddhada, as he was fondly called, was attracted to politics through his participation in West Bengal’s student-youth movement of the 1960s and 1970s.

As a leader of the youth front of the CPI(M) and a protégé of communist veteran Pramode Dasgupta, Buddhada joined the very first Left Front government in 1977 as the Minister of Information and Public Relations at the young age of thirty-three.

He figures among a very small set of leaders who served in the Left Front Cabinet from its inception till its eventful end in 2011 (except for the second Left Front government because of his narrow loss in the 1982 Assembly election).

During this long ministerial career, Buddhada always stood out for his honesty and decency.

He even resigned from the Left Front ministry in 1993, protesting against perceived wrongdoings, and had to be persuaded to rejoin the cabinet a few months later by Jyoti Basu himself.

Buddhada authored a Bengali play during that period of introspection, which reflected on the decadence of the values that were inculcated by the Left movement of yesteryears.

Among all the communist leaders of his generation in West Bengal, Buddhada was the most engaged with the spheres of literature, arts, and culture.

It was his engagement with dissident literature coupled with the lived experience of the collapse of the USSR in the late 1980s that led him to question several Marxist-Leninist orthodoxies.

Combined with his uprightness, it was Buddhada’s unorthodox approach towards governance and policy-making as West Bengal’s Chief Minister since 2000, which made him popular among the people, especially the younger generation in Bengal, who were born or brought up under Left Front rule.

His single-minded efforts to address the unemployment problem in West Bengal, which led to massive out-migration of the youth from the State, also received public support and led to a memorable election victory in 2006.

History since then took a different turn.

His industrialization strategy and land acquisition for industry initiatives, inspired by the Chinese model, generated much controversy and together with pent-up discontent on other aspects of the thirty-four-year-long regime, brought an end to the Left Front rule in 2011.

It was his decency that led him to gracefully accept the electoral defeat and gradually retire from public life.

While opinions remain sharply divided to date over the rights and wrongs under the last Left Front government, Buddhada’s unfulfilled dream of modernizing West Bengal’s economy and providing decent job opportunities to the youth within the State shall remain acutely relevant.

The initiative of his government to enhance OBC reservation quota in West Bengal and include significant sections of the minority Muslim community within its ambit, following the Sachar committee findings and Ranganath Mishra commission, was an important step to address the socio-economic backwardness of the deprived sections.

This progressive policy, which was enacted into law by the subsequent Trinamool Congress regime, has recently been reversed by a High Court verdict.

Buddhada was deeply committed to safeguarding India’s secular, democratic constitutional order.

Even during a period of serious illness on the eve of the 2019 Lok Sabha election, he appealed to the people of West Bengal not to jump from the frying pan of Trinamool Congress misrule to the communal fire being lit by the BJP.

The people of West Bengal did not take that plunge neither in 2019 nor in 2021 and 2024; although the revival of the party that Buddhada led from the front for over a decade till 2011 is still awaited.

It is that revival that would have made him most happy.