Former Communist Party of India (Marxist) general secretary Prakash Karat was one of many political leaders who were close to late West Bengal chief minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee. Here’s what the Left leader had to say about the ex-CM:

Just before the Emergency, in 1974, I had gone to Kolkata because our Student Federation of India’s head office was there at that time. In the Youth Federation Office, I found a young man in his kurta-pajama sitting at a desk and writing away furiously.

It was my first sight of Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee.

Years later, Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee epitomised an era of communist politics in West Bengal, which has now ended with this passing away. Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee was as a person and a leader someone who touched various aspects of life and society in West Bengal. He was no ordinary communist cadre. He was also a person with literary accomplishments. And he had made a distinctive contribution to the development of cultural institutions and cultural life in West Bengal as well. Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee the administrator the chief minister and long time minister of the left Front government– that is of course the most well known and most public aspect of his political life.

But for us, we were more or less on the same generation. We both came into the Central Committee of the party in 1985 so we saw him as the party cadre, a party organizer and a party leader who started this work in the student movement and then the youth movement, and then he came into the leadership of the party in West Bengal as a state committee and state secretariat member.

So what was so distinctive about him was his capacity to be totally devoted to his work. He was dedicated to what he has to do and the responsibilities assigned to him. But the same time, he had a certain detachment to see the larger picture. And as you know, he developed not just as a party functionary, but had active interest and passion for literature.

He carried this tradition in West Bengal of being a Renaissance man. Personality, he represented everything that was progressive, democratic, secular in West Bengal and its cultural traditions. Within that framework, he was also a loyal party worker and a leader. He also tried to implement the party’s understanding of how the Left front government should function with all the limitations of a state government.

He was also groomed by the first generation of party leaders . Let’s not forget he became a minister at that time when Jyoti Basu was the chief minister and Pramod Dasgupta was the party state secretary. And that’s a period when the CPIM also had to work out how to function in the state government after getting a majority in the assembly within a set up where the real powers were with the Center. Of course, it was something that leaders of an earlier generation such as Harkishen Singh Surjeet or EMS Namboodiripad had worked it out. Buddhadeb was able to carry that forward later as the minister and as Chief Minister. So that’s one of the unique aspects of his career as a minister and Chief Minister.

I think that it’s a misnomer to think that Buddhadeb was the one who brought the industrialization policy in West Bengal. Industrial policy decision was made under the Jyoti Basu government, which was also discussed in our party Central Committee to adopt new things such as. the role of private sector. But he took it forward.

What he planned to do or aim to do was not something that was not within the party’s policy framework. Problems cropped up in its implementation but the fact is that he was carrying on what had already been worked out in the party.

All through my long association, I remember the snippets we shared. I’m not that literate in the field of literature. I have read classics but he would be up to date with modern literature. Once he told me, “You should read (Jose) Saramago.” He said he’s a Portuguese writer who had won the Nobel Prize at that time and told me to read the novel Blindness. He was the one who would tell us about new books, new literary works. As a person, he had much wider interest than many of us.

(As told to Saubhadra Chatterji)