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| Old faithful left out in the cold |
| A K Bhattacharya / New Delhi Aug 20, 2010, 00:21 IST |
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Of the 400-odd pages of Somnath Chatterjee’s book — an autobiographical account of his life as a parliamentarian — as many as 30 pages are devoted to a long list of important colleagues with whom the author interacted during his long tenure as a Lok Sabha member from 1971 to 2009. Several paragraphs in these pages contain just the names of various known and unknown parliamentarians. Whether the list offers any special insight into the personality of these leaders is highly debatable. In many cases, it contains nothing that even casual observers of Indian politics do not already know. What purpose that list serves, therefore, is doubtful.
There is yet another puzzle surrounding this list of “colleagues and comrades”, as the author chooses to call them in the title of the chapter. Elsewhere in the autobiography, Chatterjee makes no secret of his strong disapproval of the politics and general conduct of top leaders of the Bharatiya Janata Party, including Atal Bihari Vajpayee and Lal Krishna Advani. However, in the chapter listing these leaders, Advani is described as one of the “top leaders” and Vajpayee earns his admiration as a parliamentarian.
The contradiction appears less baffling, when you realise that the author has refused to be explicitly critical of almost all other political leaders included in this chapter. You might call it an act of magnanimity or a brazen display of casual assessment of his parliamentary colleagues, but it adds no value to Chatterjee’s maiden attempt at writing his memoirs. You may even wonder if the entire chapter was an afterthought, prompted by the need to add to the pages of the book at the publisher’s insistence.
The thought gains ground with the discovery that as many as 124 pages (almost a third of the book) comprise seven appendices. They carry the various speeches the author made in Parliament, a list of initiatives he took during his tenure as Lok Sabha Speaker, an account of the interruptions and disruptions in the 14th Lok Sabha when he was its Speaker, messages he received after his decision not to resign as Speaker in July 2008, a farewell letter from the Speaker’s team and his statement in response to charges levelled against him by People’s Democracy, the official organ of the Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPI-M).
The appendices, though, tell you a lot about Chatterjee as a politician. His 1992 speech criticising the P V Narasimha Rao government’s policies betrays his confused ideas on economic reforms. That confusion is also evident elsewhere in the book where referring to the economic reforms of the 1990s he says that he was not against the “loosening of bureaucratic control and (the) end of licensing”. He was opposed to the “unseemly haste with which the Indian market was being opened up to multinationals”. He further rues that “instead of generating employment opportunities for the people and strengthening the economy, the government’s actions led to a state of helplessness and hopelessness”. Economic data for the 1990s and the decade after that show how wrong Chatterjee’s assessment was.
Chatterjee is also not an accomplished storyteller. In recounting his life as a member of the Lok Sabha, he tells you little that you may not already know. A few fresh pieces of information that might enlighten you include how Congress ministers would pass important files to CPI-M leader Jyotirmoy Bosu clandestinely, how Chatterjee could not get his passport renewed during the Emergency years and how he tried to phone P V Narasimha Rao twice on December 6, 1992 to request the prime minister to prevent the destruction of the Babri Masjid.
What takes precedence is his obsession with the need to justify his own actions as Lok Sabha Speaker not only to himself but also to the people in general. An entire chapter in the autobiography deals with his strained relationship with CPI-M general secretary Prakash Karat. Chatterjee dwells at length on how Karat exerted indirect pressure on him to resign as the Lok Sabha Speaker before the confidence vote took place in 2008. The top CPI-M leadership insisted that Chatterjee quit the Speaker’s post after the party had withdrawn support to the United Progressive Alliance on the question of the Manmohan Singh government going ahead with the Indo-US civilian nuclear cooperation agreement.
Chatterjee differed with the CPI-M leadership on this issue, as he argues in the book that the Speaker should remain above party politics. He claims to have even met his mentor and former West Bengal Chief Minister Jyoti Basu and received endorsement for his stand on the issue. Eventually, Chatterjee pays the price for not quitting as the Lok Sabha Speaker and the party expels him. There is, however, no denying that Chatterjee has consistently underlined the need to keep the post of the Lok Sabha Speaker above party politics. Once an elected Lok Sabha member is appointed Speaker, he should not treat himself as a member of any political party. He also successfully argues why no court of law should have the powers to challenge the Speaker’s ruling.
It is ironical that Chatterjee’s expulsion from the CPI-M was as dramatic as his admission to the party several decades ago. By his own account, his entry into the CPI-M defied all established norms of admitting a new member into the party. Chatterjee fought his first Lok Sabha election as an independent candidate with the support of the CPI-M which, in a rare gesture, allowed him to use the party’s symbol. He became a member of the CPI-M sometime later, when West Bengal CPI-M leader Pramod Dasgupta sent him a form with the request that he should sign it. Chatterjee did so. That was how Chatterjee became a CPI-M member. Which is why, perhaps, Karat felt little remorse in forcing Chatterjee’s expulsion.
KEEPING THE FAITH
Memoirs of a parliamentarian
Somnath Chatterjee
HarperCollins Publishers India
398 pages; Rs 499
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