The Bengali and the Marxist (with apologies to Amitav Ghosh)
Jyoti Malhotra -
Tuesday, July 22, 2008 8:40 AM
The morning after Day One in Parliament, where the UPA government's trust vote is being debated on the Indo-US nuclear deal -- today, that is July 22, the vote will take place -- the Bengali and the Marxist (with apologies to Amitav Ghosh, for letting this sound like a novel by him) emerged as the two real heroes of the day. Foreign minister Pranab Mukherjee, who for the first time in his nearly fifty-year-old experience in politics, is currently elected from Jangipur constitutency in West Bengal, with the help of the CPM of course -- wiped clean all those whispering insinuations from these months past with a right rousing speech in the Lok Sabha in favour of the nuclear deal and against the Left.
The other is Somnath Chatterjee, Speaker and CPM partyman, but more of him later in the blog.
Over the last year, as the Left has charged, accused and fulminated against the Manmohan Singh-led government for selling out to George Bush over the Indo-US nuclear deal, Mukherjee got perceptibly more irritable. Not once, though, were stories against the Left leaked from his side of the stable, nor were there any enthusiastic rumours, with him playing the lead, about ramming through the nuclear deal right down the throats of the comrades. Mukherjee is the eternal compromiser, and it is said that in his veins politics runs thicker than blood. He has known better than most the imperative to get the nuclear deal through, but also realised that without the Left, it would be impossible to keep the government. So over the last year, as the deal clocked away interminably, Sonia Gandhi, Manmohan Singh and Pranab Mukherjee, each in their own ways, side-stepped, circumvented, ducked the issue, but never once took on the Left. While the prime minister, it was well-known, was more than once willing to risk the government, and Sonia kept her own counsel, it fell upon Mukherjee to run the coalition on a daily basis. He did -- in between his travels as foreign minister and even as the push-me-pull-you mantra got stronger by the day. Thats when it began to be whispered, sometimes even softly, that Pranab Mukherjee is not as hard on the Left because he needs the comrades to help him get elected from Jangipur.
That was a cruel cut, and we all finally knew it when we heard his rousing oratory in Bengali-accented English on the morning of July 21. First of all, he crisply ticked off BJP leader LK Advani for accusing Jawaharlal Nehru of not doing enough for India's nuclear independence, especially with regard to the Nuclear-Non Proliferation treaty. That was because Mukherjee said, the NPT came together in 1970 and Nehru died in 1964, and dead men (usually) dont sign treaties. Then, when the combined Left-BJP Opposition had risen up in a chorus of anger and recrimination, Mukherjee charged at them with a poisoned arrow : Remember 1988, remember the Calcutta Maidan, he said, sounding like a latter-day Banquo premonition. The reference was to leaders like Jyoti Basu and L K Advani coming together for a political rally in Calcutta in 1988 in the run-up to both supporting VP Singh's government one year later at the Centre.
The Left was now totally infuriated. This was the man who had --supposedly -- led them to believe for the last one year that he was trying to find a compromise to the nuclear deal? You could hear the grinding of their teeth, almost. As the House collapsed in a cacophony of sound, only Mukherjee's voice could be heard, shouting as well, on the House headphones : Remember...
One Bengali journalist now says that Dada, as Mukherjee is fondly known outside the Foreign Office, will win by a margin or over a lakh votes from Jangipur. He doesnt need the Left anymore, said the journalist.
As for the Marxist, there was none as polite and cultured and deadpan as Somnath Chatterjee on Monday morning. All these past days, the rumours had raged about the CPM asking him to step down from his post as Speaker, otherwise he would be denounced -- and possibly, expelled and then airbrushed, out of history. It was said that Chatterjee, a member of the Party since 1968, needed to come out when the party needed him most. It was a family, after all, wasnt it. But Chatterjee, a right honourable member of the Bengali bhadralok or genteel class, did not succumb. He had been a non-partisan Speaker for four years, when he had been unanimously chosen by 18 parties in the Lok Sabha in June 2004, he was not about to step down now and vote against the Congress ! History was being made in India, and Chatterjee's wife Renu and their two daughters, had come to witness it.
Somnath stood by his good word. All day on Monday, right till 10 pm, the Speaker chastised, cajoled, criticised and hustled members of the House when they overstepped their time-limits, addressed other members instead of him, and generally strayed off the parliamentary path. At one time, he scolded the Opposition : You must cultivate the art of listening, how can you reply, if you dont listen. Then, another time, when the professorial Ram Gopal Yadav of the Samajwadi party, rubbing his hands deliciously, poked fun at the 'Lal' in Lal Krishna Advani and likened it to the 'lal' or red in the Left slogan "Lal salaam", and pointed out that two positives could become a negative, Chatterjee butted in : Lal accha rang bhi hai, he said, red is also a good colour !
The whole House collapsed in good-natured laughter. The Speaker was having a dig at the CPM's -- his own -- black and white party line, and also sending the message, perhaps : life's too short not to allow some colour into it !
And now for Day Two !