Chatterjee argued that given the BJP's rapid ascension, the CPI(M) should help the Congress in keeping the BJP out of power at the Centre.
Former
Lok Sabha speaker and veteran communist Somnath
Chatterjee died in Kolkata on Monday. He was 89 years old. A
member of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) for some four
decades, Chatterjee was expelled from the party in 2008 after
refusing to step down as Lok Sabha speaker following his party’s
decision to pull out support from the then Congress-led United
Progressive Alliance (UPA) government.
A
ten-time member of the Lok Sabha, Chatterjee occupied the post of the
speaker from 2004-2009. The sole exception to his electoral winning
spree was when he lost Kolkata’s prestigious Jadavpur constituency
in 1984 to the present West Bengal chief minister, Mamata Banerjee,
then only 29 years old.
A
powerful and persuasive speaker for his party in the Lok Sabha,
Chatterjee owed his oratorical skills to his training at Cambridge
University, where he studied law in the 1950s, and his work as a
lawyer.
Born
in Tezpur, Assam, on July 25, 1929, Chatterjee’s association with
the CPI(M) began through an unconventional journey. His father,
Nirmal Chandra Chatterjee, a former judge at the Calcutta high court,
was closely associated with the All India Hindu Mahasabha. Though the
senior Chatterjee eventually snapped his links with the organisation
and turned to taking up civil liberties issues, Somnath took an
ideologically different route.
In
his memoirs, Keeping the Faith: Memoirs of a Parliamentarian,
published in 2010, Chatterjee writes about how Jyoti Basu along with
Bengal’s communist stalwarts like Promode Dasgupta and Harekrishna
Konar persuaded N C Chatterjee to prevail upon his son to contest the
Lok Sabha polls. Backed by the CPI(M), which he had joined in 1968,
Chatterjee stood as an independent candidate in the 1971 Lok Sabha
elections. That is how he launched into an eventful political journey
spanning four decades. “As far as I am concerned, my victory was
also that of the party’s,” he wrote.
However,
Chatterjee’s differences with his party on critical questions
surfaced time and again and were well known. Some of these centred
around much of the present political churn visible in the CPI(M). For
instance, what kind of relationship should the CPI(M) have with the
Congress in light of the Bharatiya Janata Party’s political and
electoral advance? Such differences of political tactic and strategy
between the CPI(M) and Chatterjee manifested soon after the Babri
Masjid demolition in 1992.
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