13) A SAVIOUR CALLED JYOTI BASU

 

By Gurpreet Singh

 

            It was January 2010. I was on my first visit to Kolkata. Previously known as Calcutta, the city is the capital of West Bengal state of India. The province was under Communist rule when I was travelling in that part of my home country. I went there mainly to visit Budge Budge, the site where the Komagata Maru ship passengers were shot in September, 1914. The Japanese vessel carrying over 300 South Asian passengers was forced to return by the Canadian government under the discriminatory continuous journey law, designed to stop Indian immigrants from permanent settlement in BC. Following a scuffle with the British India police at Budge Budge shore, the deported passengers were shot at, leaving many dead. A Sikh temple in memory of the deceased passengers greets visitors in the town.

 

            My host Sohan Singh, a staunch supporter of the Communist Party of India (Marxist), directed me inside the temple. As a devout Sikh, he stood inside for a moment with eyes closed and hands folded in prayer before the holy‑scriptures. Another man, a baptized Sikh and caretaker of the temple, told us about the history of the place. They said that the town was once populated by many Sikhs when the transport business was flourishing, but they started moving to other parts of West Bengal once the industry went through an economic downturn. The Sikhs are the backbone of the transportation industry in the state, and many I met were the second generation of Sikh migrants from Punjab, who can fluently speak Bengali.

 

            Most intriguing, both these Sikh men supported the communists, who are otherwise infamous for being "anti-religion". Although the current Trinamool Congress government has earned the goodwill of the Bengali Sikh community and has a turbaned Sikh minister in the cabinet, the Sikhs in that region have mainly supported the communists.

 

            The reason is simple. The communists had saved the Sikhs during the 1984 carnage, while the community was targeted by goons led by supporters of the Congress party, seeking revenge for the assassination of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi by her Sikh bodyguards. While Sikhs were being killed with the help of police in Congress-ruled states, the community felt protected in West Bengal. Almost every Sikh I met during my visit felt indebted to the Marxist former Chief Minister, Jyoti Basu, for protecting the lives and properties of the Sikhs.

 

            An ailing Basu was battling for his life in those days. I had a chance to visit the hospital where he was under treatment, but no one could glimpse the veteran communist leader, who was born during the year of Budge Budge shootout. I had interviewed him for radio over the phone a few years earlier. He wanted his body parts to be donated for scientific research after his death. He was against religious rituals. I really wanted to talk about it on my radio program. Since he couldn't hear anything over the phone due to aging, I interviewed him through an intermediary. Because of this, some confusion arose over my line of questioning, and he got agitated and left the conversation.

 

            Basu wrote in his memoirs that he was near Chennai for a national conference of the Water Transport Workers' Federation when Indira Gandhi was murdered. He rushed to New Delhi the next day. Basu's government called out the army in Calcutta, and once he was back to West Bengal, his party supporters worked hard to protect the Sikhs and organized an "Amity Rally". He accused the Congress in his memoirs of using the communal card to win the parliamentary election after the riots. He pointed out that the Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh, a Hindu nationalist organization, backed the Congress while targeting the Sikhs.

 

            During my visit to the hospital another important development took place. A prominent film star, Amitabh Bachchan, visited Basu. His fans crowded a street near the hospital entrance to get his picture on their cell phones. That was the first time I saw Bachchan live. As he walked out after seeing Basu, the crowd cheered boisterously. Ironically, Bachchan was elected a Congress MP following 1984 carnage. Born to a Sikh mother, Bachchan never uttered a word to publicly denounce the anti-Sikh violence. Known as angry young men, Bachchan and other Congress MPs got elected with a brute majority, riding on the anti-Sikh wave. I wondered who the real hero was: the one who faked fights on the silver screen, or the one who stood against the current in real life.

 

            Obviously, the real hero was inside the hospital under medical care, whose legacy even affected the critics of the communists. A case in point is a Sikh driver who took me to different places in Calcutta. He had a big sticker of Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale, a fundamentalist Sikh preacher, pasted on the rear window. Bhindranwale had started Sikh militancy in Punjab. His followers killed close to 300 communists. Yet, this Sikh driver acknowledged that Basu will always be remembered as a saviour.

 

            The day I returned to Delhi, Basu passed away at the age of 96. The Punjab government declared a holiday to mourn his death. Basu was also a politician and had his own limitations and contradictions, but he proved himself a real defender of secularism by helping a minority community at the time of crisis.

 

(The above article is from the November 1-15, 2014, issue of People's Voice, Canada's leading socialist newspaper. Articles can be reprinted free if the source is credited. Subscription rates in Canada: $30/year, or $15 low income rate; for U.S. readers - $45 US per year; other overseas readers - $45 US or $50 CDN per year. Send to People's Voice, c/o PV Business Manager, 706 Clark Drive, Vancouver, BC, V5L 3J1.)