A sane voice of dissent disappears

A sane voice of dissent disappears
Neerja Chowdhury

NEW DELHI, FEB 20: Indrajit Gupta was a dedicated Communist, a veteran trade unionist, a former home minister, a public figure of rare integrity and simplicity, representing a breed that is fast disappearing. But it was as a parliamentarian that he was a class by himself.

It was not that when he spoke, both the treasury benches and the opposition heard him in pin drop silence. Or when prime ministers replied to debates, invariably they took up the points made by Gupta. Only recently, Prime Minister Vajpayee had referred to the Report on Electoral Reforms Gupta had submitted to Parliament last year at the conclusion of 50 years of the Republic -- a subject which was close to his heart. He was elected to the Lok Sabha 11 times from West Bengal, always on a Communist Party of India ticket which he headed as general secretary in the '90s. He had been awarded the first Outstanding Parliamentarian Award in 1992. (The award was given to Vajpayee after him.)

He had a deep respect for the institution of Parliament. Like many of his fellow communists who got their ideological training in Britain. In some ways it is a paradox that the communist movement has produced so many outstanding MPs who have strengthened parliamentary democracy. Gupta was in a line after A.K. Gopalan, S.M. Bannerji, S.A. Dange, Hiren Mukherji, Bhupesh Gupta and Jyotirmoy Basu.

When Gupta was Home Minister, Congress leader Santosh Mohan Deb launched a vituperative attack against him in the Lok Sabha for the deteriorating law and order situation in Assam. Later, seated in the Central Hall, he called Deb. ``Santosh, you spoke very well today.'' he told him. ``I would have said the same things had I been in the Opposition.''

During the Narasimha Rao regime, Parliament had been rocked by the telecom scam and the opposition, which then included the BJP, did not allow the two houses to function for almost the entire session. One of those evenings, I found Gupta sitting on a sofa near the entrance of the Central Hall, all alone, looking dejected and deep in thought. He was extremely depressed at the way Parliament was being stalled, at the falling standards of the debates, the lack of homework on subjects, at the growing number of ``criminals'' entering the legislatures.

Stalling the houses was no way to protest, he felt. ``We are destroying the very institution of Parliament,'' he said. He expressed the same sentiment two months ago during the winter session of Parliament, when the Congress did not allow the Lok Sabha and the Rajya Sabha to function on the Ayodhya issue.

Never one to rush into the well, Gupta believed in using the force of the spoken word to demolish his opponents, and for focussing on people's issues. His ripostes could be deadly. Once when BJP leader V.K. Malhotra was boasting during the course of a debate that the number of communal riots in the BJP-ruled states had gone down, he shot back, ``If those who are responsible for creating those riots are in the government, then naturally there will be fewer riots.''

He quoted Gandhi to take a dig at George Fernandes in the famous debate on May 28, 1996, during the confidence motion moved by Vajpayee at the end of his 13 day government. ``Gandhiji said, `Socialist friends had not understood the ABC of socialism. Why could not the socialists see that there could be no socialism in India so long as they are in the octopus grip of communalism.' We have a lot of quarrel with Mahatma Gandhi. I am not afraid to admit that we should not have quarrelled with him. But we made a mistake if we challenged his idea on that point.''

This was before Fernandes openly joined hands with the BJP.

He did not spare his Left colleagues either. Once during the debate on the law and order situation in Tripura after the elections there in the early nineties, when everyone was blaming the Congress, he pointed to Somnath Chatterji and said, ``These people are equally guilty.''

Gupta realised that the CPI had made a mistake in going along with the Congress during the Emergency, says CPM leader Somnath Chatterji, who was a parliamentary colleague of 30 years' standing and sat next to him in the Lok Sabha.

All along a votary of Left unity, always in favour of floor coordination between opposition parties, he had friends in all the parties. Under his leadership as the party general secretary, the CPI included social oppression and the caste factor as part of the class struggle. This was two years after the decision to implement Mandal Commission's report. The CPI had accepted the principle of reservation much earlier, but gave a special emphasis to it at the party Congress in Hyderabad in its updated programme document.

Gupta was a misfit in the role of a home minister, under H.D. Deve Gowda and I.K. Gujral. He was uncomfortable with the special security with the red-light pilot and escort cars. He refused to move out of his two room apartment, number 40-41 at Western Court, when he became minister. A couple more rooms were given to him there for security purposes. But he continued to eat at the first floor common dining room at the MPs' hostel.

Like Jyoti Basu, he too started his public life as a trade unionist and remained one till the end. The twenty lakh central government employees who got over Rs 10,000 crore through the Fifth Pay Commission recommendations have to thank Gupta for it.

His sympathy for the vulnerable sections of society made him empathetic to people living at India's peripheries, whether it was in Jammu and Kashmir or in the country's north east. Yasin Malik was once picked up by the police and jailed for sitting on a dharna at Jantar Mantar to protest against police atrocities. He had demanded the government look into these cases. Kuldeep Nayyar intervened on his behalf and went to see Gupta, then home minister. Gupta, who did not know about the arrest, ordered his release, saying he saw nothing illegal about Malik's demand that the Centre examine the matter.

Gupta, 81, was operated last year for a tumour behind the ear, which was found to be benign. But in November he was found to have cancer. When he attended the House during the winter session of Parliament, he told friends jocularly, ``I'm on my way out now.''

Last week, some of his younger CPI colleagues like Atul Kumar Anjan went to call on him in Calcutta. He was distressed at what was happening to the farmers in many parts of the country. ``What are you doing about it?'' he bellowed. ``You have now to go into the countryside and mobilise the farmers, so that they can be represented in Parliament,'' he told them.

Only yesterday there was a notification that Gupta would head the Subordinate Legislation Committee of Parliament. But the ``guardian of Parliament'' will not be able to perform that last task allocated to him.