Commentary/Ashok Mitra

Anachronisms are just that, why waste space even to report their demise?

Bejoy Chandra Bhagabati possessed huge commonsense. He knew he was an anachronism, and it would be better not to be around. The nation is supposedly celebrating 50 years of Independence this year. Bhagabati took the hint and bade adieu. He was 96.

His death has been duly reckoned as an unimportant event. Most newspapers did not bother to carry even the two line bit of agency news. There is no point in lamenting this collective absentmindedness on the part of the media: anachronisms are just that, why waste space even to report their demise?

True, men like Bhagabati constituted a rare breed. He was a political leader honest to the core, a Gandhian till the very end. He did not deviate from his loyalty to the Congress and yet had admirers and friends cutting across the entire political stratum.

Few will now remember some of his other personal qualities -- or his other achievements. He was, once upon a time, a member of the Union council of ministers. He was also, for more than one term, president of the Indian National Trade Union Congress. In the emerging circumstances, a person with this background should have rolled in opulence; he would have flaunted the opulence too. Bhagabati stuck to his ordinary ways; he made little money, despite his near 80 years in state and national politics. He led an austere, almost spartan, life. Another small point worth stressing: not only did he not put by a nest egg for himself; he did not allow members of his household either to gain pecuniary or any other advantage from their relationship with him.

Otherwise a soft-spoken man, when the occasion arose to express his views firmly and forthrightly, he would do so. He was proud, extraordinarily proud of Assam and its literate, culture and heritage. He was aware of the crawling tragedy that was, in the manner of an historical inevitability, threatening to overtake his state and the rest of the North-East. He without question nurtured grievances against the colossus of Aryavarta. But it was not his style to be rude or strident or to be combative or cantankerous. An Assamese to the core, he was also a great Indian.

No surprise attaches to the fact that he was squeezed out of the party leadership by the mid-1970s. He did not possess the flamboyance of a Dev Kanta Barooah; he was, besides, organically incapable of indulging in skullduggery. If you yourself do not accumulate wealth, you are a bad bet to help others amass assets and property. Bhagabati's circle of admirers therefore shrank rapidly. He became a has been. Not just his advancing age, it was the non-relevance of his being around which was the principal contributory factor for his inability to make the headlines over the past two decades. The present crowd of career builders will take at face value the claim that his failure to stay on the track was on account of his lack of inclination to follow the track.

One can only speculate on the shape Indian politics might have taken if men like Bhagabati had stayed at the helm of affairs in their respective states, or in the administration of New Delhi, or alternated between the two spheres of responsibility. Ambitious individuals of assorted descriptions have, during the past five decades, used the plank of states' rights or ethnic prerogatives to thrust themselves into political prominence, and have used this prominence as legal tender to buy a niche in the nation's capital.

Perambulations of this kind were not reconcilable with Bhagabati's portmanteau of beliefs. Work amongst tea garden labourers, so as to raise their earnings and living conditions, made him a trade union leader of stature, and nudged him into national limelight. His roots nonetheless were in Tezpur, and he returned to his roots after his stint at the centre and with the INTUC was over.

Another of the contradictions ceased to be a contradiction with him: he was proud of Assam, he was unhappy with the often supercilious manner in which the problems of the North-East were dealt with by the authorities in New Delhi, he would try to quietly convince whoever would condescend to spare a moment for him that alienation of Assam's youth and the rapidly spreading insurgency in the rest of the North-East are reflective of a very deep economic malaise.

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