On Jyoti Basu

Jyoti Basu, West Bengal’s communist chief minister for over 30 years, has gone the way of all flesh. He presided over the destruction of Bengal’s industry – what with militant trade unionism – and oversaw an exodus of the middle class from Bengal.

What I find most amusing is that the man studied Law in England. Just like Bapu Gandhi and Chacha Nehru. I wonder what they taught him there. Obviously, that private property does not matter.

The first chapter of Adam Smith’s Lectures on Jurisprudence is titled “Property.” In England, these lessons from civilization were largely forgotten, and mistaught blackies and brownies were dispatched all over the world to attempt socialist and communist experiments on black and brown peoples.

Let us not forget that Chacha Manmohan S Gandhi was also educated in Cambridge – under Professor Joan Robinson, the eminent Keynesian, who confessed that her mission in life was to destroy Say’s Law of Markets. Like saying you wanted to destroy the Law of Gravity. Like saying you wanted to destroy Property.

Of course, these idiotic ideas also took their toll at home – divine justice – and Britain is just a has-been in the world of today.

About Jyoti Basu: The ToI waxed eloquent on his initiatives in land reforms and panchayati raj (village self-government). However, all this can now be seen as foolish clientelism. If you ask any Bengali villager whether he will prefer two acres of land in Gobindopur to one room in the city, I am sure most will plumb for the room in the city. And as for panchayati raj, these clients of the Bhateeja State are useless when all the cities and towns are in decline. Urban West Bengal was devastated under Basu’s misguided communist rule.

Also noteworthy is the fact that, like Karl Marx, like Friedrich Engels, Jyoti Basu too was not “working class.” Basu was a member of Bengal’s elite. As a child he went to Loreto School in Calcutta – to study English. He graduated from the elite Presidency College – in English. Perhaps these elites had great dreams for the toiling peasantry, but these dreams were horribly misguided. With Basu’s passing an era has ended. Nature has rung out the old. Let us ring in the new.