Homage To A True Revolutionary

Red Salute Beloved Comrade!: Yechury paying homage at Muzaffar Ahmed Bhavan

Sitaram Yechury

IT will take us a long time to internalise the reality that Comrade Anil Biswas is no longer with us. The fact that he left us on his feet, like a commander leading his forces into yet another battle, is of little solace. Having steered the West Bengal CPI(M) state committee meeting the whole day, having briefed the media of its decisions on the details worked out to meet the electoral challenges, Comrade Anil went home to change and proceed to board a train to go to Malda for a Party meeting when the fatal cerebral haemorrhage struck him. He lost his consciousness on the way to the hospital and never regained. As far as he was concerned, he died as a dedicated communist in the midst of discharging his revolutionary duties.

However, to leave these mortal surroundings at an age of only 62 is a cruel expression of life. That he was ailing for some time was known. But that it would take his life was never anticipated. To that extent there is a degree of severe shock in the suddenness of his departure.

All of us, Prakash Karat, S Ramachandran Pillai, Biman Basu, Buddhadeb Bhattacharya, Manik Sarkar, Anil Biswas, myself and some others, were elected to the central committee at the Party’s 12^th Congress in 1985. Comrade Anil’s various attributes and contributions are recorded in the Polit Bureau’s homage and will surely be written about for a long time to come. This is because these attributes were not the normal or the common ones. His organisational capabilities were there for all to see He led the second generation of the CPI(M) leadership in West Bengal. Amongst his various attributes there are three that need to be recollected and emulated for strengthening the CPI(M) in the future.

The first of these is his relentless pursuit of the detail. On any issue Anil would go to the bottom of it dissecting its various aspects before coming to a conclusion on how to resolve it. My early contacts with him began when he was editing the Ganashakti, a period when  the eveninger was being converted into a regular morning newspaper. The entire infrastructure required to bring out a regular daily paper and importantly to ensure its proper distribution was established by Anil. Not only editorially but in  all aspects of the paper’s functioning, Anil would personally supervise these aspects. Similarly, as the secretary when he was dealing with complex organisational issues, which involved the deployment of various comrades to discharge various responsibilities, it was this attention for the detail which marked him out as a superlative organiser. As Stalin had once said, over 90 per cent of a Party wholetimer’s work is routine work. Leaders who tend to neglect this routine work do so at the expense of building a true revolutionary organisation.

A second aspect of Comrade Anil’s qualities is the manner in which he dealt with all Party comrades. His warmth and understanding was always a source of comfort for Party comrades in agony and distress. In fact he commanded a universal confidence amongst Party members that if you approach him with a problem he will surely provide a satisfactory answer. He was a person who is known not to brook any delay in dealing with inner-Party problems or in implementing Party decisions. His approach that needs to be emulated by all of us was never to judge any comrade on the basis of the political positions they take within their committees. This is the inalienable right of every Party member that in his concerned committed he has the complete right to air his opinions. However, the acid test of a comrade’s competence and loyalty comes when a collective decision has been taken by the committee, the concerned comrade is able to implement it sincerely irrespective of his personal opinions. It is this yardstick that Comrade Anil used to sincerely apply while dealing with comrades. This is important for all of us to keep in mind in a situation when it becomes fashionable to affix labels to various comrades. It takes a whole lifetime to mould a communist of character. This process should not be distorted by the temptation to brand and label comrades.

The third aspect concerns the ideological clarity and sharpness that Comrade Anil possessed. During the turbulent period following the collapse of the USSR, when many questions were being raised on the validity of Marxism-Leninism itself, when the Party was seized of these issues through an intense inner-Party discussion leading up to the adoption of the Party Congress resolution on these issues at the 14^th Congress in January 1992, Comrade Anil made a significant contribution to this process. I still remember his telephone calls sometimes at the middle of the night suggesting an enrichment of one formulation or the other in this resolution. Subsequently, in the entire process of the updating of the Party programme and the subsequent ongoing ideological discussions Comrade Anil always had a point of view that only strengthened further the correct Marxist-Leninist positions. It was at his insistence that the work on compiling Party’s history was undertaken and his personal efforts saw the first volume being released at our last party congress.

Lenin had once remarked that the reason why Marxism attracts hundreds of thousands of people all over the world is because it is the only world view that is, at the same time, both revolutionary and supremely scientific. Anil’s life was a relentless pursuit of combining both these aspects that constitute Marxism. As situations develop, a Marxist revolutionary has to keep abreast of these changes and work out the consequent correct tactics to advance the movement. During the past few years, Comrade Anil along with the rest of the Bengal committee was engaged in drawing up the strategy of how the Left Front government would cope with the new realities under globalisation and the pursuit of neo-liberal economic policies by the Indian ruling classes. Much of this thinking which found expression in the resolutions adopted by the West Bengal state conference of the CPI(M) have found expression in Part II of the Political-Organisational report adopted by our 18^th Congress. A communist is neither dogmatic nor is he trapped in some time-warp. A communist necessarily has to be a creative mind coping with the objective changes and drawing up correct tactics to meet these developments. “Concrete analysis of concrete conditions is the living essence of dialectics”, said Lenin once. Till his end Comrade Anil strove relentlessly in this direction.

At the recent massive rally to launch the Party’s election campaign at Kolkata’s Brigade Parade ground (no one could have imagined that this would have been Comrade Anil’s last Brigade rally), Comrade Jyoti Basu told the applauding crowd that this would probably be his last election campaign and it was his wish that the Left Front would form the government for a record seventh successive term. Anil got up promptly to assure both Jyoti Basu and the million strong crowd that this will surely be achieved. Today Anil is no more with us. Jyoti Basu’s dream and Anil Biswas’s resolve has to be carried forward to its true culmination. This is the only way that we can pay our revolutionary homage to Comrade Anil Biswas.