“Bangalore may have gone ahead, but we will catch up (Bangalore egiye gechhe, kintu amrao dhore phelbo),” Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee said, clenching his fist, with an air of quiet confidence and the hint of a smile.
It was a sunny winter morning in late 2000 when this correspondent — a cub reporter at the time — had the chance to buttonhole the newly appointed chief minister of Bengal.
Bhattacharjee had just replaced Jyoti Basu, Bengal’s longest-serving chief minister, a few months ahead of the Assembly elections.
The new chief minister, who had just settled down with a cup of tea after an event at Rotary Sadan near Rabindra Sadan, was eager to change the popular perception of Bengal as an unfriendly investment destination. Industry had already started treating Bengal with churlish disdain; the state did notseem to figure in anyone’s investment plans.
Could Bengal catch up?
The question did not faze Bhattacharjee. He said a few technology titans like IBM had already started operations in Salt Lake’s Sector V. He was pretty confident that more would come.
After a surprisingly comfortable victory in the elections a few months later — many pundits had predicted a rout for the Left Front — Bhattacharjee started drawing up a plan to kindle an industrial resurgence in a state that had sunk into an agrarian economy after the massive exodus of business houses in the face of militant trade unionism.
G.D. Gautama, the then secretary for information technology, was given a simple brief: woo the technology giants.
To dispel perceptions about Bengal’s poor work culture, Gautama, who is no more, made it a point to send emails to tech bosses in India and abroad on Sundays and public holidays. And the results were startling.
Wipro set up its special economic zone in Salt Lake; TCS built a facility in Rajarhat and many others followed as Bhattacharjee rolled out the red carpet for industry. In his second term, he also coaxed Infosys into acquiring land in Rajarhat where a campus has now come up. Even though Calcutta never quite attained the heady heights of Bangalore, it did manage to attract IT companies looking to set up or expand their base in India.
Industry-friendly
If IT was the focus area in his first full term, Bhattacharjee trained his sights on the manufacturing sector in his second. Fresh from another electoral success, he stunned the world of business when he was able to persuade Ratan Tata to announce his plans to make the Nano — touted as the cheapest car in the world — in Singur.
It had not been easy to swing the agreement. Senior Tata officials had balked at the idea and tried everything in the book to scuttle the plan. They even made an outlandish demand: the plot of land for the project would have to be on the national highway and have an imposing, 2km front.
Bengal — and Bhattacharjee — did not wilt; he arranged for the acquisition of the land and handed it over to the Tatas where they could build a "dream machine" for the world.
"We decided to locate the manufacturing plant in West Bengal. In that sense, it was a leap of faith that our company took to do something differently at a time when several states wooed us," Ratan Tata said at a press conference at that time.
The Tatas tossed several prospective names for the small car: Buddho was one of them. The other was Despite Mamata. In the end, they settled for the Nano.
The Left Front at that time was riding a tailwind of support from industry because of the support the Left had given to the UPA-I government. As a result, Bhattacharjee also managed to get Sajjan Jindal’s JSW Steel to suss an opportunity to establish a steel plant at Salboni even though Bengal did not have iron ore, the key raw material.
On Thursday, Sajjan Jindal, the boss of JSW Steel and the $24 billion JSW Group, recalled his interactions with Bhattacharjee. "He was not only a great leader of Bengal and India but a great human being. I had a very good personal relationship with him. Buddhababu went out of his way to promote industries in his state. He spent a lot of time discussing the industrial renaissance of Bengal with me," Jindal said.
The former CM’s persuasive powers were on display when he managed to rope in Tarun Das, the longest-serving director-general of CII, to become chairman of Haldia Petrochemicals Ltd, one of the state’s premier industrial enterprises.
"He almost forced me to be the chairman of HPL. He spoke to Ratan Tata and Purnendu Chatterjee who agreed to my taking up the position. I must say that I have enjoyed his trust and that of (then industry minister) Nirupam Sen," Das recalled, adding that Bhattacharjee was able to put Bengal in the mindspace of India Inc.
N.G. Khaitan, the president of Bharat Chamber of Commerce and a senior partner of Khaitan & Co, concurred. “He showed a real urge to attract investment, especially in manufacturing. He realised that there was an imperative need to go beyond socialist doctrines of state control and populism if Bengal was to forge ahead. Buddhadeb Babu was highly respected across the business spectrum for his zeal to industrialise Bengal,” Khaitan said.
In many ways, Bhattacharjee did not act like a communist. Coining the slogan, "Do it now", he tried to shake up the bureaucracy from three decades of stupor and rebuild the state whose fortunes had been marred by trade union militancy.
He triggered a controversy by attacking the "bandh" culture and publicly said that he "unfortunately" belonged to a party that often called strikes.
While he had to back down later, Buddhadeb did not always agree with his party or other Left constituents. Despite opposition from the Forward Bloc, he issued an Agricultural Produce Marketing Committee (APMC) licence to German wholesaler Metro Cash & Carry to operate one of their largest supermarkets in Calcutta.
Art connoisseur
Even as his steely resolve to industrialise was unmistakable, industrialists, corporate executives and bureaucrats this newspaper spoke to remembered him as the quintessential Bengali bhadralok (gentleman).
Sanjiv Goenka, chairman of the RPSG Group, said Bhattacharjee was a person he deeply respected. “He had a very human side to him. He had a unique way to motivate. Bengal has lost a great leader,” Goenka said.
Harsh Vardhan Neotia, chairman of the Ambuja Neotia Group, recalled the former CM's passion for art and culture, a trait of the fast-depleting breed of the bhadrolok.
“I remembered him as someone deeply interested in our culture, literature and cinema. I recollect having conversations with him on a few occasions. He also tried to industrialise the state and reached out to a great many people,” Neotia added.
Sabyasachi Sen, the industry secretary for most of Bhattacharjee’s second full term, described him as a "very good man".
“As an officer, I consider myself fortunate to have had the opportunity to work under him,” Sen said.
Even though he was accused of high-handedness following the massacre in Nandigram — the ill-fated location for a proposed chemical hub — which changed the course of politics in the state, industry leaders, in general, remembered him as a polite, courteous man.
"Buddhababu came to lay the foundation stone for our steel plant at Salboni (in 2008). After his convoy left the event, we also left with India’s steel minister (Ram Vilas Paswan) in the car with me. There was a Naxal attack on our convoy and we were lucky to escape. When Buddhababu came to know, he immediately called me to apologise and said they (the Maoists) were aiming at him and mistook my convoy for his," Jindal remembered.
A now-retired corporate executive who was in the thick of action during the Singur agitation recalled the stormy period. “I still remember when the Singur project was announced. After a few questions had been put to Ratan Tata, Bhattacharjee butted in: 'Ebar oke jete din, uni anek dur theke eshechhen (Let him leave now, he has come from a long distance away)'."
He added: "Perhaps, also because of his gentleness, he did not insist that Tata Motors choose one of the alternative sites."
Despite having the option of locating the plant at Kharagpur, Tata chose an agriculturally fertile plot in Singur that it would eventually leave when the protests against the project peaked.
Bhattacharjee’s inability to manage the situation, in a sense, sadly defined his legacy. He had the best intentions but could not deliver when it mattered.