AB Bardhan: A bright spark and a firm anchor of Left

Comrade Ardhendu Bhushan Bardhan (but he always briskly said “Bardhan” when anyone phoned), who died on Saturday in his 91st year after a brief illness, was an impressive bright spark even when old- sturdy, crisp and Spartan, and wise in his later years, a stalwart in every sense of the word.

It is a mystery why someone of his super-sharpness should come to the party centre only when he was about 70, and the reason may have something to do with the small-minded but Byzantine factionalism (of which he himself was thought to be no mean practitioner in his earlier years) that has pervaded cadre-based parties.

Before Bardhan became CPI deputy general secretary — with the late and admirable Indrajit Gupta as general secretary — in the mid-1990s, he was already a famous all-India trade union leader and respected political figure of Maharashtra, although his party had ceased to be even a blip on the map in the state.

He entered the Maharashtra Assembly just once early in his career, and that was all the parliamentary experience he had.

Had he been a MP, his name might have been on everyone’s lips. He was a formidable and crisp debater and could enthral with his fluency in English, Hindi, Marathi and his mother-tongue Bengali. When he was a boy, his father had moved from East Bengal to Nagpur on a government posting.

At 15, Bardhan had already joined the then banned CPI. Those were times when idealistic youngsters from the intelligentsia veered automatically towards communism. Bardhan became CPI general secretary in 1996 and remained in that position till 2012, but continued to command influence among leaders of other parties even after that. That was because of the clarity of his mind, and his no-nonsense manner.

The bee in his bonnet was Left unity. He could go to almost any extent to align the CPI with the CPI(M)’s positions even when many in his party felt he was making undue compromises.

In private, however, he could articulate with striking clarity the shortcomings in the CPI(M)’s ideological-political positions at the Centre, as well as in Bengal. He wrote about it without mincing words after the CPI(M)’s infamous defeat at the hands of Mamata Banerjee.

Had he put down his reflections on the state of the Communist and Left parties with his customary clarity, consistently, and without holding back, he may have made an intellectual contribution of some note, such was his calibre.

Indeed, he could shine and sometimes be a devastating interlocutor even with top-notch intellectuals. One could tell Bardhan had the gut feeling in 2007-08 that the CPI(M) position was wrong on opposing the India-US civil nuclear deal, and break from the UPA government on that basis. But he went along with it in the interests of his perception of Left unity.

Bardhan will be missed. He gave off the feeling of being a firm anchor.