Kolkata:Former Lok Sabha speaker Somnath Chatterjee, 89, died at a Kolkata hospital on Monday morning due to a heart attack. It was not immediately clear how, if at all, the Communist Party of India (Marxist), or CPM, would pay its respect to the deceased leader, who was ousted from the party in 2008.
Born into a family of renowned lawyers and parliamentarians, Chatterjee, himself a barrister, joined the CPM in 1968. He was elected to the Lok Sabha 10 times. He lost only once to Mamata Banerjee of the Congress in 1984. Chatterjee fell out with the CPM in 2008 when he declined to step down as the speaker of the Lok Sabha. The CPM and other Left parties had withdrawn support to the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government.
The party asked Chatterjee, who was unanimously elected as the speaker in 2004, to step down and vote against the government, but he maintained that he, as the speaker, held a constitutional post and was hence above partisan politics.
Though divided within over whether or not to withdraw support to the UPA government over the India-US nuclear deal, the CPM politburo took an unanimous decision to expel Chatterjee. The end of the UPA’s first term in 2009 marked the end of Chatterjee’s political career, but on a sad note.
“Not that he was seeking an extension,” said a lawyer in Kolkata, who was a close associate. “But it could have ended differently. He was deeply saddened by the move”.
At that time, CPM leaders from West Bengal had defended the party’s decision. Politburo member and one of the senior most from the state, Biman Bose, had famously said that the party’s diktat wins over everything else. Ironically, a section of top CPM leaders from the state were opposed to the standoff itself . In their view, the decision to pull support over the India-US nuclear deal was not politically expedient.
Widely regarded among lawyers and lawmakers as an expert on the Indian Constitution, Chatterjee was given the challenging task of reviving industrialisation in West Bengal in the mid-1990s .
Under the then chief minister Jyoti Basu, the state was battling an image crisis and flight of entrepreneurial capital. Chatterjee was always close to Basu and helped him draft the 1994 industrial policy. Basu went behind the back of his party to table the policy in the Assembly out of fear that outfits within the CPM could obstruct it.
Alongside, Chatterjee was brought in as the chairman of West Bengal Industrial Development Corp, and given the “onerous task” of regaining investor confidence, recalled a bureaucrat, who worked closely with him. He was chosen because he enjoyed the confidence of the business community despite his known political affiliation. He was asked to “leverage his personal goodwill” so that investors would grant an audience to the state’s sales pitch, the bureaucrat said, asking not to be identified.