CPI(M)’s Karat pooh-poohs claims Jyoti Basu was offered PM’s post

Like the conspiracy theories over Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose’s disappearance, the “revelations” on the lost opportunities of former West Bengal Chief Minister Jyoti Basu continue to pour in.

The latest claim by a former CBI Director is about Rajiv Gandhi offering the Prime Ministership to Basu twice – in 1990 and 1991. On both the occasions, the author claims, the CPI(M) did not let Basu accept the offer.

The non-Congress parties had wanted Basu to take up the top job in 1996 after the failure of the 13-day BJP experiment. Then, Basu’s party had opposed the move with its polit bureau and the central committee voting against the proposal.

But CPI(M) General Secretary Prakash Karat told

Business Line that there was no such move in 1990 or 1991. He pointed out that the Congress had along with the BJP brought down the Janata Dal Government headed by Prime Minister V.P. Singh in 1990 and that the CPI(M) had held the Congress responsible for the crisis.

“The implication is that Rajiv Gandhi wanted Jyoti Basu to play the role that Chandrashekhar played. This is absurd because politically the Congress had just helped the BJP to pull down the Government and we were denouncing the Congress for this act. It was politically impossible and it was never discussed in the party,” said Karat.

Arun Prosad Mukherjee, former CBI Director and a former Special Secretary in the Home Ministry in the Nineties, in his recently-released book, ‘Unknown facets of Rajiv Gandhi, Jyoti Basu, Indrajit Gupta’, claims that Basu was Rajiv’s first choice as replacement for V.P. Singh.

Mukherjee makes an unverifiable claim that when he was Special Secretary in the Home Ministry, Gandhi’s emissary N.K. Sharma asked him to sound out Basu on whether he was keen to take up the Prime Minister’s job.

“Ultimately, Chandrasekhar, (the last name in Rajiv Gandhi’s list after Devi Lal and Jyoti Basu), became the Prime Minister on November 10, 1990,” claims Mukherjee. The proposal, according to Mukherjee, was for Basu to be Prime Minister for 8-12 months. Apparently, Gandhi repeated the offer when he pulled the rug from under Chandrashekhar’s feet in 1991.

Mukherjee claims that Rajiv agreed to two of his conditions: a one-year term for Basu and a seat sharing arrangement with the Left Front across the country. “However, it appeared to me that the party leaders with whom the discussion took place in the (Kolkata) house of Biplab Dasgupta, an eminent scholar who belonged to the CPI(M), totally failed to appreciate the long-term implications for the state and the country as a whole,” writes Mukherjee in the book.