Now Mamata Banerjee re-christens projects named after Left leader Jyoti Basu

KOLKATA: In August, Mamata Banerjee’s Trinamool Congress emerged as the most vocal critic in Parliament of the Centre’s proposal to rename the Mughalsarai station. In just two months after those protests, her government in West Bengal appears to be on a mission to re-christen state projects, and delink them from their Communist past.

The foundation stone of the Salt Lake stadium, laid by the late Jyoti Basu, the longest serving Left Front CM, has been removed from the main entry to the Kolkata sporting arena that’s hosting the U-17 soccer world cup. Banerjee has also changed the name of a water treatment plant from the Jyoti Basu Jal Prakalpa to Jai Hind Jal Prakalpa.

Her government has also removed Basu’s name from the planned satellite city of Newtown, and did not hand over a plot of land to the CPIM that bought the property to build a research and study centre on Basu and the Communist movement in West Bengal. In the renaming spree, she appears to have spared only Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin - as of now. In downtown Kolkata, important roads were named after the greatest Communist thinkers when the Left Front ruled West Bengal uninterruptedly for 34 years.

These are among the more visible moves to end the Communist legacy. More subtle, however, are the Left defections that the Trinamool has successfully engineered in the past five years.

Simultaneously, her government has been quietly changing the history syllabus to dilute the textbook portrayals of the international Communist movement. Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels and other Communist thinkers are now given limited space in the school and college curriculum, and her government has replaced the Left thought with chapters on the freedom struggle and the movements at Nandigram and Singur.

The Bengal government has also replaced street art and murals with the logo of Biswa Bangla, a state initiative that seeks to burnish the state’s allure as an investment destination. Understandably, the moves have invited criticism from the Opposition.

Bikash Ranjan Bhattacharyya, former mayor of Kolkata, said: “How can a government destroy history? One might love or hate a particular idea, but how can one try to omit or alter history? If the present regime has something to say, it should add to the existing literature. But a government should always maintain historical reality. Banerjee’s government has removed all plates and foundation stones that had the names of her predecessors Jyoti Basu and Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee. This is pure autocracy.”