JOIN USJyoti Basu was sceptic about Chinese
Beijing might have considered Jyoti Basu the “greatest communist” of India and “a great friend of China”, but the longest serving Chief Minister of West Bengal purportedly had a fair degree of scepticism about the Chinese and he had candidly admitted this to an American diplomat in 1976.
A diplomatic communiqué from the American Embassy in New Delhi to the US Department of State on August 6, 1976 had quoted Basu saying that the Chinese were “the most difficult people on earth”.
The communiqué is one of the 1.7 million US diplomatic cables released by Wikileaks on Monday.
The cable was sent by William B Saxbe, who was America’s Ambassador to India from February 1975 till November 1977. It contained a message from the then US Consul General in Calcutta (now Kolkata), David A Korn.
“In a brief conversation some months ago, Jyoti Basu remarked to me that the Chinese are the most difficult people on earth,” wrote Korn. The conversation obviously took place more than a year before Basu took over as the Chief Minister of West Bengal — an office that he held for over 23 years.
Communist icon
Beijing, however, put on record its admiration for the communist icon after he passed away on January 17, 2010. “Deepest condolence for the passing away of India’s greatest communist and China’s great friend, Comrade Jyoti Basu,” Mao Siwei, Consul General of China in Kolkata, wrote in the condolence book at CPM headquarters in Kolkata.
Basu was the secretary of the West Bengal Provincial Committee of the Communist Party of India from 1953 to 1961. He was among the leaders who took a pro-Chinese stand during the ideological rift within the CPI in the wake of the Sino-Indian war in 1962.
After the CPI suffered a split in 1964, Basu was appointed member of the politburo of the newly-constituted Communist Party of India (Marxist) or CPM. Though the CPM was vehemently opposed to CPI’s pro-Soviet stand in 1960s, it started reviewing its position in mid-1970s.
“The CPM has for some time been moving away from the Chinese. The party is said to have been putting out feelers to the Soviets (United Soviet Socialist Republic). But our sources say the Soviets refused to abandon their support to the CPI or Mrs Gandhi (then Prime Minister Indira GandhI) and so these contacts came to nothing,” Korn wrote in his message to the US Embassy in New Delhi.
“Moreover, we are told that the CPM has now virtually cut its ties with communist parties of North Vietnam and North Korea (or possibly it is the other way around) because of their support for Mrs Gandhi and the CPI,” noted the then US Consul General in Calcutta.