(IANS)
Kolkata, Nov 20: Articulate and multifaceted, Priya Ranjan Dasmunsi was a master in political manoeuvring and the topmost leader of the youth brigade that took West Bengal by storm in the late 1960s, to sideline the Communists and bring back the Congress to power in 1972.
It was a time when the Maoist movement went from strength to strength in the state, with bright youngsters leaving schools, colleges and universities to follow Charu Majumdar’s doctrine of annihilating ‘class enemies’, that virtually saw a bloodbath over the years.
Dasmunsi was then the magnet for those young men and women, who disagreed with the Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPI-M) — the main force of the two United Front governments in the state in 1967 and 1969 — as also the policy of the bullets espoused by the Maoists.
First as a student leader in the Calcutta University, and then as a brilliant Youth Congress organiser, Dasmunsi was a major draw with his fiery oratory and many of his proteges like Subrata Mukherjee and Sougata Roy went on to occupy key positions in the government, state Congress, and in later years, to the breakaway Trinamool Congress.
The student and youth movements, militant, but pacifist compared to the Maoist line, enabled Siddhartha Shankar Ray to become the chief minister at the head of a Congress government. At the same time it gave birth to bitter factional fights in the state party, which continue to this day.
Groupism and lobby politics have often been cited as key reasons for the Congress singlehandedly failing to dislodge the communist-led Left Front government that remained in power for 34 years till 2011, when Mamata Banerjee’s Trinamool Congress combined with the Congress to take over power.
A grieving Mukherjee recalled the turbulent 60s and 70s. “I have become fatherless again. In my politics, as also at a personal level, I had only Priyada. We were a pair. Everybody used to say Priya-Subrata. We lived together in a commune. We studied in Calcutta University. He even cooked for me. He led a high-quality student movement under the banner of the Chhatra Parishad. It was because of him that the Left led United Front lost power, and S.S. Ray became chief minister”.
Dasmunsi’s talent saw his meteoric rise in the 1970s in the Congress, then led by Indira Gandhi. He became an All India Congress Committee member in 1970, was made the state youth Congress chief the same year, and entered the Lok Sabha from the then South Calcutta seat in 1971, at the young age of 26. As early as 1971, he was elected president of All India Youth Congress, a position he held till 1975, when Sanjay Gandhi removed him to anoint his (Gandhi’s) favourite, Ambika Soni, to the post.