Somnath Chatterjee shares dais with Buddhadeb, Biman

KOLKATA - West Bengal Chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee, along with several other Marxist leaders, was Thursday seen sharing the dais with expelled party veteran Somnath Chatterjee, who in his autobiography had criticized CPI-M general secretary Prakash Karat.

The incident has raised eyebrows in the political spectrum as earlier this year Chatterjee, in his autobiography - ‘Keeping the Faith: Memoirs of a Parliamentarian’- had launched a scathing attack on Karat, by calling him “arrogant” and “an intolerant man”.

Chatterjee Thursday was seen seated beside Bhattacharjee during a function held for renaming of New Town, in the northeastern fringes of the city in North 24 Parganas district, as Jyoti Basu Nagar and for the foundation stone laying programme of Jyoti Basu Shishu Udyan.

The programme was attended by Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPI-M) politburo member and state secretary Biman Bose and several other Left Front leaders and ministers of the state government.

Chatterjee, who was expelled from the party in 2008 for refusing to obey the party diktat to resign as Lok Sabha speaker before the July 22 trust vote, in his book had also claimed that top CPI-M leader Jyoti Basu had asked him not to quit.

The CPI-M state secretary along with the party’s central leadership had earlier slammed Chatterjee for dragging late patriarch Jyoti Basu into the controversy and had said he was trying to malign the party. They had also dismissed his comments as ‘rubbish’.