Its main players now remain scattered in different places. Some have died. Today's is a vastly changed political matrix. Yet some of the issues that had BEEN thrown up by that old controversy continue to have relevance in contemporary politics, especially for the rainbow coalitions. Hence the need for a revisit of the old episode.

Sample some of those romantic surmises: 'History might have taken a different course had the CPI(M) allowed Basu to become the consensus prime minister'; 'It could have heralded a stable secular alliance of the Congress and non-Congress forces'; 'CPI(M) lost a chance to stretch itself and take roots across the country by using Basu's pre-eminence as PM'. All this is sheer moonshine. Beginning with the last, no ruling party in India could ever realise the cherished dream of expanding its reach through power. Instead, in each case the baggage left by longer period of power has only damaged them. What happened to the NDA after being in power for six years?

Vajpayee was so confident of his government's achievements that he had advanced the polls and ran an unprecedented 'shine-India' campaign. But the NDA lost heavily. It awfully failed to strengthen itself or reach out to areas where it is traditionally weak. The corporate world had gone gaga about the economic miracle under finance minister Manmohan Singh's reform when Narasimha Rao was PM. GDP went up, business confidence was high and foreign exchange piled up. Yet the Congress slipped down to a record low of 140 MPs. Its support base eroded in almost every state. The task is more uphill for cadre-based parties like the CPI(M). Cadre is built over a generation. It needs a different kind of organisational culture and firm ideological commitments. It is absurd to presume that a few years of PM's aura can do the miracle.

Next question: could Jyoti Basu have given a really stable secular government in the 11th Lok Sabha? Basu as PM might have encountered challenges at least at three levels. His party had just 32 MPs in a house of 544, or 1/17th of the total. As against 273 MPs for a technical majority, his Left Front had just 50, and needed the support of UF allies like JD (44). Tamil Maanila Congress (20), SP and DMK 17 each, TDP 16 and AGP. Then Basu would have had to constantly keep Congress president Sitaram Kesri in good humour for his outside support. Could Basu's stature as a leader and talents at managing coalitions in West Bengal have enabled him to balance so many endemic contradictions?

The mainstay of Basu's success as chief minister for 23 years was a homogenous front whose constituents had broadly similar background. They have consensus on fundamental precincts. His other advantage was the overawing presence of his party in the state and the support of a core group within LF. From early 90s, L.K. Advani has been stressing the latter requirement - core support base of around 230 MPs - for the stability of any coalition. The NDA had achieved this by painstakingly pampering trusted groups like JD(U), SS and Akalis. Basu could not have done so as his day-to-day survival depended on the whims of Sitaram Kesri. Hence Lalus, Mulayams and Shorens might have pestered him for slowing down scandal cases and dismissing rival governments against his own conscience. If he stoops so low to save the government, it might have been at the cost of his own stature.

The second - Kesri's Democle's sword - was so real. The Congress which could never reconcile to being out of power, has a bad reputation of ditching other's governments. Forget Deve Gowda. Gujral was toppled on the flimsiest of pretexts. The Congress used a patently false story about the non-existent comments in the Jain commission report on Rajiv assassination and asked the UF to oust the DMK from the front. Gujral preferred the fall of his government rather than yielding to the threat. It is another matter if the Congress hope of a Rajiv sympathy wave dashed and it had to align with the same DMK six years later. Neither Basu nor his party had any magic wand to ward off similar situations inherent in badly fractured rainbow coalitions.

At the third level, Basu's quandary might have been more catastrophic. It was a time when five years of liberalisation and globalisation under Rao had unleashed the full play of free market forces. Domestic corporates in liaison with the foreign lobbies had by then assumed enough clout to anchor the government policies. What some corporates did to V.P. Singh six years earlier - prior to reform - should have been a grim reminder. The presence of Chidambaram had provided some cushion to the UF governments. Therefore, the first thing Vajpayee did after taking over as PM was to appoint its best reform face Jaswant Singh as finance minister (though the RSS reversed the decision).

Just prior to this, the BJP had to dump its consensus Gandhinagar economic policy declaration, evolved after year-long internal debate, as part of a deal for corporate patronage. Swadeshi Jagran Manch was silenced and Govindacharya chased out. Scadal scare alone had halted Arun Shourie's 'strategic' PSU sales. Could Basu as PM have dumped all of CPI(M)'s consistent economic profile just for being in power? If CPI(M) buries its basic ideology and policies it must have lost its very raisons d'etre as a Left force and there might have been mass desertions in its ranks.

The Jyoti Basu episode was not the CPI(M)'s first 'historic blunder'. They had repeated it in May, 2004, when the Congress vigorously wooed them to join the UPA. In 1989, Ramnath Goenka had separately met Basu and E.M.S. Namboodiripad to request them to join the V.P. Singh ministry. The same had happened in 1977. Each time, the CPI(M) religiously stuck to its 43-year-old decision preventing it from joining any coalition where it does not have enough strength to influence the government's policies.

The decision on Basu was taken by a three-fourth majority. It was reviewed the next day on special requests from leaders like Lalu and Mulayam. Perhaps paradoxically, the two communist parties alone in India preserve the real, functioning internal democracy. Coteries calling meetings to endorse the boss' decision or leaving it to the party chief and external power centres is alien to them. The problem is that those who are used to the working of the super boss parties cannot really understand such constraints of a cadre-based party. (IPA Service)