KOLKATA: Somnath Chatterjee, the erstwhile Left Front regime’s first pro-business and pro-industry face from an era when very few CPM leaders would want to be seen in the company of either a businessman or an industrialist, passed away at a private-sector city hospital on Monday. He was 89. Chatterjee, the liberal and the pragmatist in a party full of dogmatic conservatives, was a CPM member for nearly four decades.

But the contradictions between party and man proved too much and it was perhaps predestined that CPM would finally show him the door (in 2008). It was also perhaps no surprise that the forced orphanhood — and not the 10 terms that he served the party in the Lok Sabha — would become the talking point on the day he died. Less than 10 hours after Chatterjee breathed his last, his family — son and daughter — spoke bitterly about how they felt let down by the treatment meted out to their father by the CPM even in his death.

The CPM politburo communique, an Orwellian relic from communist Russia, might have contributed to the bereaved family’s bitterness. “An eminent lawyer by profession, he (Chatterjee) also took up the cause of the working class,” it read, eschewing any reference to his association with the party. Chatterjee’s political career saw not one but two watersheds.

The first came in 1984, amid the Indira Gandhi sympathy tsunami for Congress, when he was defeated by a 20-something, unheralded Mamata Banerjee in the then CPM bastion of Jadavpur . But the second was a more permanent low-water mark for both Chatterjee and CPM. It came in 2008, when he was turned out by his party for refusing to heed its diktat asking him to get off the Lok Sabha Speaker’s chair.

By then, his biggest backer in the party — former Bengal CM Jyoti Basu — had become entirely home-bound. Chatterjee also made the mistake of daring to go where even his mentor did not venture. Basu, asked by CPM to stay away from the PM’s race in the mid-1990s, came up with a telling oneliner on his party’s folly; he called it a “historic blunder” but toed the party line nevertheless.

More than 10 years later, Chatterjee had no such telling one-liner to describe his party’s folly; but he stayed put in the Speaker’s chair, prompting his party to disown him. That orphanhood rankled. “I wanted to remain with the party till my last. It is the party that showed me the door,” he had said then.

Chatterjee was unwell for some time, spending most of his last two months at Belle Vue Clinic. He spent a 40-day stretch at the hospital after a brain stroke, returned home for a few days in July-end and then again entered the hospital — for the last time, as it turned out — last Tuesday.

His vital organs were giving away gradually and he suffered a massive cardiac arrest last Thursday, following which he was put on ventilation, and a milder one on Sunday; he did not survive these two attacks.

