Kshiti Goswami sets down his cup of black tea on his well-worn desk, swivels his chair to face the framed portraits of Lenin and Marx sitting atop a set of steel drawers and gets it off his chest. “It’s a totalitarian regime. I am ashamed that I have been part of it,” mutters the public works minister of the Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee government, almost under his breath.

We are in his house — he hastens to add that it belongs to his wife’s family — in south Calcutta’s Bagha Jatin neighbourhood, once a refugee settlement. Goswami, once a “refugee boy,” is completely at ease with himself and with his “philosophy” of life. The philosophy is simple: “Never bow your head, whoever he is and however powerful he is,” he says, alluding to his public spat with the Bengal chief minister over what he calls “bloodletting” in Nandigram. Needless to say, he has refused to bow his head, offering to resign from the ministry instead.

As his Revolutionary Socialist Party (RSP) — a constituent of the ruling Left Front with four ministers — hotly debates the minister’s resignation offer and mulls over withdrawing from the CPI(M)-led alliance that has ruled Bengal for 30 years, Goswami seems taut.

“There has been immense pressure on me to withdraw my resignation, not to do anything that may split the Left Front,” the 65-year-old leader says.

Yet Goswami finds it hard to accept what has happened in the East Midnapore block, where armed CPI(M) cadres shot at peace rallies, killing several and wounding many.

I try to veer the conversation round to his life, but it is seemingly stuck in Nandigram, now the “name of a calculated, cold-blooded pogrom,” he says. “I see little difference between what happened in Gujarat and in Bengal. There Narendra Modi did it in the name of Hindutva and here the CPI(M) did it in the name of the party — and it was ratified whole heartedly by the chief minister,” says Goswami.

Goswami attributes the Nandigram violence to a single cause: “Buddhadeb’s limitless arrogance.” Right from the start, he says, the chief minister has dealt with the issue “in a haughty manner.” Had he “softened his tone” a bit, the RSP minister says, the “disaster” could have easily been averted. “Who on earth does he think he is? Would he have lost all his prestige and power if he had spoken a bit softly?”

Anger bubbles out.

The veteran leftist is keenly aware of the consequences of using harsh words against the man he reports to in the government but he seems indifferent, almost impervious to reproach. He says he has nothing to lose and he would be happy to be freed from the “shackles” of his post. He has stopped going to office and using his office car.

In some ways, his hardscrabble childhood as a refugee boy and his tumultuous youth as a student activist have prepared him for everything, for “the worst,” as he puts it. Having crossed over from what was then East Bengal in the bloody, post-partition days of 1950 with his “young, fearless” mother, Goswami, then only eight, stayed in a refugee camp with his six siblings. He remembers standing in long queues for hours for a fistful of flour and scrambling with other refugee children for a taste of jaggery.

Going hungry was an integral part of his early life in the north Bengal town of Balurghat. “Once I went without food for four days in a row, filling my belly only with water,” he says, with a wry smile.

Poverty and deprivation made him “anti-establishment” even when he was in his teens. As a school student, he found himself sucked into the refugee movement, being waged by the RSP in the West Dinajpur district, demanding rehabilitation. Almost at the same time, he got drawn to Marxism. As a newspaper hawker, he says he found himself reading Swadhinata, the mouthpiece of the undivided Communist Party of India, every morning.

A bright student, he won a scholarship in school and later got into Balurghat College. But 1959 changed all that. The food movement had already swept Bengal and the 17-year-old could not help but leap into it. An arrest warrant was issued against him after he led a group of “famished” people into the Balurghat court and ransacked it in protest against government indifference to their demands.

At night, a police team raided the house he was staying in. He escaped through the back door, with the police chasing him. And before they could grab him, he dived into the swirling Atreyee river, swam across to the other side of the bank and went underground. It was political baptism, not by fire but by water, as Goswami puts it.

Much to his regret, Goswami could not finish college; he moved to Calcutta in 1963 as state committee member of the Progressive Students Union, the RSP’s students’ wing. Staying at the party “commune” in Calcutta’s Surya Sen Street, he got to know student leaders from the CPI(M), including Subhas Chakroborty, Biman Bose and Shyamal Chakroborty. “We worked together and are still friends.”

The RSP leader says the CPI(M) could, however, never forsake its “self-aggrandisement or expansionist” nature. In its effort to “decimate” the smaller front partners, he says CPI(M) cadres “tied up and burned alive” 26 RSP supporters from refugee families in a Jalpaiguri village in 1969 and burnt down the RSP office in north Bengal’s Alipurduar. “You see the same aggression in the CPI(M) and its leaders in Nandigram and elsewhere today. That party brooks no opposition.”

Goswami became an MLA for the first time in 1991 from Calcutta’s Dhakuria constituency. In 1995, he became a minister after the death of the RSP minister, Matish Roy. Today, he says he owes both his defeat in 2001 and victory in 2006 from Dhakuria to the CPI(M). “The RSP hardly has any organisational strength in this constituency,” he says.

Yet he refuses to be a “slave” of the CPI(M). Little wonder that the “big brother” finds it hard to stomach him. Not that it bothers him.

Power, he maintains, means nothing to him. And he will continue to “speak his mind,” as he did during the 2006 Cricket Association of Bengal election when the chief minister fielded former police commissioner Prasun Mukherjee as his “proxy” candidate against Jagmohan Dalmiya and more recently in the Rizwanur case which he feels has “irreparably hurt” the Left Front’s image.

Goswami believes the ordeal of Nandigram has not yet ended. Once the storm of protests over the CPI(M)’s “incursions” into the villages dies out, he says the party will stealthily revive its special economic zone (SEZ) plan for Nandigram, which the chief minister publicly abandoned sometime ago.

“They have already drawn up the blueprint and that’s why they captured land in armed attacks and drove out those opposing the SEZ,” Goswami says. He says Nayachar, the alternative site for a proposed SEZ, will actually be used to “relocate” the people of Nandigram. “It’s the party’s hidden agenda and the chief minister is very much aware of it,” he claims.

Tellingly, Goswami’s home office has a framed picture of former chief minister Jyoti Basu, but no portrait of Bhattacharjee, his boss in the Cabinet. “I respect Joyti babu a lot and he also loves me,” he says when asked about the picture. For Bhattacharjee, he only has contempt.

Yet in his fight against the Bhattacharjee-led “establishment,” he finds himself alone. Over the last 30 years, the Left Front partners, especially the ministers, have got so used to the “intoxicating scent” of power and authority that they are unwilling to give it up. “I really don’t blame them. It is hard to break the status quo which the Left rule has become in Bengal,” he says.

But he pledges to carry out his “solitary” battle against Bhattacharjee’s “totalitarian” regime. “I believe in a political philosophy and have an independent mind, which is not held hostage to anybody, to anything,” he says. The fight will, clearly, go on.