NEW DELHI: Jyoti Basu, the charismatic Marxist who headed the world's most electorally successful communist party for two decades, died on Sunday after a long illness.
Basu, 95, who was the longest serving chief minister in Indian political history, led the CPM to power in West Bengal in 1977 and ruled the state for an unbroken 23 years.
Basu died of multiple organ failure in a hospital in Kolkata, capital of West Bengal state. Ill health forced him to step down in 2000.
After an inconclusive general election in 1996, he was within a hair's breadth of becoming prime minister at the head of a centre-left coalition, a prospect that prompted the headline "'Red Star Over Delhi" in one national newspaper.
But the CPM's central committee decided not to participate in the government -a move that Basu later described as a "historic blunder".
The son of a well-off Bengali family, Basu was born in 1914 in Kolkata, which was then Calcutta and the capital of British India.
While training to be a lawyer in England in the 1930s, at the time of the Spanish Civil War and the rise of fascism, he was drawn to the communist movement, which he formally joined following his return to India in 1940.
After a period of trade union activity, Basu launched his political career when he was elected to the Bengal legislative assembly.Read Full Story
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