Jyoti Basu

"Our doubts subsided some what. My very first election as a candidate gave me a taste of what bourgeois elections were all about. It was to baptism by fire. But all’s well that ends well. Mr. Kabir was defeated.

The 1946 elections taught me that there could be no place for ideals and honesty in such a bourgeois set-up. The end game was to win. At any cost".

Jyoti Basu (8 July 1914 – 17 January 2010)

Jyoti Basu, the name needs no introduction, 5 decades in active politics and probably the longest serving chief minister of a state anywhere in the world, was pronounced dead today due to multiple organ failure.

I heard this name first when i was in the sleepy town of Haldia, where i was born and brought up for the next 4-5 years. Jyoti Basu was the chief minister of the state then and my parents would often mention his name, few people they admired i think.

What a time to live in, Hitler's rise and soviet fall, birth of socialism in India and the freedom struggle. In a country where there were only two political camps that exercised any kind of control, the Congress and the Muslim League, where communal affiliations were the order of the day thanks to these ruling parties, Jyoti Basu was dreaming of a Communist party, a party that at the time lacked the brute force of the entrenched Congress and the political positioning of the Muslim League. A party that laid its foundations on a simple but strong ideology of uniting the masses into a class struggle, of uniting those who were a means of production in the neo imperialist society under the Raj and fighting its way to the parliament.

Over years the CPI(M) rose from being a ideological movement to a mainstream political party. To every non bengali Bengal is now synonymous with CPI(M) and Jyoti Basu.

I would just like to pay homage to this great leader.