Jyoti Basu, who has died aged 95, was one of the last Indian politicians whose careers started before the end of British rule. He was a stalwart of the much-fractured communist movement, but his devout socialism was tempered by pragmatism and an unerring political instinct. He was chief minister of his beloved West Bengal state for more than 23 continuous years – longer by far than any other chief minister of any Indian state.
That remarkable tenure was made possible by Basu's towering popularity, the result of seven decades of public and political service, most of it in Kolkata (or Calcutta, as it was known for most of his long life). He could have gone to the very top, as India's first communist prime minister in the mid-1990s, but his chance evaporated when his Communist Party of India (Marxist) (CPM) decided to boycott the United Front coalition, which went on to rule under HD Deve Gowda of the Janata Dal. Basu thought the boycott a calamitous mistake, but true to style he remained steadfastly loyal to his party.
Jyoti Kiran Basu (the middle name was quickly dropped) was born into a well-to-do Hindu family. His father, a respectable doctor, was later horrified by Jyoti's choice of a political career, and even more by his choice of party. But the boy's early years were comfortably uneventful. He was educated in private schools and graduated from Presidency College, Kolkata, before sailing to Britain in 1935 to study law.
There, he became fascinated by leftist theory and practice. He attended lectures by Harold Laski, and got involved with the Communist Party of Great Britain. He wanted to join the party, but was dissuaded by its general secretary Harry Pollitt, who knew the young Indian could get into hot water if he returned to the British Raj as a known communist. Still, there was plenty of political work to do in London: Basu agitated for independence, and acted as a fixer for visiting dignatories, including Jawaharlal Nehru, arranging for them to meet leaders of the Labour party and the wider socialist movement.
Having qualified as a barrister at the Middle Temple, Basu returned to Kolkata in 1940. Almost immediately, he plunged into politics, becoming an organiser for the Communist Party of India (CPI), with the task of spreading the word among railway workers. It is a measure of his industry and effectiveness that he soon became general secretary of the rail workers' union.
In the meantime, British rule in the subcontinent was passing none too peacefully to its close. Basu, briefly imprisoned in 1945, was elected to the Bengal legislative assembly in 1946, the year before independence and partition, and immediately became leader of the communist opposition to the ruling Congress party. In the rough and tumble of West Bengal politics, Basu was an astute tactician, but he remained an essentially provincial politician with little prospect of advancement.
That changed in 1964, when the CPI underwent a dramatic split. It is often represented as a schism between nationalists who staunchly supported India in the brief but disastrous border war with China in 1962, and those who believed that it had been a war between socialism and capitalism. In reality it was a left-right split, with Basu in the former camp. He became chief of the CPM in West Bengal. At the last count there were at least 15 communist parties in India, ranging from mild left to raving revolutionary, but only the CPI and the CPM really count electorally.
Under Basu, the CPM built a formidable, some would say ruthless, state apparatus. It was denied victory in the state elections of 1972, which were shamelessly rigged by the even more ruthless Congress machine, but was swept to power in 1977.
Over the following 23 years, Basu achieved much, and failed quite often too. He brought reform to a largely feudal landscape, and his redistribution of land-wealth made him electorally invincible. Even better, he brought stability to a previously chaotic state. But rural reform was paralleled by urban stagnation. Kolkata remains the most lovable of Indian cities, but communist rule has denied it the new prosperity visible in other centres such as Delhi and Mumbai (Bombay). Nowhere is the stultifying effect of the regime more evident than in the Writers' Building, a relic not just of the Raj but of the East India Company, where legions of clerks, peons and other penpushers juggle endlessly with crumbling heaps of forms, dockets, chits and files, to no apparent purpose.
Basu remained an idol to the working class and rural peasantry, but in the end became a symbol of the statism which is so despised by today's MBA-brandishing classes. Had he become prime minister in 1996, he might well have restored prestige to that much-damaged office, through his honesty and other old-fashioned virtues. On the other hand, his instinct for hands-on control might have brought India's modern boom to a shuddering halt.
A steadfastly private man, Basu married twice. His first wife died after only 16 months of marriage. He had a long and happy second marriage with Kamal who predeceased him. They both doted on their son Chandan, who survives him.