Bengal’s ‘iron man’ Jyoti Basu goes the way of all flesh

Communist Party of India (Marxist) doyen Jyoti Basu, who helped shape West Bengal politics for at least three decades and was the state's chief minister for a record 23 years before he stepped aside, died on Wednesday at the age of 95.

His death was not unexpected – he had been house-bound for the last two years and in hospital for the last 17 days, with doctors' prognoses getting increasingly pessimistic. But it marks the end of an era for the CPI(M), which he co-founded in 1964, and indeed for Indian politics in general.

Leaders from across the political spectrum sent condolence messages in which they were unstinting of praise. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh called him a ''great son of India'' and ''a regional voice in the national political scene''. Congress president Sonia Gandhi – who was no more than a young bride when Basu was already a political giant – said he was a ''warrior for social justice''.

Finance minister Pranab Mukherjee spoke of his intimacy with ''this outstanding parliamentarian; while home minister P Chidambaram called him a ''colossus''. Bharatiya Janata Party leader L K Advani – who stood on an ideologically opposite pole to the Communist veteran – called him a ''stalwart and a great leader''.

Railway minister Mamata Banerjee, whose Trinamool Congress is in direct opposition to the Left Front government in West Bengal, said she frequently visited Basu in latter years and discussed a range of issues with this ''leading politician of our country''.

Basu joined the then undivided Communist Party of India in 1940. He became chief minister of West Bengal in 1977 and ruled uninterrupted till 2000, when he stepped down in view of his failing health and made way for the present chief minister, Bhuddhadeb Bhattarjee.