Is Jyoti Basu Dead?

(GaeaTimes.com) - Jyoti Basu was reported to be dead as per the information posted on Samaylive.com (the page is currently down, they are apparently doing an upgrade!) and kalponik.us (Kalponik has since retracted the story and now points to Samaylive, however initially they claimed to have received the news from an Hospital insider). It was reported that the veteran Left Front leader and ex-Chief Minister of West Bengal has passed away today after suffering from pneumonic infection according to the sources mentioned above.

As per a report published on kalponik.us, he died at around 1:30 pm today, 6th January 2010. However according to latest bulletin Jyoti Basu is alive and positive change has been observed. We wish him rapid recovery.

We reported earlier that Sri Jyoti Basu developed breathing trouble today during early morning hours and was shifted to the ventilator in critical condition in the afternoon hours. He is admitted to the Salt Lake AMRI Hospital in Kolkata for the aforesaid pneumonic infection.

The death news of such an iconic figure will be shocking to many of his followers as he was the pioneer of Leftist movement in India.

Source:

http://blog.taragana.com/e/2010/01/06/jyoti-basu-dead-long-live-comrade-jyoti-basu-77136/

Jyoti Basu is the member of CPI (M) Politburo from the founding time of 1964 till 2008 and served as the longest Chief Minister of India from 1977 to

Jyoti Basu critical, 'some positive change'

Kolkata: The condition of CPI-M leader Jyoti Basu, in hospital with pneumonia, continued to remain critical today but doctors attending on him said he has shown some 'positive changes'.

"Basu's condition deteriorated in the morning and he was put on ventilator. His condition is still critical but he hasshown some positive changes since the last bulletin at 1130 hrs," a medical bulletin issued by the hospital at 6:00 pm said.

"His blood pressure has been controlled a bit and one urine output was OK," AMRI Hospital executive director told reporters when asked about the positive changes.

Doctors of the medical board were constantly monitoring the condition of the 95-year-old former West Bengal chief minister and would review his condition tomorrow at 11:00 am, he said.

Basu, who was admitted to hospital on Friday, wasimproving till yesterday, but his health parameters turned erratic early this morning and he was put on life support, Superintendent of the private hospital Hospital Dr Debashish Sharma said.

Chief minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee told reporters at the state secretariat, "Basu's condition is not good."

Prime minister Manmohan Singh telephoned to enquire about Basu's condition, he said.

Railway minister Mamata Banerjee, former Lok Sabha speaker Somnath Chatterjee, CPI-M politburo member Biman Bose and state Congress working president Pradip Bhattacharya were among those who visited the hospital today.

Sources:

Kolkata: The condition of CPI-M leader Jyoti Basu, in hospital with pneumonia, continued to remain critical today but doctors attending on him said he has shown some 'positive changes'.

Jyoti Basu – poster boy of Indian communism

Jan 8, 2010 04:15 EST

indian communism jyoti basu media politics west bengal

(UPDATE: Jyoti Basu died in Kolkata on Sunday)

When Prime Minister Manmohan Singh rushed to Kolkata on Thursday just to pay a 22-minute visit to the hospital where 96-year-old Jyoti Basu is battling for life, the trip spoke volumes about the communist patriarch’s relevance in Indian politics.

India’s longest serving chief minister is on ventilator support but the throngs of teary-eyed followers outside the hospital, the 24×7 mediapersons camping outside and the steady stream of political digniindicate the respect Basu commands across the political spectrum.

The Prime Minister offered to fly in experts from anywhere in India to treat Basu.

A day later, former Prime Minister H.D. Deve Gowda also visited the ailing leader in Kolkata.

“I remember what Jyoti Basu has sacrificed. He made me the prime minister of this country,” Gowda told reporters recalling the political stalemate in 1996.

In May 1996, Basu, then firmly in the saddle as the longest serving chief minister of West Bengal, was on the verge of becoming India’s first communist prime minister as a consensus choice amid political chicanery.

The United Front government, comprising the Left Front and the National Front, wanted him as its leader, but Basu’s own party puritans would not allow him to accept the post.

Thus, India missed its first communist prime minister.

Basu himself had later dubbed the episode as a “historic blunder” and referred to it in a biography by Surabhi Banerjee.

“I was constantly being coaxed into accepting the key post. I was simply waiting for the party’s stand now. I was inclined to accept the onerous but unanimous offer for the credibility of the Third Front and secondly for solving the stalemate.”

In November 2000, Basu voluntarily stepped down as the chief minister of West Bengal, paving the way for his deputy Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee to take over.

Basu, even in reclusion forced by failing health, remains the poster boy of Indian communism. Till recently he was a crowd-puller in election campaigns.

The anxiety of his followers, the tears, the flurry of media activities outside the hospital and the air-dashing political royalty, mainly those from rival political outfits, vouch for it.

Jyoti Basu, Communist Who Ran Indian State for 23 Years, Dies

January 17, 2010, 07:02 AM EST

Jan. 17 (Bloomberg) -- Jyoti Basu, who ruled India’s eastern state of West Bengal for 23 years at the head of an elected communist government, died today.

Basu, 95, died at 11:47 a.m. local time, Debashish Sharma, superintendent of AMRI Hospital, said by telephone from Kolkata. Basu had backed reforms that distributed farm land to the poor and raised production, and he remained popular with the state’s rural masses, his speeches attended by up to a million people at the height of his influence. He was taken to hospital in Kolkata, West Bengal’s capital, on Jan. 1 with respiratory problems.

“It’s a sad day for all of us,” India’s Home Minister P. Chidambaram said in Kolkata today. “He was a great patriot, a great democrat, a great parliamentarian and a great source of inspiration.”

A London-educated barrister, Basu retired as chief minister in November 2000 because of ill health. While he is credited with bringing stability to a state known for its fractious, rowdy politics, Basu and his Communist Party of India (Marxist) failed to attract the investment flowing into regions like Andhra Pradesh, Maharashtra and Karnataka.

“Jyoti Basu was ambitious and progressive, and presided over political stability and the underdevelopment of West Bengal for almost quarter of a century,” said Omprakash Mishra, pro- vice chancellor of the New Delhi-based Indira Gandhi National Open University. “Industry, infrastructure, education and health care suffered during his tenure.”

Basu began his political career in the 1940s as a trade union leader. In the 1980s and 1990s, his party opposed the use of computers in banks and other public offices on concern that they would eliminate jobs, making Kolkata less attractive for India’s software firms. The city fell behind the likes of Bangalore, Hyderabad and Mumbai.

Pressure to create jobs in the city led Basu and his Marxists to soften their ideological opposition to private investment, and Kolkata now hosts offices of many large Indian and overseas companies.

The Communist Party of India (Marxist) became a key ally of Congress Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s government from 2004 to 2008, when they used their influence to stall the sale of shares in state-run companies and block the entrance of foreign investment in banking and insurance.

Sources:

http://www.businessweek.com/news/2010-01-17/jyoti-basu-communist-who-ran-indian-state-for-23-years-dies.html

Topics:

• Marxist Leader
• CPM patriarch
• Communist leader Jyoti Basu

Veteran Communist leader Jyoti Basu, who was West Bengal's chief minister for 23 long years, died in Kolkata on Sunday after a prolonged illness. He

Jyoti Basu (1914-2010)

was 95.

He was an astute politician, able administrator, reformist and a record setter in many respects. Jyoti Basu resigned from active politics in 2000 but continued to guide the communist movement in India.

In Pics: Jyoti Basu (1914-2010)

The last of nine politburo members who founded the CPM in 1964, Basu was described as a "great son of India" by none other than Prime Minister Manmohan Singh.

Born in 1914 in Kolkata, Basu became chief minister of West Bengal in June 1977 and held the post, uninterrupted, until stepping down voluntarily on health grounds in November 2000.

He was a politician of high credibility whose loss will be felt by the entire nation.

Sources:

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/Pay-your-tributes-to-CPM-leader-Jyoti-Basu/articleshow/5455276.cms

Topics:

• Marxist Leader
• CPM patriarch
• Communist leader Jyoti Basu

Veteran Communist leader Jyoti Basu, who was West Bengal's chief minister for 23 long years, died in Kolkata on Sunday after a prolonged illness. He

Jyoti Basu (1914-2010)

was 95.

He was an astute politician, able administrator, reformist and a record setter in many respects. Jyoti Basu resigned from active politics in 2000 but continued to guide the communist movement in India.

In Pics: Jyoti Basu (1914-2010)

The last of nine politburo members who founded the CPM in 1964, Basu was described as a "great son of India" by none other than Prime Minister Manmohan Singh.

Born in 1914 in Kolkata, Basu became chief minister of West Bengal in June 1977 and held the post, uninterrupted, until stepping down voluntarily on health grounds in November 2000.

He was a politician of high credibility whose loss will be felt by the entire nation.

Sources:

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/Pay-your-tributes-to-CPM-leader-Jyoti-Basu/articleshow/5455276.cms

Jyoti Basu, Popular Indian Communist Leader

Jyoti Basu, communist leader from West Bengal, India, turns 83

One of the last communist leaders left alive in the world, 83 year old Jyoti Basu, chief minister of West Bengal, very nearly became India's prime minister in the recent elections. For the blink of a stock-brokers eye, India's fast-track economic reforms teetered on the edge of oblivion. Or maybe not?

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Before India's inconclusive 1996 general elections, few rated Mr Basu's chances for the Prime Minister's seat above zero. An octegenarian marxist whose party devotees still keep photos of Stalin and Lenin garlanded like gods, with marigolds, at the party headquarters in Calcutta, Mr Basu seems the unlikeliest of all candidates to run a boisterous democracy of 920 million Indians.

After all, India has jettisoned over 40 years of Soviet-style socialism in favor of Coca-Cola, Kentucky Fried Chicken and free-market capitalism. Its factories and bureaucracy had rusted out. And even Mr Basu, who mischievously renamed the Calcutta address of the American Consulate to Ho Chi Minh street, was forced to swallow his Yankee-phobia and go to Washington to seek investment for West Bengal, where he has ruled as chief minister for 19 years.

A skilled practitioner of realpolitik and a graduate of the London School of Economics, Mr Basu's radicalism began early. As a student at one of the privileged Calcutta Catholic schools during the British colonial days, Mr Basu led his friends on a daytime raid of the posh, whites-only Calcutta Club. Fully-clothed, they splashed merrily in the swimming pool until the Bengali radicals were fished out and arrested.

The youthful prankster turned into an autocratic Marxist, but the diminutive Mr Basu won respect for bringing order and development to West Bengal. "Everybody wants me to be leader," he joked recently. "I've even had calls from Bangladesh asking me to run things there."

In any other country, an old Marxist like Mr Basu would be an anachronism. But India's poverty and social injustices -- especially in the countryside where untouchables cannot "pollute" the village well by drinking from it, or worship inside temples -- a strong, progressive current pulls at the country.

Mr Basu's Communist Party of India (Marxist) belongs to a ragtag assortment of small regional parties, socialists and other communists (without the Marxist bracket behind their name), and parties who champion the rights of India's Muslim minority and the lower-caste Indians who are trying to escape out from under the bottom of Hinduism's complex hierarchy.

Known as the National Front-Left Front, the alliance captured the third largest number of seats in the spring elections that resulted in a hung parliament. The Bharatiya Janata Party, (BJP) won the most seats with its nationalist rhetoric, but not enough to survive a vote of confidence. With a few new rebels from the losing Congress party, the NF-LF, re-christened the United Front, made a play for power. In a country desperate for a leader of prime ministerial caliber, a reluctant Mr Basu emerged as a possible candidate, but not for long.

After a flurry of back-room bargaining, in which the defeated Congress party pledged to support the United Front - if only to keep the hated BJP out of power - Mr H D Deve Gowda, a soft-spoken farmer's son from the southern state of Karnataka was appointed to lead the motley 13-party coalition.

Mr Basu's party, the Communist Party of India (Marxist), not to be confused with Communist Party of India, opted out of the United Front but says it will not go against the coalition on crucial votes in parliament. Meanwhile, Mr Basu has faded quietly into a red sunset.

Sources:

http://www.ieo.org/basu.html