NEW DELHI: While adherents of Marxist ideology the world over struggled to retain their relevance among people, Jyoti Basu stood out. In a country where Marxists, despite their ideology, adhere to democratic norms and assume state power legitimately through the ballot, Jyoti Basu was exceptional, turning down the country’s top job even as he won five consecutive five-year terms in office as West Bengal’s Chief Minister.

Although Communists never retire, the legendary Basu who died today aged 95, actually relinquished office in November 2000 after a record-breaking 23-year tenure as Chief Minister.

He embodied the “bhadralok” or gentlemanly culture of ideology, ethics and inclusiveness in Indian politics. Born on July 8, 1914, in Kolkata, the doctor’s son was educated in elite institutions in Kolkata before he went to study law in London, where he came in contact with the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) and veterans like Harry Pollitt, Rajani Palme Dutt and Ben Bradley.

On returning to India, Basu joined the then undivided Communist Party of India (CPI). The widely popular and yet aloof and patrician Basu’s life encompasses the entire period of the Left movement’s rise and fall in India. When he first became a legislator in the West Bengal assembly in 1946, before India became independent, Basu and Promode Dasgupta were the only two Communists in the legislature. After getting elected to the Bengal legislature almost continuously for six decades, his death has taken place at a time when the ideology itself is dying out not only in India, but worldwide.

Basu could have become India’s prime minister in 1996, after a fractured national electoral mandate saw a variety of ‘secular’ political parties request him to assume office. However, bowing to the diktat of Stalinists within his party, the Communist Party of India (Marxist), Basu turned down the job, going on to later call the decision a “historic blunder.”

While largely responsible for ensuring that the Left parties, after their best ever national lectoral performance in 2004, supported the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance to come to and stay in power for most of its five-year tenure, Basu also lived to see the near rout of the CPI(M) and its Left allies from national politics in the 2009 elections. If the rise of the Left in the late 1950’s, 1960s and ‘70s was the result of a cyclical change in Indian politics, its decline, which has reduced it to a position of insignificance in parliament, and when it faces major electoral setbacks in West Bengal, could be seen as the result of Basu’s failure to reinvent the CPI-M.

By the time he relinquished the reins of West Bengal citing health grounds, Basu had been the chief minister for 23 years. He was widely respected across the political spectrum and prime ministers consulted him on matters of national importance.

One of international Communist movement’s most respected figures, Basu’s body will lie in state in Kolkata until his funeral on Tuesday.