KOLKATA: Hundreds of thousands of people thronged the streets of Kolkata in eastern India today to pay their last respects to veteran communist leader Jyoti Basu who died at the weekend.

Basu, who was the longest serving chief minister in Indian political history, headed the world’s most electorally successful communist party for two decades from his base in Kolkata in West Bengal.

He died on Sunday at the age of 95 after a long illness.

Vast crowds gathered in the city throughout the day, many weeping as his funeral cortege passed on its way from a private mortuary to the state legislative assembly.

Emotional mourners pushed down barricades to try to get a final glimpse of their former state chief and police were unable to prevent several minor stampedes, though no injuries were reported.

Many in the crowd shouted “Long live comrade Jyoti Basu”, while others carried placards reading “Red salute to comrade Jyoti Basu” and “We will never forget you”.

Communist party officials used megaphones to appeal for calm.

“He was a friend of the poor, the working class. Young, elders, women and children — everyone is here to pay their last tributes to the leader,” Sohini Roy, a college teacher, told AFP.

Basu led the Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPM) to power in West Bengal in 1977 and ruled the state for an unbroken 23 years.

“Basu was my hero,” said 50-year-old Asit Banerji who travelled from Malda, 300 km north of Kolkata, the capital of West Bengal, today.

Senior Indian politicians, including the leader of the governing Congress party, Sonia Gandhi, and senior opposition figure LK Advani, as well as Bangladesh’s Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina gathered in Kolkata for the farewell.

Before reaching the assembly, Basu’s flower-decked cortege stopped briefly at the CPM office in the heart of the city where senior leaders laid floral wreaths.

West Bengal chief minister Buddhadeb Bhatterjee and senior government officials also paid tribute as the funeral procession passed in front of the colonial-era Writers Buildings, the state administrative headquarters.

Basu instructed his son in 2003 that he wanted his body donated to medical science, apparently in line with his atheist beliefs which ran against the devout Hindu practices of most Indians.

After a military gun salute, his body was taken to the anatomy department of the SSKM Hospital in Kolkata.