TIME

Monday, Jan. 18, 2010
Icon's Death: What Now for India's Communists?
By JYOTI THOTTAM AND NILANJANA BHOWMICK / NEW DELHI

In a political career that spanned all of India's 61 years as an independent nation, Jyoti Basu, 95, was the face of India's Communist Party. He was epitome of a certain kind of leftist — urbane, westernized and a skilled power broker — and his death on Jan. 17 has prompted eulogizing from every corner of Indian public life.

Brush aside the flowery tributes, though, and what Basu leaves behind is a party in decline, unable to stand up for the increasingly urgent needs of India's poor. Basu's home state of West Bengal is one of two in India (the other is Kerala) where communists have been a major electoral force since the late 1960s. But while the left in Kerala has been in and out of office, Basu's Communist Party of India (Marxist) has been an unquestioned force in West Bengal for decades. Early in his political career, Basu harnessed the threat of massive strikes to take power — and keep it. A 1970 article in TIME about one particularly bloody wave of Marxist protests in West Bengal concluded: "No one doubts Basu's potential for mayhem." (See pictures of India's Nehru dynasty.)

That street-fighter turned into a powerful administrator. From 1977 to 2000, Basu served as West Bengal's chief minister — the longest-serving state leader in Indian history. He presided over sweeping land reforms, lifting millions of farmers out of poverty. "Transforming one-crop land to multicrop land and providing land to the landless was his greatest contribution," says Mohammed Salim, a colleague of Basu's in government. By the 1980s, West Bengal had gone from a famine-plagued state dependent on food subsidies to a surplus grain producer. "But that's where it all ended," says Rajat Roychowdhury, a political analyst based in Kolkata, West Bengal's capital. Resting on its agrarian reforms, the state became a byword for industrial decay, as its share of India's industrial output fell from 9.8% in 1980 to 5% in 1998. "Basu didn't do anything for industry."

Meanwhile, Basu himself developed a reputation for nepotism. He gave choice land and government contracts to his son's friends and business partners and, in March, his own biographer was named vice chancellor of Calcutta University. Basu never hid his bourgeois tastes — which included a fondness for Scotch and annual trips abroad for health checkups — but critics derided his increasingly lavish, state-sponsored birthday celebrations and Prime Minister–level security detail. The Marxist poet Samar Sen described Basu as "the most well-protected Marxist leader east of the Suez Canal."

The increasingly out-of-touch communists, sensing the state's slipping grip on power, tried to push through a belated industrial expansion by force. In 2007, at least a dozen villagers in Nandigram were killed by state police during protests against the seizure of their land for a chemical plant. In 2008, similar protests pushed Tata Motors to cancel plans to manufacture its $2,500 Nano in the village of Singur, a political debacle that contributed to the communists' severe losses in the 2009 national elections. Basu had retired in 2000, but his high-handed rule left permanent damage, says Tathagata Bhattacharya, a political observer based in New Delhi. "In effect, he made sure that left politics in a democratic framework did not have a future in India."

An armed Maoist insurgency has filled the vacuum, presenting themselves as the true voice of the dispossessed. They have infiltrated villages in pockets throughout the state, and have all but taken control of the village of Lalgarh, less than 125 miles (200 km) away from the state capital of Kolkata. Police and paramilitary forces have struggled for months to subdue the armed guerrillas, already suspected of killing five Communist Party members in 2010 alone. But opposition politician Mamta Banerjee has called the anti-Maoist offensive "a total failure." As mourners greet Basu's funeral procession today in Kolkata, and analysts debate his legacy, the mayhem continues.

Businessworld

Saturday 23 Jan 2010
Jyoti Basu: An Appraisal
There were two Jyoti Basus: one, a likeable bhadralok, and the other who put Bengal back by a few decades
By Omkar Goswami
Jyoti Basu deserves respect. As india’s longest ruling chief minister — 23 years from 1977 to 2000. As a polite man with a sense of humour; first elected in 1946; who then got elected in all but one state election between 1952 and 1996, a total of 11 times; was more hardworking than most of his colleagues and party members; who interacted with various political personalities, irrespective of their creed; who, despite his “historic blunder” comment, strictly followed the rules of party discipline and the principles of communism; and yet, loved good food, good whisky and a post-prandial cognac. It is difficult to be objective about this man.
And yet, I suspect that Basu would have demanded an objective assessment of his tenure. If the CPI(M) in West Bengal choose to make him a deity on the various walls of its cities and towns, his ghost will not be amused.
In 1967 and then 1969, the Bangla Congress came into power because of CPI(M)’s support. Ajoy Mukherjee was the weak chief minister; Jyoti Basu, the deputy-CM, called the shots. Then, Basu and the CPI(M) had a single-point agenda: to cripple the government while bolstering CPI(M). It did, in the 20 years from 1967 to 1987. But it also devastated West Bengal.
A vicious, no-holds-barred war between the CPI(M), the Naxalites and the Congress up to 1974 killed thousands of young people. Abusing Dharma Vira taught the CPI(M) MLAs the importance of insulting governors. The party destroyed industry, through violent and incessant strikes in Calcutta, Budge Budge, Sibpur, Naihati, Howrah, Durgapur and Asansol. Factories shut down and companies packed up. Infrastructure collapsed. Roads were euphemisms for huge potholes; buses were burnt at whim; the police became an organ of the party; power cuts were so ubiquitous that Tangail weavers designed ‘power cut saris’, which went from light to very dark. The CPI(M) began the trend of calling state-wide bandhs despite being the party of the government in power.
Another lasting damage was to education. From the second half of the 1960s, some of the better students had started leaving after their bachelor’s degree. By the mid-1970s, it had become a deluge, thanks to university exams being conducted at least a year later than usual. In the name of equality, the best colleges were destroyed. Presidency College, Bengal Engineering College, Lady Brabourne, Bethune and Jadavpur University were staffed by non-performing apparatchiks; while the best professors were ordered to teach in second-rung colleges. By the early 1990s, students who could were escaping the state after Class 12. Today, many escape after Class 10. This was the worst damage that CPI(M) wreaked upon Bengal.
The one positive change was the redistribution of agricultural land to landless peasants and sharecroppers. Unfortunately, the good effects haven’t lasted. According to the 2001 Census, rural West Bengal is not much better than rural Assam, Orissa or Bihar. In 2001, 44 per cent of rural households in India had electricity connections; in West Bengal, merely a fifth. For rural India, 41 per cent of households had pucca dwellings in 2001, versus less than a quarter in rural Bengal. Over three-quarters of rural households in West Bengal did not have drinking water within their homestead; and of these, 84 per cent didn’t have electricity. Thus, in 2001, 8.5 million households in the state went elsewhere to fetch water; of these, 7.2 million had no electricity. In 2001, only rural Orissa was worse.
Jyoti-babu was a different man after two terms in office. By the early 1990s, he had realised the need to get industry back. Somnath Chatterjee and he tried hard to secure memoranda of understandings — to a point where Chatterjee was called MoU-da. But it was too late, except for ventures like Haldia Petrochemicals, which also faced trouble with the government.By 2000, when Jyoti-babu had stepped down as chief minister, the damage was done. West Bengal had no industry worth the name; its higher education was in ruins; the cities were deteriorating; jobs were few; and the CPI(M)’s absolute power over all aspects of governance had started to corrupt. Agricultural productivity growth was not enough to get West Bengal to any meaningful place under the sun.Longest chief minister? Certainly. Clever and canny? Absolutely. Polite? Without doubt. More control than anyone in state politics? No question. Could he change West Bengal? Yes. For the better? You judge.If West Bengal gets a crazy Luddite to rule after the next election, who will the CPI(M) blame? Think.
The author is chairman of CERG Advisory.

Dawn Editorial

Jyoti Basu

19 Jan, 2010
Jyoti Basu, who passed away on Sunday, was an iconic figure in Indian politics. More a social democrat than a dogmatic ideologue, Mr Basu worked for and led the communist movement in India for more than six decades.

His forte lay in bringing together disparate voices so that left-leaning coalitions could be forged and a way forward agreed upon, irrespective of political differences.

He ruled West Bengal for 23 years from 1977 to 2000, a record unmatched by any other Indian chief minister. With him at the helm, Mr Basu’s Communist Party of India-Marxist was credited with restoring stability to West Bengal after the political tumult of the late 1960s and 1970s.

Perhaps more than anything else, he was revered as a cult figure for redistributing wealth through land reform. A rural support base gained further strength as peasants became landowners, and in the cities Mr Basu was backed by trade unions and West Bengal’s cultural intelligentsia.

He also had an opportunity to become India’s first Marxist prime minister following the inconclusive 1996 elections. However, his party chose to support the government instead of joining it, a move Mr Basu subsequently called a “historic blunder”.

Mr Basu had his critics who felt that he let the West Bengal economy stagnate by letting trade unions, who were opposed to foreign investment, dictate terms to the chief minister.

He had been in retirement for almost nine years when the CPI-M lost significant ground in last year’s elections. Ironically, the party that once gave land to the people suffered heavily for its plans to sell arable holdings to industrial concerns.

Some also believe that the CPI-M’s younger leaders who went from college to the party politburo in just a few years do not understand the peasantry.

But whatever the CPI-M’s future in West Bengal, Mr Basu’s legacy will remain intact.

The News International

Jyoti Basu's mixed legacy
By Praful Bidwai, January 23, 2010

In communist veteran Jyoti Basu's death, India has lost its most illustrious politician and the last leader who embodied a personal link between the many phases of Indian politics since the early 1940s.

Basu was not just a major Left leader in a country with the world's biggest Communist party outside China. He participated in numerous processes which shaped politics, including trade union and peasant movements, radicalisation of the intelligentsia, contestations between social-group identities, and crystallisation of the party system.

Unlike other distinguished communist leaders -- S A Dange, E M S Namboodiripad, P C Joshi, B T Ranadive, Gangadhar Adhikari, P Sundarayya and A K Gopalan -- Basu was neither a theoretician nor a mass leader. Nor was he an organisation man such as Harkishan Singh Surjeet, the last general secretary of the Communist Party (Marxist), or Pramode Dasgupta, who built and controlled the CPM party machine in West Bengal. Basu chose to concentrate on his greatest strengths -- electoral politics, administration and governance.

Basu was a party pragmatist with a managerial style. He worked on the public side of the CPM and built successful election-oriented social coalitions. He was chief minister of West Bengal -- a state with 80 million people -- continuously for 23 years. This is a world record. Basu could have stayed on as chief minister beyond 2000 if he wanted to.

Basu was a maverick in many ways. When the undivided Communist Party split in 1964, he was the only individual from a group of privileged European-educated young communists who went with the CPM. All others, including Adhikari, Indrajeet Gupta, Hiren Mukherjee and Nikhil Chakravartty, stayed with the CPI, as did most party intellectuals.

More significantly, Basu unquestioningly accepted the CPM's organisational hegemony. He was an unbending party loyalist, who believed in orthodox forms of discipline and "democratic centralism" -- based on concentric circles of authority within the party, and the norm that party members must unquestioningly follow a decision taken after internal debate.

In 1996, Basu famously became "the best prime minister India never had." The United Front unanimously offered the position to him. But the CPM central committee rejected the offer. The decision was driven by a narrow control-based consideration: with its 51 MPs, the Left wouldn't be able to dominate the Front. But the Left would have gained much advantage, including prestige and mainstream acceptance, with Basu as prime minister. This would probably have delayed or prevented the BJP's rise to national power in 1998. Ironically, those in the CPM who opposed Basu's candidature the most later backed Mayawati as prime minister!

Basu was a pragmatist par excellence. On any issue, he would choose the most practical and least radical of the options made available by the CPM. This would satisfy both privileged industrialists -- whom his party has been wooing for investment -- and poor people, among whom it had its roots. In land reform in West Bengal, the Left avoided a radical transfer of ownership to the tiller and the landless -- unlike in Kerala in the 1950s. Its Operation Barga registered tenants and gave them a 75-percent harvest share and tenure security.

In his first term as chief minister, Jyoti Basu said: "Let [the] capitalists understand us. We shall also try to understand their point of view." No wonder he developed a close rapport with several industrial magnates, including Dhirubhai Ambani, Ratan Tata and R P Goenka. He favoured multinational takeovers of some of Bengal's sick industrial units and wanted the West Bengal Electronics Development Corporation to form a joint venture with Philips.

Basu's upper-class, upper-caste Bhadralok identity endeared him greatly to Bengal's elite. But Basu's politics largely excluded Dalits, Adivasis and OBCs -- and even Muslims, who form one-fourth of the state's population -- from governance and political representation. In this respect, and in social development indicators, West Bengal lags behind many other states. The rate of decline in its rural poverty has halved since 1994.

Worse, according to the National Sample Survey, "the percentage of rural households not getting enough food every day in some months of the year" is highest in West Bengal (10.6 per cent), worse than in Orissa (4.8). West Bengal has more than 900,600 school dropouts in the 6-14 age group, higher than Bihar's nearly 700,000. Of India's 24 districts which have more than 50,000 out-of-school children, nine are in West Bengal.

The official Human Development Report (2004) admits that spending on and access to health services have stagnated. Some indicators -- immunisation, antenatal care, women's nutrition, and doctors and hospital beds per 100,000 people -- are below the national average. West Bengal has not opened a single new primary-health centre in a decade. West Bengal has the lowest rate of generating work under the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act -- 14 person-days per poor family. The national average is 43. (The promise was 100.)

India's worst recent food riots have occurred in West Bengal -- especially in poor districts like Purulia, Bankura and Birbhum -- when starving people raided the storehouses of dishonest ration-shop owners, all CPM members. Purulia is one of India's poorest districts -- with 78 percent of its population below the poverty line. More than two-fifths of West Bengal's poor don't have ration cards, which entitle them to subsidised food. Meanwhile, some of the gains of Operation Barga are eroding. Seventeen percent of registered tenants have lost their land and another 27 percent are in insecure possession.

Clearly, the Left Front has failed the poor in numerous ways during its 32 years in power. The rationale of the CPM's tenure in office has eroded. Basu bears a good share of responsibility for this.

Basu, then, is akin to Yasser Arafat, the tallest leader of the movement for an independent Palestinian state, who died in 2004. Arafat put Palestine on the world agenda -- a great historic contribution -- but signed the Oslo Peace Accords under Western pressure. These imposed a hideously unjust settlement on his people. Arafat's once-secular and -progressive Fatah has lost its credibility. The Islamicist Hamas won a plurality in a free and fair election. The CPM might similarly lose West Bengal to the Trinamool Congress.

Basu leaves a mixed legacy. The Left Front is still paying the price for its advocacy of "industrialisation at any cost." Chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee believes that industrialisation of any kind is progress. Actually, neoliberal corporate-led industrialisation lacks classical capitalism's employment and social-political potential and destroys livelihoods.

Poor people are increasingly alienated from the CPM. If it loses the 2011 West Bengal Assembly elections, Trinamool will unleash unspeakable violence to settle old scores and capture new areas. In Kerala, the Left faces an uphill battle. It was routed in the 2009 Lok Sabha elections. A nationally weakened Left could go into serious long-term decline. The Left has grown in India even while communism went into a tailspin globally after the collapse of the USSR. This was a great achievement. Its reversal would be an equally great pity. Luckily, Basu won't be there to see the unravelling and humiliation of the Left.

Finally, Jyoti Basu must be admired for standing by his atheist convictions and donating his body for medical research. Not many show such courage at a time when it's most needed -- amidst the explosion of blind faith, superstition and worship of so-called godmen and every conceivable irrationality in India.

Khaleej Times

Basu’s Middle Path

Experiments in Indian Politics
Jyoti Malhotra

20 January 2010
Russia’s recently-returned ambassador to India Vyacheslav Trubnikov tells a wonderful story about the Indian genius of political opponents maintaining private friendships, with starring roles played by Communist party patriarch Jyoti Basu, who died in Kolkata on Sunday and Atal Behari Vajpayee, Hindu nationalist leader and the right-wing hero of our times, now in the autumn of his own life, pretty much 
silenced by a stroke.
The story relates to the 1960s, when both Basu and Vajpayee were members of Parliament in Delhi and Trubnikov was a correspondent with TASS, the Soviet news agency. This is when the latter was witness to a particularly debilitating exchange of views between Basu and Vajpayee inside the House. Some time later after the debate was done, Trubnikov strolled outside the House to the cafeteria, where he found — to his utmost surprise! — Basu and Vajpayee having a cup of tea together. What happened, asked a somewhat agitated Trubnikov of the two gentlemen, wondering if he had fallen prey to an especially duplicitous vision, or, perhaps, he was just seeing things?
Not at all, reassured Vajpayee, seating Trubnikov down. You see, unlike in the Soviet Union, we don’t have a Gulag in India to which we can send dissenters. Here, we can agree to disagree, but we can’t do it too violently!
Basu, one of the greatest authors of the Indian way of life known as the Middle Path, died in his beloved Kolkata on Sunday, the subject of much adulation as well as criticism.
Vajpayee, a leader of the nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), who led his party to electoral victory twice, has been similarly accused of several ideological flip-flops in public life, but has also been feted for his ability to step out of the circle of his own beliefs and reach out to the opposition.
Jyoti Basu’s greatest achievements and defeats have been extensively chronicled in the Indian media, especially the morning after his demise, but perhaps his greatest attribute was his ability to draw people of widely conflicted beliefs together and broker 
a compromise.
Basu was the inheritor of the quintessential ‘Bengali bhadralok,’ a genteel, petty-bourgeois tradition which continues to revere both god and family values, and although Basu dispensed with the former — he willed that his body be given up to medical research, something neither Lenin, nor Deng Xiaoping, Stalin or Ho Chi Minh did — he was too well brought-up to reject 
the latter.
Bengal, the bedrock of the mother goddess cult, adopted Basu as one of its own. The Communist understood the power of religion and never denigrated it — a key difference from Communists the world over, whether in China or in the erstwhile Soviet Union.
Unlike Stalin, however, Basu was able to forge lasting coalitions with people of his own ilk, especially other Leftists. While Stalin hunted down his adversaries, including Trotsky, Basu persuaded the small Left Front parties to participate in a Left Front coalition that has not only been a formidable force in hometown Bengal for over 
30 years, but also shaped several governments in Delhi.
Unlike Deng Xiaoping, meanwhile, Basu was never able to rise above the Party line to nationalise Bengal’s Communist experiment, reinforced by its path-breaking agrarian reform. (He acknowledged later that it was a “historic blunder” that could have changed the course of Indian politics.) But when Deng cracked down on the 1989 students movements at Tiananmen square and large parts of Communist India applauded, Basu was horrified.
Basu’s place in Indian history is assured for several reasons, but perhaps his most important contribution was his ability to straddle the golden mean so that Left politics was always relevant to the people.
After the 1962 border conflict with China and the 1965 war with Pakistan, Basu felt India should initiate dialogue with both nations because it was the chauvinist elites, not the people responsible for the wars in the first place. This burning desire, to remain relevant to the ever-changing political landscape, allowed him to adapt constantly. Basu tried to persuade his unrepentant comrades in the Party not to oppose Manmohan Singh government’s decision to go ahead with the Indo-US nuclear deal, even if the US was the proverbial red rag to the Communist bull.
The Left parties rejected Basu’s advice. The consequent drubbing they received in the elections last year has meant that today, they are a pale shadow of their former selves, toothless and torn, unable to deal or bargain or strike a chord with mainstream India. That’s why Jyoti Basu’s passing is a milestone in India’s history His life was yet another manifestation of the middle path experiment that makes this country just a little bit different. Question is, whether the Left is willing to learn from it.

Financial Express Bangladesh

A relentless crusader

against communalism passes away

Md. Masum Billah

JYOTI Basu, an iconic leader, has died but his memory will never go into oblivion. His death is an irreparable loss for India and South Asia in general. His achievements will be judged by the extent to which he transformed his ideas into reality. He brought political stability to West Bengal, implemented land reforms and established a thoroughly non-communal ambience in the state. He also developed a viable and multifaceted industrial policy for the state. As chief minister of West Bengal he wooed private domestic and foreign investment for industrial development of the state. He toured extensively to allure more investments in West Bengal and he showed enviable success in his efforts. Today West Bengal witnesses industries of various sizes. He showed his pragmatic approach to political and economic issues to attract foreign investors in the face of strong criticism by his own party comrades. He was the main advocate for the initial participation of the Tatas in the Haldia Petrochemical Complex in West Bengal, which was among the first major industrial initiatives during the left rule in the state. Basu said, "We want capital, both foreign and domestic. After all, we are working in a capitalist system. Socialism is not possible here." His land reform policy has brought smiles to poor farmers of West Bengal. He distributed land to two million landless families. From a very young age, Basu started taking interest in politics. In 1936 he joined London Majlis and was elected Secretary of London Majlis in 1937. Basu returned to India on 1st January 1940 and formally joined the Communist Party in India. Basu became the secretary of Friends of Soviet Union and Anti-Fascist Writers' Association in Kolkata. As member of the Communist Party, his initial task was to maintain liaison with underground Party leaders. He was entrusted with the responsibilities of the trade union front of the Party from 1944. In that year, Bengal Assam Railroad Workers' Union was formed and Basu became its first secretary. Basu was elected to Bengal Provincial Assembly in 1946 from the Railway Workers constituency. Ratanal Brahman and Rupnarayn Rory were the other two Communists who were elected. From that day on, Basu became a popular and influential legislator. He showed how the Communists can use the legislative forums for strengthening struggles. Basu played a very active role in stormy days of 1946-47 when undivided Bengal witnessed the Tebhaga movement, workers' strikes and even communal riots. Everywhere the struggling people got Basu by their side. Joyti Basu was the secretary of the West Bengal Provincial Committee of the Communist Party from 1953 to January 1961. He was elected to the Central Committee of the Party in 1951. Though 28 Communist candidates were elected to the West Bengal assembly in 1952, the then speaker refused to accord Basu the status of the opposition leader. The recognition finally came in 1957 when Basu was re-elected from Baranagore constituency, the seat he retained till 1972 when he suffered the only electoral defeat in his political career. He emerged as an influential member of CPI(M) after the 1964 split in Communist Party of India over sharp ideological differences over the Sino-Indian war in 1962. He was a member of the Politburo from 1964 onwards. After the sweeping victory of the Left Front in 1977, Jyoti Basu became the Chief Minister of West Bengal. He was Chief Minister of West Bengal for an unprecedented five terms. In the 1980s he played a key role in convening a meeting of non-Congress chief ministers of the various Indian states in Kolkata to raise their voice against the 'step motherly attitude' of the Congress government at the centre This he did in close liaison with late NT Rama Rao of Andra Pradesh and late Ramkrishna Hedge of Krantaka. Basu's political astuteness showed up once again when he succeeded in his efforts in late 1985 to convince late Indian premier Rajiv Gandhi of the utility of forming a hill council to restore peace in strife-torn Darjeeling where the Gorkha National Liberation Front under subhas Ghising had waged a violent agitation for a separate state. The United Front Government was formed in India in 1996. The Front offered Basu to become the Prime Minister but his party CPI(M) chose not to join the government. He followed the party decision as behoves a loyal communist. Bangladesh Jatiya Sangsad paid a rich tribute to the great leader of the sub-continent Jyoti Basu by adopting an obituary reference unanimously, saying that he was a symbol of honesty, tolerance and ideology who will remain a source of inspiration for the posterity. Basu was a genuine friend of Bangladesh and he had helped the country in many ways for achieving independence and development. He played a very important role in signing the Ganges Water Agreement and Chittagong Hill Tracts Peace Treaty. 'India has lost a leader, Bangladesh has lost a well-wisher and I have lost a guardian,' commented Bangladesh Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina. The Leader of the Opposition Khaleda Zia said that this region has lost a great leader and Bangladesh a well-wisher. Dr. Manomohan Singh, the Indian Prime Minister, rightly said about Basu: 'He was a pragmatic visionary politician whose death marks the end of an era in the annals of Indian politics." The writer is Senior Manager: BRAC Education Programme, PACE. He can be reached at e-mail: mmbillah2000@yahoo.com

The New Nation, Bangladesh

Jyoti Basu’s legacy
Khaled

Former Chief Minister of West Bengal died on Saturday. Ideologically he was left communist but lost support of China after CPI (M) leaders Kanu Sanyal and Charu Mozumder led an abortive peasants' uprising at Naxalbari, West Bengal in 1967. Still he won the provincial assembly election in 1977 to become Chief Minister and held that office till 2000 A.D. In this regard, it is necessary to define who was left communist and who was right communist?Those, who among the communists, supported Chinese policy in international communist movement were called left communists and those who supported Soviet line of peaceful co-existence with the imperialists were branded as right communists. Again those who supported Naxanbari uprising were being called ultra-left communists. Thus, the Indian communists were divided into three lines-right communists, left communists and ultra-left communists. Jyoti Basu belonged to second group. The student's front of the communists was also divided into SF (Left) and SF (right).The wave of division did not spare former East Pakistan also as we found former East Pakistan Students Union (Menon Group) divided into two groups namely Bangla Chhatra Union and Biplobi Chhatra Union sometimes in late 1969. NAP (Bhasani) was split into three factions. The leaders of two factions killed any one whom they thought political rivals calling them 'class enemy'.But with the fall of Soviet Union and change of power in China from left to right, the communists of India and Bangladesh lost their identities and began to pursue the policy of sharing power with the Pro-American rightists.Jyoti Basu got a chance to become Prime Minister of India in 2004, which the Politburo of CPI (M) rejected. The former chief minister of West Bengal remarked: It is a historical mistake. It meant that he had desire to become PM of India sharing power with the rightwing Congress.Another thing is that Mr. Basu like other communists believed economic emancipation of people was possible if Marxian economy was implemented.. But he did not know that the basic principles of Marxian economy lie in Islami economy for which he and his followers are afraid of Islam as State power.