Big commie bosses don't get out of their big chairs until God, who is the hashish of the masses, doth them part. Stalin ruled over the Soviet empire for 29 years, getting his critics executed or packed off to Siberia. His whelps were too traumatised to believe him to be dead, and took three years to paw out his coffin and water it. Mao Zedong reigned behind the bamboo curtain for 27 years till his death in 1976. It took China a few years more to start eating McDonald's burgers, whispering that the late chairman had a ball with well-shaped peasant girls, and getting down to normal business.

Jyoti Basu is too much of a bhadralok to be put in the same league with the pistol-packing proletarian pashas. The deadliest weapon in his arsenal is the hammer, that too as a part of the party symbol sewn into the flag, made of cheap red cloth.

It is too pat to link Basu's durability in power to that of Stalin and Mao, who were authoritarian leaders at the helm of their respective nation-states. Basu was 64 when he became chief minister and has faced four elections since then, not to be ousted in any of them. During his rule, the radical has never been chic in West Bengal (it was so in the Naxalite years of the late '60s). He led a team of Marxists and other leftists who had little experience of governance, having spent their years mostly in seedy trade-union offices drinking tea from mud cups. The government that Basu has led is mediocre, its only self-serving achievement being a legislation by which tenant farmers could not be evicted, thus making them fiercely loyal to the Marxists.

But tenant farmers are just one constituency in the agrarian society. On the other hand, the state's industry went through a procession of bankruptcy and closure, while jobs in the organised sector evaporated. The leftist labour unions made matters worse by raising wage demands on firms already on stretchers. How could Basu stay in power for so long? At the top of a heap of no-brainers? Without a People's Liberation Army at his call?

He came to power following the 1977 elections, held for both the Lok Sabha and the state Assembly, in which the issue was not whether there should be dictatorship of the proletariat but whether the Emergency dictatorship of Indira Gandhi and her son should continue. The people said it shouldn't. As the Congress was voted out of power at the Centre and in the states, including West Bengal, there was a huge political vacuum. That caused the CPI(M) under Basu to get hoovered up to power in Calcutta. The point is unlike other state leaders Basu never got out of power since then.

Most of the credit should go to the Congress which has, since B.C. Roy's death in 1963, not produced a credible leader in the state. However, Basu too demands a share of the credit for having kept alive a charisma that transcends ideology. He may be a has-been to the high-nosed Calcuttan but to the ordinary folks in the state, he is the last link with a bygone era when pedigreed gentlemen alone were entitled to guide the course of politics. The lineage goes as far back as C.R. Das and Subhas Chandra Bose. Till Basu is alive, and in chair, Bengalis will take a long pause before they decide to vote him out.

Sumit Mitra is senior editor, India Today

THE LEFTISTS
SHRIPAD AMRIT DANGE (1899-1991)
With a jowl like a bulldog's bulbous eyes and a capacity to talk endlessly in the arcane phraseology of the Marxists' literature, he could pass off as a traditional communist aparatchik. What made the difference is his love of the Congress. Under his leadership, the Communist Party, then undivided, lurched so much Congressward that it got split, with the CPI, the rump that he led, clinging to the Congress in the hope that the tail would wag the dog. Dange died a faded communist, developing a soft spot for the opium of the masses, Hinduism. However, his "line" of communists tying up with the Congress had a longer lease of life as it influenced his detractors, the CPI(M), which now adores the Congress.

CHARU MAZUMDAR (1915-1972)
Most communists in India forgot that their ideology was after all about overthrowing rulers by force, not through ballot box. But some communists stuck to the book. After an armed uprising of peasants at Naxalbari in north Bengal, Charu Mazumdar (left, seen here with acolyte Kanu Sanyal), then a low-profile Marxist leader, broke away from parliamentary leftism to create, two years later, a party wedded to violence. It called China's chairman "our chairman" and hoped that the Red Army would 'liberate' India. Disowned by the Chinese leaders, and hounded by the police, Mazumdar died in 1972 in police custody a sick man who had probably lost his faith. But 5,000 people had died in the civil strifes. The seeds of armed rebellion kept blowing in the wind, with the breakaway Naxalite groups still active in Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra and Andhra Pradesh, claiming 150 to 200 lives each year. Mazumdar's followers no longer believe that a revolution can be imported, but his call for the use of terror as a political weapon is gaining in popularity several years after his death.