CPI-M launches fundraiser for Jyoti Basu centre

KOLKATA - In a bid to intensify its mass contact programme ahead of assembly polls slated for later this year, West Bengal’s ruling Marxists launched a door-to-door fund-raising campaign for setting up a research centre on Jyoti Basu on the former chief minister’s first death anniversary Monday.

The state unit of the Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPI-M) began the 10-day fund collection drive for building the ‘Jyoti Basu Center For Social Studies and Research’, at Jyoti Basu Nagar in the northern outskirts of Kolkata. The state housing department has already sanctioned land for the project.

The centre will facilitate those who want to study about the country’s Communist movement and Jyoti Basu’s life and struggles. It will consist of a library packed with Marxist literature, an auditorium and a seminar room.

“Jyoti Basu has great acceptability among the masses, cutting across all sections. Our leaders have time and again stressed the need for intensifying mass contact, at a time when the party is going through difficult times, and with the crucial assembly polls approaching. So if we go to the people taking the name of Jyoti Basu, that will definitely evoke a more positive response,” said a party source.

CPI-M state secretary Biman Bose, in an appeal published in party’s Bengali mouthpiece ‘Ganashakti’, has appealed to the masses to make the fund-raiser a success.

One of the nine founding politburo members of the CPI-M, Basu was at the helm of affairs in West Bengal for over 23 years - the longest chief ministerial tenure in India.

He almost became India’s prime minister in 1996 at the head of a Centre-Left United Front government. But the CPI-M vetoed the proposal and he later dubbed the party’s decision a “historical blunder”.