Click to play videoKolkata: CPI(M) politburo member Anil Biswas, who suffered a massive brain haemorrhage on March 18, died at a south Kolkata nursing home at 1725 hrs (IST) on Sunday. He was 62.
Biswas is survived by his wife and a daughter. Biswas, who was on a life support system since admission to the nursing home, underwent two surgeries to remove blot clots from his brain.
The condition of Biswas began to deteriorate since Saturday morning.
Earlier in the day, former Chief Minister Jyoti Basu, Chief Minister Buddhadev Bhattacharjee and Defence Minister Pranab Mukherjee visited Biswas at the nursing home.
According to CPI(M) sources, his body would be brought to the party headquarters at Alimuddin Street at 0800 hrs (IST) on Sunday from where it would be taken to his residence in nearby Moulali area.
It would be again brought to the party office at 0930 hrs (IST) and kept there till 1630 hrs (IST) for people to pay their last respects.
Then at 1715 hrs IST the body would be taken to the NRS Medical College, where he has pledged his body.
CPI(M) General Secretary Prakash Karat, party Rajya Sabha Member from West Bengal Sitaram Yechuri, Politburo member S R Pillai and other party leaders would arrive at Kolkata on Monday to pay their last respects, the sources said.
Biswas - the true leader
Keeping a party as robust as the CPI-M together is perhaps as difficult as building it from scratch, but with Anil Biswas around, it never looked difficult.
It did not because more often than not, he found a way to reconcile divergent views and even managed to keep differences from popping out into the public domain.
Like most prominent Left leaders, Biswas was a student when he joined politics, and even before he became a member of the CPI-M in 1965, he started editing a publication of the party's student wing, the SFI.
That was Biswas' first brush with journalism. He later became the editor of the Bengali newspaper that the party runs in Kolkata.
Biswas' meteoric rise through the seventies brought him in close contact with party patriarchs like Pramod Dasgupta and Jyoti Basu.
He emerged as a prominent figure in the CPI-M in the early eighties and enjoyed the support and confidence of Basu despite opposing his move to become the prime minister. That was in 1996.
The former Bengal chief minister called it nothing less than a "Historic Blunder", yet backed Biswas in becoming a politburo member in 1998 and thereafter the state secretary in 1999.
That perhaps was the most challenging role in his political career of forty-odd years. His mandate as the state secretary was to find a middle path each time the hardliners disagreed with the liberals, and pave the way for Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee to unveil to the world a new face of Bengal and the CPI-M that ruled it.
"A New year comes and a new years goes, but the Left Front comes, and Left Front stays. This Poila Baisakh we will see 30 such Bengali New Years in power and we will see 30 more. And let me also wish you a very happy new year in advance and the Trinamul leader too," the leader had said during a conference.
(With PTI inputs)
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