Former West Bengal Chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee passed away on August 8. He was 80.

The veteran CPI(M) leader had pledged his body for medical research.

Who was Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee?

• Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee was born on March 1, 1944 in North Kolkata.

• He joined the CPI(M) in 1966 and participated in various student and youth movements.

• He became state secretary of the West Bengal Democratic Youth Federation in 1968. Bhattacharjee was elected to the party’s West Bengal state committee in 1971 and became a state secretariat member in 1982.

• He was the MLA of Kashipur-Belgachia from 1977 to 1982. 

• Bhattacharjee took over as the Chief Minister of West Bengal in 2000 from party senior Jyoti Basu.

• Bhattacharjee, who was the seventh Chief Minister of the state, pushed hard to shed his party’s anti-industry image and promote industrialisation to breathe new life into Bengal’s moribund economy.

• He actively engaged himself in wooing investors and big capital to set up industries in the state with the primary goal of generating more employment opportunities for the youth.

• His tenure, however, was also marked by agitations over the acquisition of land for industries led by present Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee.

• He oversaw the end of an era in which he helmed the longest democratically elected communist government but failed to lead the Left Front to victory for the eighth time in a row in the highly politically polarised state.

• After the electoral loss in 2011, Bhattacharjee stepped down from the CPI(M) politburo and central committee in 2015 and gave up membership of the party’s state secretariat in 2018. 

• Bhattacharjee rarely made public appearances after losing the 2011 Assembly elections, which also brought an end to the 34-year-long Left Front government in the state.

• In January 2022, Bhattacharjee was honoured with Padma Bhushan. However, he refused the award stating that his consent had not been asked and he did not want the award.

• He published books in Bengali which include ‘The Rise and Fall of Nazi Germany’ (2018) and ‘Chaos under Heaven’ (2019).

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