Communist Voices: Jyoti Basu
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Jyoti Basu (1914-2010) served for more than twenty years as the elected Communist chief minister of the Indian state of West Bengal. He was a member of the larger and more radical of the two main CPs in India, the Communist Party of India (Marxist). I met him in his office in the Writers' Building in Calcutta in June 1992, on my first visit to India - the first of three interviews I did with him over the years. Jyoti Basu talks about how he became a communist while in London in the 1930s and the political mood of that time, and reflects too on the achievements of his Left Front coalition government in West Bengal and on the collapse of Soviet Communism.

I spoke to him for a programme about West Bengal in the radio series What's Left of Communism?
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With Jyoti Basu, Calcutta, June 1992