This is a piece I wrote for - and broadcast on - BBC radio's 'From Our Own Correspondent': you can see all my FOOC  pieces here. AW
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I took this photo in June 1992 on my first visit to Calcutta - and indeed India. As I recall, it was near the CPI(M) headquarters on Alimuddin Street. The hammer and sickle flag marked a street hawkers' union local office. The photo below was taken on the same trip - in the Nadia region of West Bengal state where I went to investigate alleged violence and maiming by CPI(M) supporters.

INDIA'S RED FORT STATE - June 1992

Orthodox communists have led the government of the Indian state of West Bengal for the past fifteen years - and in free elections they have built up such a strong electoral based that West Bengal is now known as India's Red Fort state. Our political correspondent, Andrew Whitehead, has been to Calcutta to try to find out the secret of their success:

Lenin's statue still enjoys pride of pace in downtown Calcutta. Testament to the unbending ideological rigour of West Bengal's dominant party - the Communist Party of India (Marxist). Go along to its imposing headquarters in Alimuddin Street - red flag flying high - and Stalin's portrait is prominently on display. Some party officials admit they wish last year's attempted coup by Soviet hardliners had succeeded. But in West Bengal, old-style communist orthodoxy marches hand-in-hand with unashamed political expediency.

The state of Lenin, an advocate of state control, looks down on free enterprise in full swing as Calcutta's private bus operators noisily ply for trade. After fifteen years of Left Front government, Calcutta is one of the few Indian cities whose power supply remains in private hands. Multinationals are not simply tolerated in West Bengal, they are positively encouraged. Wealthy industrialists proclaim: "he's a good man, that Jyoti Basu" - the state's long-serving Communist chief minister.

Jyoti Basu is a thoughtful, mild-mannered man in his late seventies, not at all charismatic, who was - he told me - entirely non-political until he went to London in the late thirties to train as a barrister and was recruited by the Communist Party of Great Britain. The land reform minister, Benoy Chowdhury, learnt his Marxism in jail after taking part in the salt tax protests. Another veteran - the West Bengal party secretary, Sailen Dasgupta - was a dacoit, a terrorist as he puts it, in one of the revolutionary nationalist movements so strong in Bengal in the closing decades of British rule, before abandoning banditry for scientific socialism. 

Committed communists all. So why has the West Bengal state government been so cautious? Well, in part because the Left Front - ever since taking power here in 1977 - has been determined to avoid the adventures in insurrection and ultra-leftism which had come close to destroying Indian communism. 

The communists looked to the rural areas for support; that's where most of West Bengal's sixty million or more people live. An ambitious policy of land reform giving labourers their own small plots and share-croppers security of tenure has been complimented by a devolution of power to elected local panchayats or councils, giving villagers their first real share in decision making.

While Calcutta's opinion formers rail against autocratic and out-of-date communism, the party has built up a formidable organisation and power base in the countryside. And it has tapped into what could be called Bengali nationalism. The state government's achievements are its own; its failures are all the fault of the central government. The free market economic policy, state ministers say, has been dictated by Delhi. The decay and squalor of Calcutta, where even the hollows in a railway platform are somebody's home, is put down to a shortfall in central government finance.

But the CPI(M) is also suffering from its own success. Once a small, highly disciplined party, it now has almost 200,000 members in West Bengal. Most have joined since the Left Front came to power. For some at least, the attraction was not Marxism but money and status.

While West Bengal's state government is probably more honest than most, opposition parties are increasingly complaining of vote-rigging, intimidation and systematic corruption. I spoke to supporters of the opposition Congress who had been attacked, raped and had their hands cut off - allegedly by communists. 

The party hierarchy is, it seems, anxious to clean up its reputation. There are suggestions that as many as one-in-six party members will be lapsed this year in an attempt to weed out the thugs and opportunists. But the question now widely asked in West Bengal is: when Jyoti Basu goes, will his successor be able to stop the 'Red Fort' from crumbling?