INDIAN politics since independence has not been short of milk-and-water socialism, such as that on offer in the Congress party. But it has lacked charismatic figures on the left. The exception—in a diminutive, elegant, determined shape—was Jyoti Basu. For 20 years, with a few breaks, Mr Basu was the leader of West Bengal’s opposition; for 23 years he was the state’s chief minister. He was also a communist, and a charming one.

His memoirs, written at the end of his life, proclaimed a fervent and orthodox Marxism-Leninism. His career was often different. Though he longed for the masses of India to “emerge victorious” in a society without caste, class or exploitation, Mr Basu was above all a pragmatist. If private firms could bring jobs to West Bengal, he sought them out. He was unabashedly friendly to capitalist cadres such as The Economist, presenting the editor in 2000 with a small silver carriage adorned with bright pink, very un-Marxist, feathers.

Kolkata (once Calcutta) was his showpiece, the only big Indian city in which, from 1977 to 2000, red flags flew, and hammers and sickles graced the walls. It remains dirty, sprawling and chaotic, though bustling with IT jobs and with many more glass towers. After his death, opinion diverged over whether Mr Basu had brought in more investment or scared it off, ruined West Bengal or made it a beacon for the country. Businessmen who had tangled with the state’s militant unions had little good to say of him. Opponents queried his unprecedented re-elections, attributing them to a cult of thuggishness in his party. But landless farmers, beneficiaries of his million-acre land-distribution programme, worshipped him; villagers empowered through his improved version of local councils, the panchayati raj, voted for him eagerly; and commuters in Kolkata could thank him for cheap trams.

His straddling act was tricky at times. When West Bengal in 2006, under his successor, won the hotly contested contract to build the Tata Nano, he was delighted at the thought of the investment, jobs and growth. But he found himself at odds with his chief supporters—poor farmers, empowered by himself, whose land would be seized for the new car plant—and could not persuade them to accept compensation. Tata eventually left for Gujarat.

This thoughtful, flexible politician hardly resembled the young hothead who first stood for election, in 1946. Mr Basu was then deep in organising the railway workers, planning strikes and organising safe-houses for communist comrades. He preferred direct action to the ballot (“such a bourgeois set-up”) and the laboured etiquette of Question Hour, but soon saw the point of representative democracy. From the 1950s onwards he refined his manifesto of land reform, decentralisation, a minimum wage, free trade unions, fixed food prices. It was a time of hunger and unrest, with thousands of farmers and labourers besieging the assembly in Calcutta with cries of “Give us starch!” The ruling Congress party kept the crowds at a distance, or got the police to disperse them with tear gas and rifle fire. But Mr Basu went out to Esplanade East, talked to the people and brought their grievances inside.

His upbringing had been comfortably middle-class: a Calcutta doctor’s son, St Xavier’s, Presidency College, studies for the bar in London. His family blamed that stint, during the anti-fascist ferment of the 1930s, for turning him communist, and certainly he went back to India a determined Red. Several times he was arrested, once while simply taking a cup of tea in the Kamalalaya Stores. From 1948-51, when the party was banned, he went underground for a while, shifting from house to house, all the time keeping up his “pro-people” agitation. In 1964, when the Communist Party split over India’s war with China (his side, the Communist Party of India (Marxist), having favoured talks, rather than fighting), he saw the divide as one of “real” communism against the revisionists. He was accused of being anti-national, and had his offices raided—offices where pictures of Lenin and Stalin were decked with marigolds, like gods.

Despite all this, however, his pragmatism increased. As chief minister of West Bengal, he realised that economic liberalisation and the rise of China were making old orthodoxies redundant. “We want capital,” he said once. “Socialism is not possible now.” Such remarks astonished his colleagues in the party.  Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire did they relish his harping on what he called their “historic blunder”: the moment in 1996 when, at the head of a “third front” alliance of left-wing, regional and caste-based parties, he almost became India’s prime minister, only to be stymied by his own politburo’s ideological squeamishness.

That might have allowed Mr Basu and the left a vital role in national politics. He still had much to do. He wanted to see the people’s political consciousness awakened, and India’s colossal inequalities of wealth and caste fading inexorably away. But in fact he had left West Bengal an economic backwater, largely shunned by foreign investors and a byword for obstreperous unionism. Marxist-Leninist revolution remained his dream; but, as he knew better than anyone, capitalism and private enterprise remained a surer bet.