He died on Sunday at the age of 95 after a long illness. Vast crowds gathered in the city throughout the day, many weeping as his funeral cortege passed on its way from a private mortuary to the state legislative assembly. Emotional mourners pushed down barricades to try to get a final glimpse of their former state chief and police were unable to prevent several minor stampedes, though no injuries were reported. Many in the crowd shouted "Long live comrade Jyoti Basu", while others carried placards reading "Red salute to comrade Jyoti Basu" and "We will never forget you".
Communist party officials used megaphones to appeal for calm. "He was a friend of the poor, the working class. Young, elders, women and children - everyone is here to pay their last tributes to the leader," Sohini Roy, a college teacher, told AFP.
Basu led the Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPM) to power in West Bengal in 1977 and ruled the state for an unbroken 23 years. After an inconclusive general election in 1996, he nearly became prime minister at the head of a centre-left coalition. "Basu was my hero," said 50-year-old Asit Banerji who travelled from Malda, 300 kilometres (200 miles) north of Kolkata, the capital of West Bengal, on Tuesday.
Senior Indian politicians, including the leader of the governing Congress party, Sonia Gandhi, and senior opposition figure L.K. Advani, as well as Bangladesh's Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina gathered in Kolkata for the farewell. Before reaching the assembly, Basu's flower-decked cortege stopped briefly at the CPM office in the heart of the city where senior leaders laid floral wreaths.
West Bengal chief minister Buddhadeb Bhatterjee and senior government officials also paid tribute as the funeral procession passed in front of the colonial-era Writers Buildings, the state administrative headquarters. Basu instructed his son in 2003 that he wanted his body donated to medical science, apparently in line with his atheist beliefs which ran against the devout Hindu practices of most Indians. After a military gun salute, his body was taken to the anatomy department of the SSKM Hospital in Kolkata.