“Jyoti Basu was our ultimate leader," he said. "I would have felt better now, if I had not contested an election against him."

In a career spanning five decades, in which he fought 11 Assembly elections, Basu lost only once. That, too, after winning six times from the same constituency — Baranagar — starting from 1952.

He got 30,158 votes and Bhattacharjee, the candidate for CPI, got 69,145 votes. In his lifetime, Basu, however, blamed rigging and never acknowledged that he really lost. 

As a young activist for the undivided Communist Party of India, Bhattacharjee used to be an aggressively campaigner for Basu.

When The Indian Express met him on Monday, Bhattacharjee was flipping through the day's newspapers. He recalled his first meeting with Basu — during one of the many election rallies he had organised for him.

"Basu used to stay in Ballygunge then and came to Baranagar in a car during the elections. I was organising the campaign in East Baranagar, where he had a huge following," said Bhattacharjee, now 74 and a resident of Baranagar's Netaji Colony.

"During the 1957 elections, he was up against Kanailal Dhole, a Congress candidate. He was a little doubtful about his prospect of winning. He expressed his apprehensions to me. I told him that he would definitely win by a margin of 10,000 votes and that is what happened," he said.

In 1977, the CPM was forced to reshuffle constituencies and let Basu contest from Satgachia after their candidate lost by a huge margin to the CPI candidate Indrajit Gupta in the preceeding Assembly elections in 1976.

Basu contested elections from the Satgachia constituency from 1977 to 1996. In the 1977 Assembly elections, he defeated Jumman Ali Mollah of Congress. The margin was huge, Basu got 45.538 votes while Mollah got just 7,092 votes.

"After the elections in 1972, we never spoke. At times I got to attend the same programmes as him. He greeted me with his trademark smile, but it never went beyond that," recalled Bhattacharjee.

A Communist from his college days, Bhattacharjee set up the Left student's union at BKC College. He gave up his job as a teacher in a school for speech and hearing impaired people to devote all his time to the party.

He, however, feels now that the Communist movement in the state has taken a wrong path of late, encouraging imperialistic policies, taking away agricultural land, banning Maoists and warming up to Congress leaders at the Centre.