CALCUTTA, Oct 5: Veteran Parliamentarian and General Secretary of the All India Forward Bloc, Chitta Basu died in his sleep after a massive heart attack while travelling alone by the Howrah-bound Danapur Express from Patna early today.

A bachelor, Basu was 72 Basu, travelling in an A C First Class coupe, complained of abdominal pain to a railway attendant soon after the train left Patna and a wireless message was sent to Jha Jha station.

Doctors at the station examined him and gave him medicines, according to the Bihar Pradesh Pradesh Congress President, sarfaraz Ahmed, who was travelling in an AC Second Class compartment.

Ahmed told PTI in Patna that he was informed by a railway attendant that as the train halted at the next stop -- Madhupur -- doctors boarded the train to check Basu's condition, but they found him dead at around 0230 hours.

The Forward Bloc leader was returning to Calcutta after attending an anti-Laloo rally organised by a 17-party left and democratic front in Patna yesterday. A pall of gloom descended on the Forward Bloc office at Hemanta Basu Bhawan Basu's body reached the city here today.

Important state party leaders, including Ashoke Ghosh who received the body at Howrah Station today, described the death of Basu as an irreparable loss to the party.

Basu's body was taken to Barasat for people to have last glimpses of their leader. Barasat was his constituency for over two-decade and from where he was elected to Parliament all these years barring once. According to party sources, his cremation will take place here tomorrow.

Chitta Basu, who joined the Forward Bloc formed by Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose in 1939 after Bose resigned from the National Congress the same year, worked for the party since he joined it way back in 1945 as a promising student leader and rose to become its all-India General Secretary in 1977.Born in Dhaka, now the capital of Bangladesh, in 1926, Basu represented a rare and almost vanished tribes of the politicians who did politics for a cause and practiced what they preached.

Basu, who contributed to the formation the Left Front Government in 1977 in West Bengal, was one of the very few Left leaders who joined the Left movement in the country in his own terms notwithstanding the fact that he and the organisation he came from, did not have a Communist origin.

Incidentally,Basu was one the FB leaders who also struggled for the party's survival immediately after the Independence when it became somewhat fashionable for the political parties, particularly Left and a section of Indian socialists, to heap abuses and slander on the Forward Bloc for Subhas Chandra Bose's joining the Axis during the Second Great War.

Successor may be announced after funeral

The Forward Bloc was still undecided about the possible successor to its All-India General Secretary Chitta Basu who died early today. ``Chitta's void is difficult to fill. But the party will have to ask one of us to take the reins'', Ashok Ghosh, party's West Bengal Secretary, said. Chitta Basu, who steered the All-India Forward Bloc as its General Secretary since 1977, earned respect of all in the party which he joined in 1945. Ghosh, who reminisced on his close association with Chitta Basu, said ``ours was an attachment for 52 years and no one knew how committed he was to the Forward Bloc''. Party sources said that the new general secretary would be appointed after Basu's funeral.

Copyright © 1997 Indian Express Newspapers (Bombay) Ltd.