India’s longest serving chief minister and veteran Marxist leader Jyoti Basu died on Sunday due to multiple organ failure.

He was in a hospital in West Bengal state capital Kolkata.

The state secretary of the Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPM), Birman Bose, told reporters, “Jyoti Basu is no more with us. He is no more in this world.”

For over twenty years, Basu was head of the most successful electoral communist party in the world. He brought CPM to power in 1977 and ruled the West Bengal state for 23 straight years.

“He was a colossus on the political scene for many decades,” said Home Minister P. Chidambaram. “He was a great patriot and a great democrat.”

His two-decade rule will be remembered most for the rural reforms implemented, which created village councils and redistributed land to peasant farmers.

The 95-year-old Basu was a widower and was survived by his industrialist son, Chandan.

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