Jyoti Basu

Calcutta, Aug. 14: In Rajasthan, sons and grandsons of maharajas have turned their ancestral houses into hotels, offering guests a mix of luxury and history.

In Bengal, the son of a communist chief minister has followed in their footsteps, turning the famous father’s house into a guesthouse.

Thanks to his son Chandan’s business acumen, you can now stay at Jyoti Basu’s house at Hindustan Park for between Rs 2,500 and Rs 3,000 a night. Basu lived in this house, gifted by his father Dr Nishikanta Basu to his wife Kamal (according to the authorised biography of Jyoti Basu by Surabhi Bandopadhyay), through the years he grew as a Marxist leader to become Bengal’s longest-serving chief minister.

Chandan Basu said: “This is my personal guesthouse to provide accommodation to my acquaintances free of cost.”

A four-page brochure (see picture) printed apparently to promote the property suggests the rooms are available on rent. The literature says: “In a city where putting up is a challenge, indeed, we present to you a trendy guesthouse at our city’s heart.”

Basu Jr has every right to do what he wishes with the property because it’s ancestral. His wife, Rakhi, had opened a school there.

Rakhi said: “We started the Montessori for small children but we had to close it down in 2005-06 because of some problems. The house has now been renovated totally to give it a new look.”

A deluxe AC room with breakfast costs Rs 3,000 a night and a standard AC room, also with breakfast, Rs 2,500.

The guesthouse now is spread across the first two floors and the other two are expected to open shortly.

The lift that had stirred a heated controversy when it was installed in the house at a cost of Rs 6 lakh to the government during the time Basu was chief minister is no longer there. A modern elevator has been installed in its place.

An employee said: “Boro saheb (Basu) came here with our saheb in the middle of June when the guesthouse was opened.”

This is the first instance of a former Bengal chief minister’s house being put to such use. Bidhan Chandra Ray, who was chief minister from 1948 to 1962, had a house on Subodh Mullick Square, which now hosts a polyclinic. Prafulla Chandra Sen and Ajoy Mukherjee had no property in Calcutta. Siddhartha Shankar Ray does have a house but he lives there himself.

The current chief minister, Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee, occupies a government flat at Palm Avenue.

Basu’s confidential assistant Joykrishna Ghosh recounted that it was from the Hindustan Park house that the CPM veteran started for Raj Bhavan to be sworn in as chief minister for the first time in June 1977. Since 1987, Basu has been living in a government building in Salt Lake, called Indira Bhavan as it was built for Indira Gandhi before the AICC session in Calcutta in the early 1970s.

Somnath Chatterjee, the former Speaker who is a long-time associate of Basu, has fond memories of 55B Hindustan Park. “I had been to the house any number of times,” Chatterjee said.

Congress leader Subrata Mukherjee’s recollection is of a different nature. “The Assembly marshal had physically lifted me out of the House late at night when I had protested the installation of a lift at Basu’s Hindustan Park residence,” Mukherjee said.