29 years in Bengal & going strong
1987
By the time the Left Front achieved its hat-trick in 1987, there was one big change in national politics. Indira Gandhi had been assassinated in 1984 and her son Rajiv was the prime minister after a landslide win for the Congress on a sympathy wave.
The 1984 general election had seen the emergence of an important political leader from Bengal, Mamta Banerjee. She defeated the CPI-M's Somnath Chatterjee, the current Lok Sabha Speaker.
In the 1987 assembly election, Buddhadeb Bhattacharya changed his constituency to Jadavpur and won.
Jyoti Basu with his Marxist colleagues Prakash Karat, now CPI-M general secretary, and Harkishan Singh Surjeet, Karat's predecessor
Also See: Welcome to Kolkata Shining