opposition leaders and activists as well as Chinese Indian citizens. Basu was imprisoned among other major communist leaders such as the former chief minister of Kerala, E. M. S. Namboodiripad, the organisational specialist Promode Dasgupta, the founding leader of Communist Party of India (Marxist), Hare Krishna Konar, the Indian revolutionary freedom fighter, Benoy Choudhury, the Telangana revolutionaries, Puchalapalli Sundarayya and Makineni Basavapunnaiah as well as some members of the rightist section such as the trade unionist A. B. Bardhan. Basu reportedly received the news of his father's death during this time in prison. Although, the war ended in November 1962, the detainees were only released in December 1963 after an order from the Supreme Court of India. On 11 April 1964, in a landmark incident, 32 members from the "Leftist faction" in the CPI national council including Basu walked out of a meeting in Delhi with the stated intent of forming the "real communist party". The section organised their own conference in Tenali, Andhra Pradesh which concluded with a resolution to form a new party and in the seventh congress held between 31 October to 7 November in Calcutta, the Communist Party of India (Marxist) was formally founded. Basu was elected to the first politburo of the new party being one of the nine founding members commonly referred to as the Navaratnas (trans: nine gems). On 27 June 1965, Basu also became the founding editor of the English language organ of the new party called People's Democracy. Coalition Governments in West Bengal (1966–1972) Between February–March 1966, a second and more spontaneous food movement flared up across West Bengal. As a result of price rise of essential commodities, the new chief minister, Prafulla Chandra Sen had suggested that people should shift from their staple of rice–potatoes to wheat–green bananas and subsequently agitations had broken out in the area of Swarupnagar, leading to police firing and death of two participating teenagers on 16 February. Consequently, widespread spontaneous protests broke out over the following months and across the state of West Bengal with more frequent instances of vandalism and violent encounters between the agitators and police than in the previous agitations. This movement while having less organised backing from the opposition parties is described to have been impactful in its political ramifications in the subsequent years; among others, leading to the Indian National Congress losing its absolute majority for the first time and